Daryl G. Smith
The Claremont Graduate School

A central part of my work the past two years has been to evaluate current research and theory related to diversity in higher education, that is, diversity in terms of the various student populations now considered nontraditional, including racial and ethnic minorities, adult learners, women, and people with physical and learning disabilities. One of my conclusions from these investigations was that the issues raised in our discussions about diversity go to the heart of quality education and that by paying attention to these issues, we have an opportunity to improve teaching, learning, and higher education's role in the society of the future. The task facing us is not an easy one, because it challenges some of the ways we think and perform our responsibilities. Moreover, it is a challenge that cannot be met successfully unless faculty play a critical role.

One caveat: The challenge of diversity is not new to higher education, having been faced in one form or another by this country since its inception. Further, it is unrealistic to assume that higher education will be able to meet this challenge independent of the rest of the society. It is clear, however, that the successful involvement of diverse populations in higher education has significant implications for education in general and for the nation.

I will summarize the status of diversity today and then discuss some of the fundamental issues that we must confront, particularly those centering on the curriculum, teaching, and learning.

One Third of a Nation is one of the recent reports concerning this topic that sounds the alarm, "America is moving backward not forward in its efforts to achieve the full participation of minority citizens in the life and prosperity of the nation . . . If we allow these disparities to continue, the United States will inevitably suffer a compromised quality of life and a lower standard of living" (Commission on Minority Participation in Education and American Life, 1988, p. 1). Similarly alarming themes have emerged over the last few years concerning the success of higher education in general. An examination of retention rates, performance, achievement, and access to certain fields, institutions, and postgraduate study shows that the record today is not what it should be. This is not only true for large numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans, but also for women, people with physical and learning disabilities, adult learners, and other individuals who simply drop by the wayside--in other words, the vast majority of our students.

As I reviewed the literature describing the status of each of these groups, the most troubling theme to emerge was alienation: Many campuses do not effectively involve those who are different (Smith, 1989). The issue of alienation pervades the literature in higher education. Although it is particularly prevalent in the literature concerning racial and ethnic minorities, it also is present in the literature focusing on women, people with disabilities, and virtually all other nontraditional groups. Alienation, lack of involvement, marginalization, overt racism, insensitivity, sexual harassment, and discrimination tend to characterize the campus experience, the classroom, and the curriculum for students who are different. Such students tend to feel like outsiders, or "strangers in a strange land" (Beckham, 1988, p. 74). In higher education, the condition of diversity is all too often a condition of alienation.

The implications for education are profound. Given what we know about teaching and learning, it is involvement in the educational process, not alienation from it, that is central to success. Moreover, the experience of involvement or alienation can directly or indirectly affect the performance and success not only of students, but of faculty and staff as well.

Historically, as institutions evaluated student performance, success or failure was attributed to characteristics of the students. The result is that responsibility for success is defined in terms of the individual. An extensive literature now exists suggesting that the issues facing many students go beyond their individual and group backgrounds to the question of whether institutions are designed to deal with diversity. Our programs, methods of assessment, and institutional policy must focus not only on the needs of individuals and groups but also on the organization and the ways in which questions are framed and problems addressed. In other words, the basic conceptual framework must shift from one of only assisting or accommodating those who are different so that they can survive in an alien world, to a broadened focus on the college or university and what it does to promote successful education.

What would our institutions, classrooms, curriculum, students, faculty, and staff look like if we were truly prepared to educate diverse populations for a pluralistic world? Frankly, I don't think we know yet. We have just begun to ask that question. But I do know that this is the question, that we would look different and that we would be more successful. Just as the countries of eastern Europe have embarked on a process of breaking away from old patterns without having a clear picture of the future, higher education is now moving along an uncharted path.

Before discussing some of the areas in which reformulation must take place, I would like to emphasize the importance of framing problems and questions correctly. I consider this critical to much of our dialogue about diversity on campus. The way we frame questions and problems leads toward the knowledge we seek and the answers we find at every level--from how we evaluate students, to where we look for solutions, to whom we hire, and to what and how we teach. For example, Jaramillo (1988) points out that when retention is referred to as student dropout rate, it implies a problem with the student. Alternatively, when retention is termed institutional graduation rate, the focus is on the institution. She says, "as long as we condone the use of metaphors which conjure up a scenario of individual initiative and responsibility for educational failure, change will not occur" (Jaramillo, 1988, p. 27). By focusing on the "underprivileged minority," we shift our attention away from the institution.

I am a psychologist, and the dominant research paradigm in my field for understanding educational success has been to compare successful with unsuccessful students. The result of this design is that we learn who can succeed in our system and who cannot, but we leave relatively untouched the role of the organization, the classroom, and the environment in producing these results. With this approach, we admit and retain only those who fit our system or who can survive in spite of it, and we eliminate those who are different. We now are faced with the necessity and the opportunity to think once again about what we do and how we do it. The aim of this effort is improved capacity to educate in a pluralistic society for a pluralistic world. But we must shift our thinking from students who are "problems," a kind of deficit model, to what the institution is doing. All too often we have assumed institutional perfection and student incompetence.

One area needing change is the curriculum. This requires thinking about what we teach and why, and about new scholarship, not just so that students can identify with material but because of the need for integrity in what we teach (McIntosh, 1989).

The Ford Foundation recently invited 200 colleges and universities to submit proposals for encouraging diversity to be considered for funding. In a letter from a group of university presidents and others that came with Ford's request for proposals was a call to weave diversity "into the academic life and purpose of the institution: valued by faculty, expressed through the curriculum and nourished through cultural expression and extracurricular life." Significant progress has been made in adding curricular material dealing with diversity, but these efforts remain mostly at the margin of our institutions. Traditional subject matters and approaches have been only slightly altered, perhaps with the inclusion of a book by Maxine Hong Kingston, a speech by Martin Luther King, or a citation of Barbara McLintock's role in biology. These approaches leave unchanged the dominant notions of what should be taught. They leave the study of new perspectives and material on the fringes and keep at the center of the curriculum what traditionally has been considered essential and important to learn.

Curricular transformation may be prompted by the diversity of students, but that is not a sufficient motive. The rationale must be that as long as we continue to teach from one tradition only, we perpetuate the notion that, for example, the White middle-class experience in America is the important experience and that other experiences provide only interesting anecdotes. The new questions introduced by women's studies in traditional fields--and the revitalization of disciplines that has occurred--are an example of how scholarship and the curriculum can be reevaluated from the perspectives of those at the margin by placing them at the center. One consequence of this effort will be the reduction of alienation. Curricular transformation involves the same kind of developmental process as institutional transformation, moving from simply adding courses that seek to plug holes in the curriculum to asking new questions that more naturally embrace the pluralism of perspectives in the field.

A second focus for change is classroom pedagogy. In most institutions, classroom pedagogy has remained largely unchanged, dictated by the reality of large classes, unfamiliarity with alternative ways of teaching and learning, and an assumption that the lecture method conveys information most effectively. Recognizing that groups and individuals learn in different ways requires rethinking the manner in which teaching is delivered. The concept of different learning styles relates not only to the ways in which knowledge is organized and absorbed but also to the different climates and modes that are either compatible with or alien to one's background. For some cultures, cooperative learning is the only way to learn; highly individualistic approaches are not understood. The issue of redesigning pedagogy is particularly pressing in math, science, and writing. Again, because we have labeled failure to learn as a student problem or deficit, our approach has been simply to add programs such as tutoring, remediation, or drill and practice--again at the margin.

As long as students could succeed despite this prevailing model of teaching, and as long as we did not care about those who did not succeed, we did not need to connect teaching with learning. Now those conditions have changed. Fewer students succeed, and their failure is our failure. There is now a call for teaching that encourages involvement, in which there is participation and feedback. This model of teaching is based on all we know about learning and stands in stark contrast to the values implicit in many forms of contemporary pedagogy--isolation, cynicism, and competition--a system that relies on lectures, grading on the curve, and highly individualistic if not competitive approaches.

Assessment is a third dimension of this educational challenge. Important questions have been raised about the forms of assessment already in place. For example, multiple-choice, timed tests may be invalid indicators of learning for those with learning disabilities. We have become increasingly aware that total reliance on standardized tests of any kind severely restricts our capacity to assess potential and learning for many students. The adult learner and many racial and ethnic groups are at a disadvantage on these tests. Without valid indicators of learning, underestimating the performance of many students is a significant risk. We need to develop adequate assessment programs and to stop relying on inadequate measures which, although expedient, diminish the evidence of performance for particular groups.

The New York State Supreme Court recently ruled that using the SAT as the sole basis for allocation of state scholarships was unconstitutional, because this practice systematically denied scholarships to women. The evidence presented was that the SAT consistently failed to predict accurately performance in college. On average, women earned better college grades than did men yet received fewer scholarships when the SAT was used as the only predictor of college performance (National Center for Fair and Open Testing, 1989).

Another major issue we must address is the diversity of faculty and staff. Indeed, this is almost universally cited as one of the most important aspects of change. Once again, we may be framing the questions and responses in a much too limited way. Currently, the primary rationale for needing a diverse faculty and staff is that it will serve minority students well--a kind of benevolent call for role models for nontraditional students. Certainly an important element of the success of historically Black and women's colleges is the leadership role of Black and women faculty and staff at these institutions. But there are several more reasons as well. As long as our institutional leadership remains as homogeneous as it is, our efforts at diversity will be suspect. Moreover, our efforts at embracing diversity likely will be as ineffective as most unilateral and unidimensional decisions are. The ultimate test of a pluralistic institution is that power at all levels and in all dimensions is shared by a diverse mix of persons.

Diversification of faculty and staff is critical to our institutions, because diversity is likely to contribute vitally to what is taught and how it is taught. Further, without diversity in institutional decision making, the perspectives are apt to be too narrow, not considering alternative viewpoints and solutions. Diversity creates an intellectually exciting and dynamic environment in which various ways of knowing and seeing are introduced.

Numerous efforts across the country stress the diversification of faculty and staff. Yet there is great concern that achieving this goal is highly unlikely because of the demographics of the pipeline. The current projections are that more faculty positions will open in the next decade than have been available for some time; however, it is recognized almost universally that the lack of retention and attractiveness of pursuing advanced degrees for many nontraditional groups threatens the achievement of diversity among faculty and staff.

The barriers to this goal are not just numbers. Evidence suggests that institutions are not retaining faculty and staff for the same reasons they are not retaining students (Blackwell, 1988). As long as persons who are different remain a small minority on campus--tokens--they will be placed in difficult situations. The strains described for students are multiplied for staff and faculty, who are asked to serve on all relevant committees, to bring diversity by their presence to almost all aspects of decision making, and at the same time, to meet rigorous standards for promotion and tenure. Some may also pursue nontraditional scholarship, which might address topics that traditional faculty cannot evaluate and which tend to appear in publications that traditional faculty do not consider sufficiently prestigious. Minority faculty and staff are also likely to endure the same kind of loneliness and insensitivity experienced by minority students. Such persons are highly visible as members of groups, yet invisible as individuals. As Madrid said, "Being the other is invisible, while sticking out like a sore thumb" (1988, p. 2).

The current revolving-door pattern is an extravagant waste of human resources and a major obstacle to change. Efforts to retain and develop minority faculty, staff, and graduate students within the institution are as important as increasing the minority applicant pool to the institution.

A number of issues hinder our ability to make changes in these areas. I would like to mention one in particular, because it is fundamental to many of the others: Shifts in perspective raise questions about values that, in our traditional ways of thinking, tend to pit diversity against quality. The continuing message that a basic conflict exists between diversity and quality is perhaps the most disturbing indication that present institutional responses to diversity are inadequate. Given the number of national studies concerned about the effectiveness and quality of higher education and the call for better standards, the higher education community and faculty in particular need to address this issue carefully and thoughtfully.

Ironically, as I look at studies of the most successful institutions concerning diversity, a common characteristic is that they have high standards for performance. The climate of such institutions is one in which excellent performance and quality are expected and not compromised. The difference is that great care is given to deciding how performance will be evaluated. In these schools, students who are different do not feel as though they were admitted but expected to fail. Setting high standards to weed out is different than using high standards as a framework in which students are expected and helped to succeed (Mingle, 1987; Richardson & De los Santos, 1988; Pearson, Shavlik, & Touchton, 1989).

Where then do we get caught? Sometimes it has to do with using traditional measures to assess quality, whether it is certain scores on standardized tests, numbers of publications in certain journals, or degrees from certain graduate schools. If those are indicators of quality, most persons at the margin will be excluded or devalued. In my research on diversity, for example, I became aware that I was reading the work of more White scholars on racial and ethnic diversity than of minority scholars. An indication of the pipeline problem? No. When I started searching for the work of minority scholars I knew were writing in this area, I discovered that much of their work was published in journals and books that are not mainstream. Their writing and research was very important, but it was invisible. To this day, I know that if I publish in a journal labeled as dealing with women's studies, I reduce the clout of my article from a promotion and tenure perspective in my kind of institution, even if the journal is refereed and best suits the topic.

In addition to the question of where one publishes, there is the question of what one teaches. The methods and questions of many disciplines foreclose discussion of topics that interest persons at the margin. Let me give you an example from my own teaching of adult development, a field whose significant theories are based primarily on the study of men. A topic such as Black women's adult development is still considered a special interest topic, not part of the mainstream research or teaching on adult development. It does not occur to us that all the research based on White adults is also specialized. In the view of the field to this day, theories based on data from White participants are legitimate theories of adult development. The same statement cannot be made for data from homosexuals, Blacks, or Hispanics. Research on these groups generally is not published in mainstream journals or taught in mainstream courses. The perceived quality of the work is therefore discounted.

One can claim that higher education is predisposed to maintaining homogeneity and to adapting only when necessary. Another example of this tendency is that some institutions have set limits on access for Asian- Americans because they are considered overrepresented in the student body. The credibility of higher education's commitment to quality and diversity is weakened when access of Asian-Americans is limited in the name of diversity, and access of Blacks and Hispanics is limited in the name of quality. The net result of both is to perpetuate homogeneity.

If these two concepts--quality and diversity--remain in conflict, the challenge of diversity cannot be met. I do not believe there is an intrinsic conflict. However, when quality is measured in only one way, the conflict will remain. We can broaden our understanding about quality without diluting expectations for learning, for the curriculum, or for faculty. We need to scrutinize carefully the standards we use, the assessment of performance, and the climate in which performance is assessed.

What are the implications of diversity for teaching and faculty? While there are many, I would like to emphasize the following:

1. We need to be prepared to deal with and learn from conflict. Even the most superficial analysis of what is happening on college campuses suggests that conflict is either openly present or just under the surface. In fact, greater conflict exists on those campuses engaged in discussions and actions concerning diversity. Alternate perspectives on issues, lack of trust, varying levels of power on campus, and different values make conflict inevitable. While higher education theoretically is rooted in the notion of debate, it is not clear that institutions actually know how to deal with conflict. The challenge is to accept that conflict will occur, that we will learn from the debate, and that vehicles will be needed to assist in the resolution of conflict. Indeed, a characteristic of many successful campuses is that they have created strong policies, procedures, and even special programs of mediation and arbitration to recognize the existence of conflict and to use it as a vehicle for learning.

2. We need to clarify our view of the mission of our institutions in the 21st century. Higher education's response to the proliferation of knowledge and disciplines has led to a smorgasbord approach to the curriculum. The answer is not increasing fragmentation, but rather thoughtful clarification of what is important and why.

3. We need to educate ourselves and each other about new developments in our own fields and about our students. When the computer era arrived, especially personal computers, most of us understood that we would need to learn this new technology, and we did. We did not want the institution, the discipline, or ourselves to be considered out of date with respect to new technology. Moreover, our institutions found a way to respond. Scholars in all fields found themselves "retooled." Similarly, we cannot afford to be out of date with respect to the knowledge emerging about diversity and its implications for teaching and learning.

4. We need to be clear about which values and objectives are truly central to our goals and which simply serve to maintain homogeneity. Because isolation in our own cultures can make this difficult to see, it will necessitate collaborative efforts among those of divergent perspectives.

5. We need to be aggressive in hiring and retaining minority faculty and staff. The pipeline demographics cannot be an excuse for allowing the status quo to continue. We also must assess the kinds of support and protection given to minority faculty and staff who might otherwise be spread too thin.

6. We need to understand and evaluate the kinds of classroom approaches and environments that inhibit success or prompt students to avoid certain fields, such as those requiring writing or mathematics.

7. We need to expect that change of this sort will take time and commitment. If we keep adding and changing only because we have to, we will resent the expenditure of time and resources. In contrast, if we change our frame of reference, we will see that we all have a great deal to gain from this effort. Our success as well as the integrity of our research and curriculum are at stake.

Collectively and individually, we all have an important role to play in addressing these issues. If there is a single lesson to be learned, it is that we cannot simply add and stir. Recognizing and dealing with the complexity of these issues should greatly benefit teaching, learning, and the curriculum. The resources of diversity will be invaluable in revitalizing education and in preparing us for the future.

References

Beckham, B. (1988). Strangers in a strange land: The experience of blacks on white campuses. Educational Record, 68(4), 69(1), 74-78.

Blackwell, J. E. (1988). Faculty issues: The impact on minorities. Review of Higher Education, 11(8), 417-434.

Commission on Minority Participation in Education and American Life. (1988). One third of a nation. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Jaramillo, M. L. (1988). Institutional responsibility in the provision of educational experiences to the Hispanic American female student. In T. McKenna & F. I. Ortiz (Eds.), The broken web (pp. 25-39). Encino, CA: Floricanto Press.

Madrid, A. (1988, March). Diversity and its discontents. Paper presented at the National Conference of the American Association of Higher Education, Washington, DC.

McIntosh. (1989). Curricular revision: The new knowledge for a new age. In C. Pearson, D. Shavlik, & J. G. Touchton (Eds.), Educating the majority (pp. 400-412). New York: MacMillan.

Mingle, J. R. (1987). Focus on minorities: Trends in higher education participation and success. Denver: Education Commission of the States/SHEEO. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 287 404)

National Center for Fair and Open Testing. (1989). FairTest Examiner, 3(1),1-3.

Richardson, R. C., Jr., & De los Santos, A. (1988). From access to achievement in higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pearson, C., Shavlik, D., & Touchton, J. G. (Eds.) (1989). Educating the majority. New York: MacMillan.

Smith, D. G. (1989). The challenge of diversity: Involvement or alienation in the academy? (ASHE-ERIC Report No. 5). Washington, DC: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Smith, D. G. (1991.) The challenge of diversity: Alienation in the academy and its implications for faculty. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 2, 129-137.