The Enigma of Diversity

The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice

Ellen Berrey

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226246376
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That's a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it?Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan's admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences.Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

PART ONE

Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Michigan

TWO

“Academically Excellent and Diverse”

“Michigan: Distinguished. Diverse. Dynamic.” This is the headline applicants to the University of Michigan would see, in blue and gold lettering, when they opened the Office of Undergraduate Admissions’ website in 2004.1 Alongside those words were images of a football game, a science lab, and an orchestra. The text introduced the university: “A vibrant community of intellectually adventurous students and renowned faculty who live and learn in an environment of limitless possibilities.” Videos and photos featured students of different racial backgrounds hanging out or engrossed in deep conversation. Pullout quotes testified to the exciting challenges, welcoming environment, and diversity of the university and its student body. “Be prepared, pay attention, speak up, and really think for yourself,” advises a young white woman with short red hair. “Diversity is one of the issues I’m most passionate about,” says Ewurabena Menyah, a nursing major from Ohio.

On the admissions office website and in the university’s other public relations and educational materials, campus leaders projected an identity for Michigan as a trailblazer in academic excellence and diversity. Michigan was “the leaders and best”—as the fight song proclaimed—not just in scholastic achievement and football but also in its support of diversity.

This identity gained tremendous political importance at the turn of the twenty-first century, with the Gratz and Grutter litigation detailed in the next chapter. Before then, for decades prior, university leaders had cultivated and mobilized it to mediate integration on campus. In the mid-1960s, a few university leaders took on a historically unprecedented objective: to encourage the numeric representation and institutional assimilation of black students. Over the subsequent half century, Michigan transformed from a nearly all-white university to one in which white students, in 2013, made up 67% of the undergraduate student body (see fig. 2.1).2 Many administrators were deeply invested in spurring those changes. Administrators advanced them principally through organizational practices of affirmative action in admissions and explained them initially in reference to remedying disadvantage and then, by the 1980s, in terms of diversity’s educational benefits.

2.1. Representation of undergraduate students enrolled at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, by race, fall 1987–fall 2013. Source: Based on data from University of Michigan, Office of the Registrar, Report 837, multiple years.

The push for diversity at Michigan both enabled these changes and was defined by them. It was prompted by discernible forces in the university’s external environment, namely Powell’s opinion in the 1978 Regents of University of California v. Bakke case and responses to it in the field of higher education. In the context of the increasingly restrictive legal doctrine on race, diversity became a cover for a policy intervention to support people of color. But the university’s adoption of diversity was not simply copied and pasted from Powell’s opinion. Campus leaders made diversity the centerpiece of the university’s identity. This identity linked both racial minority representation and campus pluralism with academic rigor, campus vitality, and the social good. In fact, in their organizational activities, administrators made far more of diversity as an image, ideal, and low-stakes affirmation than as a technical explanation for race-conscious admissions.

This chapter introduces Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus and the university’s identity of diversity. To establish patterns of stratification and institutional structures relevant to the administration’s drive for diversity, it explains the politicized markets of selective college admissions and the policy of affirmative admissions. Then the analysis traces the historical development of the university’s diversity efforts and identity over four points of time, starting in 1964. The administration’s advocacy of diversity symbolically signaled that the boundaries of the student body were far reaching—not just inclusive of white people and not biased toward students of color—and in modest but impactful ways, their diversity efforts pragmatically opened up access to a white-dominated, highly coveted domain of privilege.

Welcome to Campus

The University of Michigan is a large, elite public university known for its football team and its prestigious faculty and resources. The main campus, in the college town of Ann Arbor, sprawls over about three thousand acres. In 2005, the university consisted of nineteen schools and colleges, enrolled forty thousand undergraduate and graduate students, and employed more than five thousand faculty members. Around the same time, its total research expenditures reached over $750 million.3 It is among the most prestigious public universities in the United States. In 2004, U.S. News and World Report rated the Michigan undergraduate program as the third-best public university and among the top twenty-five colleges in the country.4 The university has become selective since the 1970s.5 In the mid-2000s, Michigan’s first-year student admissions rate was around 50%, making the university more competitive than most large public schools but far more accessible than elite private schools such as Harvard or Yale.6 Gaining admission required excellent credentials. In 2005, only 25% of admitted students received an SAT score lower than 1240. University boosters call it the “Harvard of the Midwest.”

The student body at Michigan is predominantly white and affluent or middle class but still quite heterogeneous. In 2005, the undergraduate student body was 68% white, 13% Asian, 8% black, 5% Latino, 1% Native American, and 5% unknown.7 In the fall of 2005, just over half of Michigan’s undergraduates were female, and almost 5% were international students.8 In 2002, 54% of first-year students reported a family income over $100,000, while only 14% reported a family income below $50,000.9 About 13% of undergraduate Michigan students received Pell Grants from the US government for low-income students, which earned Michigan the third slot for economic diversity among the top American universities in a U.S. News and World Report index.10 At the time of this study, in 2005, the cost of attending Michigan as an undergraduate was over $19,500 for students from within the state (compared to average cost of public universities nationwide of $12,115).11 Students who were not state residents—about 32% of the undergraduate student body—were an important source of revenue for the university; they paid over $38,000 in tuition, room and board, and other costs.12

The university has a strong intellectual, social, and political culture. The university calendar includes hundreds of speakers, conferences, workshops, performances, and readings. Many university activities, guided by Michigan’s mission as a public university, are oriented toward public service such as service learning for students. Student political and social activism has been vibrant on campus for decades and leans liberal. Students and graduates express a strong sense of identification with the university, especially its athletic teams, the Wolverines, which include the school’s wildly popular football team and twenty-six other varsity sports teams.

“Academically Excellent and Diverse”

Diversity is portrayed as a core value in administrators’ statements on the university’s mission and guiding principles, paired with references to Michigan’s commitment to public service and academic rigor. The University of Michigan Vision Statement set out seven aspirations for the university in the twenty-first century, among them “To be a source of pride for all people of Michigan,” “To occupy a position of unique leadership among the nation’s universities in research and scholarly achievement,” and “To be recognized as a University that honors human diversity.” The Senate Assembly, representing the faculty, passed a statement on the “value of diversity” in 1998 that posed diversity as conducive to knowledge:

The goals of an institution of higher learning should be to generate new knowledge, to convey knowledge to others, and to involve its faculty, students, and staff in using this knowledge to address contemporary social problems. For the University to excel in reaching these goals, the rich diversity of contemporary society is a resource that needs to be tapped. . . . Our commitment to diversity means at the most basic level a willingness both to recognize the value of disparate experiences and visions and to weave them into the fabric of our institution. Because of this, we are committed to a policy of recruiting and maintaining a culturally and racially diverse student body and faculty that are representative of contemporary society, and to assuring that these diverse influences are respected and incorporated into the structure of the University.

Statements such as these are formulated for the purposes of articulating shared principles and, through their circulation in handbooks and online, become part of the university’s public image.

The administration also carefully cultivated an image of the university as an incubator of diversity and excellence in its public relations materials. Speeches and statements by the university president made reference to the value of diversity as central to the university’s mission. The university’s promotional websites and brochures crafted an image of the student body as archetypically diverse. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions’ 2004 Student Profile described the student body:

University of Michigan students have a lot in common. They’re intelligent, motivated, inquisitive, hard-working, open-minded, ambitious, and ready to be challenged. . . . Beyond that, however, you couldn’t find a more diverse group. Michigan undergraduates come from all 50 states as well as 129 foreign countries. Think of the student body as a mosaic of races, cultures, languages, religions, and points of view.

One commonly circulated image showed President Coleman with James Duderstadt, a white professor who had previously been the president of the university, and Lester Monts, an African American professor in a high-ranking administrative role, ceremoniously on stage. All wear academic regalia, their colorful robes signaling their achievement of a PhD.

As in the Senate Assembly statement, university leaders routinely identified Michigan’s admissions policies as crucial for creating diversity. A December 2002 e-mail announcement from the administration, explaining the current stage of the Gratz and Grutter litigation, stated that the undergraduate admissions policy “works very well in choosing a student body that is academically excellent and diverse in many ways.”

The university’s materials—whether formulating core values, marketing Michigan’s people and environment, or characterizing its policies—also underscored the good that came of such diversity. The faculty senate diversity statement explained that, by fostering diversity, “we can provide students with the unique educational experience and intellectual stimulation that can only come from interacting with and learning to respect a broad range of people with differing backgrounds, life experiences, beliefs, and ideas.” Such statements on productive diversity stressed the learning and growth that students experienced through their interactions with different types of people.

The university also made diversity an explicit organizing principle throughout much administrative activity, programming, and intellectual work. There were many ways to promote diversity and to achieve it. These included affirmative action in admissions and hiring, training and pedagogical programs for students, programming under the Office of Academic and Multicultural Initiatives, a presidential Diversity Council, and the National Science Foundation–funded ADVANCE program for female faculty members in science and engineering. Support services were provided for students of color, female students, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender students, students with disabilities, and international students. Faculty and administrators, some of whom were leading researchers on diversity, conducted major research studies on the effects of racial heterogeneity on student performance and best practices of campus diversity initiatives. The university published histories and time lines of diversity, suggesting a long-standing, deeply engrained institutional dedication to diversity.

Most Michigan students expressed similar views of the university. The Michigan Student Study, a longitudinal study of student and alumni perceptions, found that students expressed overwhelming support for diversity on campus. In 2004, the vast majority of seniors—from 68% of white seniors to 79% of African American ones—reported that diversity had “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of an impact on their college experience, and for most of those individuals, the impact was positive.13 The 2004 seniors and alumni of the university, reflecting on their years on campus, felt their exposure to new and different people and perspectives had enhanced their intellectual development and awareness of other types of people. (However, as discussed in the next chapter, white students had more reservations about diversity and affirmative action, and many students of color experienced racist hostility.)

Meanwhile, popular media, college guidebooks, and institutional authorities on higher education spotlighted the university’s academic rigor and diversity. Unigo, a popular online college guide created in 2008, ranked the university as one of the top ten “New Ivies” and committed to fostering diversity. The student reviews, which are referenced on the website of U.S. News and World Report, included comments such as “diversity here is amazing.”

These value statements, images, testimonies, activities, rankings, and endorsements all seemed to be tangible evidence that Michigan was indeed diverse and a stalwart in the twin pursuits of excellence and diversity. It appeared to be a place where people of different backgrounds learn, work, and socialize peacefully and productively—where their racial, ethnic, economic, and other social differences enhanced students’ learning experiences and the vitality of campus life. As depicted, students expressed their unique personal identities through enriching cross-cultural interactions with other students. The university seemed ever more prestigious for its groundbreaking support of diversity.

That Michigan administrators projected such a polished identity is not surprising. The university’s ideas of diversity were derived from law on race in college admissions. In the context of major legal attacks on those policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an argument about educational benefits of diversity served as a legitimated, legalized explanation for its race-attentive admissions policies.

These notions of diversity and excellence had purchase beyond the political arena as well. At Michigan they were relevant, in particular, for admissions officers’ work of recruiting students and selling the university to those students and their families. Administrators mobilized such ideas in branding practices as they vied for smart students and external funding, in competition with other selective universities.14 This is part of the corporatization of higher education.15 Over the last forty years, universities and colleges have increasingly commercialized research, instruction, and athletics.16 In admissions, selective universities promise a coveted product (a degree) and sought-after services (elite education), and they have come to treat students as consumers with desires to satisfy. Like administrators at many other elite universities, those at Michigan made diversity, excellence, and leadership their sales pitches in the face of a market of elite college admissions—a market in which affluent students are essential and t...