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Daryl G. Smith
The Claremont Graduate School
Several years ago, I found myself becoming
increasingly impatient as I read report after report and
heard speech after speech describing the changing
demographics in our society. Most descriptions ended with
statistics, as if these figures made it obvious that
changes were needed and that we all knew what these
changes should be. If the reports went further, they
tended to describe a population of students who were
different primarily in their preparation for college, a
difference that institutions needed to deal with. My
experience as an administrator and faculty member in
higher education for almost 25 years told me that the
issues and challenges were far more complex than they
were described. In particular, I was not sure that the
right questions were being asked.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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McIntosh. (1989). Curricular revision: The new
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J. G. Touchton (Eds.), Educating the majority (pp.
400-412). New York: MacMillan.
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in higher education participation and success.
Denver: Education Commission of the States/SHEEO. (ERIC
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Examiner, 3(1),1-3.
Richardson, R. C., Jr., & De los Santos, A.
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Pearson, C., Shavlik, D., & Touchton, J. G. (Eds.)
(1989). Educating the majority. New York:
MacMillan.
Smith, D. G. (1989). The challenge of diversity:
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Smith, D. G. (1991.) The challenge of diversity:
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faculty. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching,
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