Leading a Diversity Culture Shift in Higher Education

Comprehensive Organizational Learning Strategies

Edna Chun, Alvin Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138280694
• eBook ISBN: 9781351809429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Leading a Diversity Culture Shift in Higher Education offers a practical and timely guide for launching, implementing, and institutionalizing diversity organizational learning. The authors draw from extensive interviews with chief diversity officers and college and university leaders to reveal the prevailing models and best practices for strengthening diversity practices within the higher education community today. They complement this original research with an analysis of key contextual factors that shape the organizational learning process including administrative leadership, institutional mission and goals, historical legacy, geographic location, and campus structures and politics.

Given the substantive challenge of engendering a cultural shift for diversity in a university setting, this book will serve as a concrete primer for institutions seeking to develop a systematic and progressive approach to diversity organizational learning. Readers will be able to engage with provocative case studies that grapple with the current pressures emanating from diversity training and learn effective strategies for creating more inclusive environments.

This book is a perfect resource for institutional leaders, administrators, faculty members, and key campus constituencies who are seeking transformational change, institutional success, and stability in a rapidly diversifying national and global environment.

1
An Improbable Landscape for Diversity Culture Change

On campuses today you see more bonding than bridging. If we do not deliberately create conditions to encourage real bridging, we are left with a series of disconnected conversations that do not feed or challenge one another, a kind of archipelago of islands of like individuals occupying the same ocean, and not a community forged of common ground.

Julio Frenk, President of the University of Miami, 2016, para. 12¹

In March 2007, then Senator Barack Obama who later became America’s first biracial president, described the civil rights journey begun by four students from North Carolina A&T University. The African American student activists, dubbed the Greensboro Four, dared to sit in at a lunch counter in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina:²

The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side. So the question, I guess, that I have today is what’s called of us in this Joshua generation.

In this biblical reference, Obama viewed the historic journey toward inclusion as the unfinished work of the Joshua generation. While Moses enabled the Hebrews to leave Egypt and nearly reached the Promised Land, Joshua had the task of helping the Hebrews cross over the Jordan River.³

Students representing the new Joshua generation have pressured for diversity progress in higher education. In fact, historians may view this time period as one in which young people drove the process of cultural change, a time when the dimension of youth intersected with race, class, and identity.⁴ Higher education will undoubtedly play an “outsize role” in the historical record, as student demonstrations in higher education crystallized the “explosive strands” of demography and social change in the United States.⁵

Given the unfinished journey that former President Obama describes, how can colleges and universities foster more inclusive learning, living, and working environments for faculty, staff, administrators, and students? What contextual conditions and leadership strategies will lead to a comprehensive diversity culture shift and offer the greatest potential for success?

Scholars indicate that colleges are changing and can indeed change,⁶ while skeptics see diversity progress as slow, even glacial, and marked with the type of resistance that accompanies the effort to preserve well-established patterns and practices. Few institutions have implemented successful approaches to diversity learning that transcend organizational silos and transmit diversity learning across the varied counters of campus topography. More commonly, diversity activities and programs are fragmented, piecemeal, and lack sustained and integrative program-matic impact.

Diversity change is not a “quick fix” but requires sustained and deliberate institutional planning and action. Committed diversity leadership needs to shift the tides of institutional culture and navigate the rocky course of changing institutional mindsets in order to embed the value of diversity throughout a campus ecosystem. As demonstrated by the interviews and case studies in this book, the progressive course of diversity organizational learning is subject to many variables and attainment can fluctuate based on institutional leadership and cultural readiness.

To provide a compass for the change process, this book offers a research-based framework for initiating, implementing, and sustaining a diversity culture shift. To date, only a small body of research addresses how systematic diversity organizational learning can be implemented in higher education. The purpose of this study, using the analogy suggested by Julio Frenk, is to find strategies that will bridge the archipelagos of islands that co-exist independently within a college or university, build community, and transmit shared diversity values throughout the institutional ecosystem. As Frenk explains, institutions of higher education need a “scholarship of belonging” that embraces the multiple dimensions of diversity and links “our value to our values.”⁷

Our central premise is based on two fundamental assumptions: first, that bold and courageous university and college leadership is required to overcome regressive internal and external forces resisting diversity change; and second, that systematic organizational learning is an indispensable lever for transmitting diversity across a campus landscape. The dynamics of a diversity culture shift depend upon committed leadership, a governance infrastructure that supports change, and clear institutional direction.

In a larger sense, the higher education environment represents a microcosm of the structural, institutional, economic, political, cultural, and psychological conditions in society as a whole that lead to powerlessness.⁸ Institutionalization has reproduced and replicated forms of exclusion and oppression of members of nondominant groups that constitute a longstanding “material, social, and ideological reality” in American society.⁹ The five case studies of public and private re-search universities shared in this book reveal the ways in which institutional cultures can transmit, reproduce, and perpetuate the exclusionary norms, attitudes, and practices present in wider society. For this reason, we adopt the terminology of minoritized or nondominant groups to address groups that have wielded or held less power respectively within institutional settings based on salient demographic characteristics that include race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status as well as the intersectionality of these dimensions.¹⁰

During the interview process for this study, a question we often received from campus leaders was, “What do you mean by organizational learning?” As Nicole, a diversity dean at an elite university observes, at her institution faculty remain skeptical about knowledge the institution has not produced itself:

There is nobody here who has a concept of organizational learning…. We are in a place of very, very smart people who I think care in some very abstract way about this issue… but are unconvinced that they don’t already have the answers to the problem… we are functioning at a level that is not as strategic as it is reactive. I don’t think we are unique.

The case studies in the book illuminate the ways in which the leadership structures of higher education have fared under seemingly antagonistic forces. These forces include the following factors: 1) increased intervention of conservative state legislators in the governance of public institutions of higher education, 2) hostility to diversity and divisiveness arising from national political events, 3) skepticism of alumni and external stakeholders about student demonstrations, and 4) pressures from minoritized student groups seeking to create more inclusive campus climates.¹¹ In the most extreme example at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UTK), legislative attacks have resulted in the withdrawal of diversity funding and led to administrative turnover. The case study at the close of Chapter 2 illustrates the dramatic tension between student demands and the legislators’ view that UTK had deviated from “Tennessee values” or the values of the majority. At the same time, a clear trend that emerges from the troubled institutional waters of higher education is the voice of tenured faculty leadership that in some instances has garnered strength through faculty senates.

Our examination of the institutional landscape for diversity foregrounds the critical role of systematic organizational learning in diversity transformation. From this perspective, organizational learning needs to be a core element of an institution’s diversity agenda, an agenda that integrates diversity and inclusion into the organizational structure and culture of the college or university.¹² This book addresses the specific ways in which organizational learning can serve as a conduit for changing mindsets, assumptions, and prevailing norms related to diversity within the fabric of institutional culture. Most importantly, we share approaches that lead to substantive institutional outcomes.

The Tumultuous Political Stage for Diversity

Beginning in late 2014 and continuing well through the fall and winter of 2015, a wave of student demonstrations swept college campuses around the nation. The protests initially arose following the killing of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer in August 2014 and the determination in November of that year that no indictment would be issued to the officer.¹³ A tsunami of student protests was ignited by demonstrations at the flagship University of Missouri campus at Columbia (“Mizzou”), just 116 miles away.¹⁴ The Ferguson incident triggered discontent on the Mizzou campus regarding a perceived legacy of marginalization and exclusionary treatment of minoritized students. In the case study at the close of this chapter, we describe the aftermath of the student demonstrations at Mizzou and the subsequent administrative upheaval.

Concerns about the persistent lack of inclusion for members of nondominant groups on predominantly white campuses were at the forefront of student concerns. Student activism expressed impatience regarding the pace of diversity progress. In a seemingly domino effect, across the spectrum of college campuses including Ivy League institutions, research universities, and private liberal arts colleges, students demanded changes in the campus environment for diversity. These demands not only emphasized the need for greater diversity among faculty, administrators, staff, and students, but also called for leadership support, policy changes, and training programs that would create more welcoming living and learning environments.

A survey of 76 institutions and organizations reveals remarkable commonality in the themes that student demonstrations identified: 91 percent of student groups called for policy change; 89 percent had specific demands for campus leadership practices; 88 percent requested greater resources be devoted to the needs of diverse students; 86 percent sought greater structural diversity among students, faculty, staff, and administration; and 71 percent requested new or revised cultural competency or diversity training.¹⁵ While the demands for training were varied, students emphasized the importance of systemic training on diversity and cultural competency for all campus constituencies including faculty, staff, students, administration, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 An Improbable Landscape for Diversity Culture Change
• Chapter 2 Laying the Groundwork for a Diversity Culture Shift
• Chapter 3 A Framework for Systematic Diversity Organizational Learning
• Chapter 4 Representative Approaches to Diversity Organizational Learning
• Chapter 5 Future Aspirations and Expectations
• Appendix A Diversity Officer Sample
• Appendix B Diversity Organizational Learning Assessment Matrix
• Index