Diversity and Inclusion on Campus

Supporting Students of Color in Higher Education

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, Angela M. Locks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351235204
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

This new and updated second edition of Diversity and Inclusion on Campus: Supporting Students of Color in Higher Education provides an exploration of the range of college experiences, from gaining access to higher education to successfully persisting through degree programs. By bridging research, theory, and practice related to the ways that peers, faculty, administrators, staff, and institutions can and do influence racially and ethnically diverse students' experiences, Winkle-Wagner and Locks examine how and why it is imperative to have an understanding of the issues that affect students of color in higher education.

This new edition also includes features such as:

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• New case studies and examples throughout that allow readers to take institutional-level and student-level approaches to the chapter topics

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• Updated citations and theory across chapters

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• New topical coverage, including discussion of college affordability, an exploration of a variety of institution types, and the role of merit in maintaining and perpetuating racial inequality in higher education

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• End-of-chapter questions that encourage readers to explore chapter concepts in more detail

This second edition is an invaluable resource for future and current higher education and student affairs practitioners working towards full inclusion and participation for students of color in higher education.

Section 1
Getting In

1
Introduction

The Action of Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education

Diversity-And-Inclusion-As-Action

Diversity. It requires thought. It requires understanding. But, mostly, diversity is a call toward action, a verb, something that one can demonstrate, behave, enact. Our task in this book is to call for action. We charge our readers to do something with, about, and for diversity that goes far beyond discussions. To ensure that all people have their right to pursue happiness, their right to be included in the fabric of the United States and the world, requires action. Inclusion is not something that happens on its own. To enact diversity in positive ways requires the act of inclusion. And inclusion assumes the deliberate act of bringing people into the group, the norms, into the opportunities that will allow for a meaningful pursuit of happiness. Our focus in these pages is on racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion in higher education. We start from the assumption that higher education is a vessel through which these goals can be enacted and then modeled into society more generally. But, to fully understand the difficult task ahead for inclusion on college campuses, we must situate our consideration of diversity within the current moment in our society.

During his second inauguration, President Barack Obama¹ (2013) pondered what remained to be done, saying, “We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.” Obama went on to identify what he considered the nation’s “greatest task,” arguing that it is not just being different/diverse from one another that matters:

Our generation’s task—to make… Life… Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness real for every American.… Being true to our founding… does not require us to agree on every contour of life.… Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates for all time… it does require us to act in our time.

What Obama’s (2013) speech asserted, and we find this relevant even in the second edition of this book, is action. When we penned the first edition of this book, the country was experiencing a time of hope, change, and there was consistent talk about embracing differences, embracing “diversity.” We did not agree with the “post-racial” assessment that some made at that time, that the country was beyond racial inequality. Rather, when authoring the first edition of the book, we aligned more with concerns that the term “post-racial” was just a way to disguise historical and contemporary racism (Higginbotham, 2015; Tesler, 2016), we wondered if our second edition might be a reflection on ways that campuses were transforming into more equitable, affirming, racially just spaces. But, the second edition, as it stands, reflects deepening divides in the country, and many of these divides continue to be on racial lines (Bobo, 2017).

Since the first edition of the book, a new President, Donald J. Trump, was elected and, with his inauguration, much has changed, including views on diversity. In Trump’s inaugural address he stated:²

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.

Along with the “America-First” agenda, there have been dramatic changes in the way that diversity, race, and racism have been manifested. The idea of an America-first agenda has changed the way that diversity is presented and considered in many spheres, including on college campuses. For many, the idea of being America-first has meant a reinforcement of Whiteness as the norm and a turn away from former ideas of embracing differences (Sides, Tesler, & Vavreck, 2018). While our effort here is not to compare two Presidential Administrations per se, we do want to reflect on the contemporary moment of the United States.

We write the second edition from a place of deep concern that the wounds of racism, slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples, White Supremacy, inhumane immigration policies, and racial hierarchies in this country are torn open. The country is deeply divided on political lines, perhaps more divided than any other time in history aside from when the country was experiencing Civil War (Carmines, Ensley, & Wagner, 2014; McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2016). Racially charged rhetoric that pits one group against another has become the norm (Sides et al., 2018). Diversity-asdifferences continues to matter but the framing of it is often less about inclusion and more about demonstrating where the lines are drawn between groups (Sides et al., 2018). That is, diversity has become an individual phenomenon, one of individually embracing differences (or not) instead of diversity as structurally and institutionally situated. These national trends have arrived on college campuses too—and the idea of “diversity” is at the center of some of the challenges (Berrey, 2015).

Diversity continues to be a conundrum for many college campuses. While there is often a desire to continue to diversify college campuses on the part of some administrators, staff, or faculty, there has also been an uptick in racial hostility on many campuses in the past few years and campus leaders are left to struggle with how to deal with these incidents (Cole & Harper, 2017). “Diversity” on many campuses has been a way to contemplate individual ideas of acceptance in ways that may fail to account for the structural and institutional roots of racism (Rodriguez & Freeman, 2016). It seems that there is a problem with “diversity” relative to how it is taught, framed, and enacted on many college campuses (Berrey, 2015; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Patton, 2016).

Since writing the first edition of the book, we have concerns over using the word “diversity” because the word has been used is so many conflicting ways. The language and use of diversity is an “enigma” as Berrey (2015) framed it in her book. On some campuses, White students have used diversity courses and diversity training as a way to absolve them of structural responsibility for racial injustice (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Sometimes students have used “diversity” for their own educational benefit (e.g., learning more because of having many racial/ethnic groups around) (Warikoo, 2016). Thus, while we use the word “diversity,” it is imperative that we offer a structural framing for the word here.

Left alone, diversity might simply exist with or without approval, acceptance, or without any enactment of it. All people have their uniqueness, their differences in thinking, acting, behaving, or being. We, as a larger humanity, do not really choose to be diverse; we simply are. History teaches us that, left alone, diversity may exist, but inclusion may not. This is our rationale for pushing the meaning of diversity from an adjective, something that describes another object or idea, toward an action.

One lesson of history is that when diversity, the differences(s) between us, the adjective to describe us (i.e., diverse people), is left untouched and un-enacted, those who were initially afforded power and privilege by way of their birthright will continue to have it. Those who were not so fortunate as to be born into privilege will be relegated to persistently disadvantaged positions. In the United States, this history includes the cancerous effects of genocide upon indigenous populations, the deep and persistent scars of slavery, the memory of concentration camps both foreign and on U.S. soil, a federal law that permits states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, and a constitution that allows the detention of its citizens based on race and ethnicity, and still does not explicitly grant women equal rights to men. While we simply are all different, our history on diversity as an adjective has not been only the well-intended metaphors for the patchwork quilt, the melting pot, or the salad bowl where people come together and make something more beautiful. Our collective human history on diversity-as-an-adjective has been messy, painful, and all too often subjugating and violent towards those who are not born into dominant groups.

We choose to acknowledge this history as we enter into such a delicate, shifting subject like diversity (Berrey, 2015). Without knowing where we have been, there is no path to know where we should go next. We acknowledge the concept of diversity as an adjective, the idea that we are different. But, our task in this book is to devise ways to think about a deliberate marriage contract between diversity and inclusion so that we move beyond the diversity-as-an-adjective idea.

To those who read this book as philosophers and thinkers, our goal is to offer a review of theoretical notions of diversity in higher education with a call toward empowering new thinking on the topic. For those who read this text as seasoned or emerging researchers, we attempt to provide a synthesis of a vast body of research that has been done on diversity on college campuses. For those who read this book as practitioners, administrators, and do-ers, we hope to offer practical ideas, insights, suggestions, and calls for your action in order to make diversity and inclusion go hand in hand on college campuses. For those who are not sure yet where you fit in the diversity-and-inclusion action plan, our desire is that you might be able to figure out your own path toward enacting these ideas, even if only in your own life and professional practice. And finally, for those students, staff, faculty, or administrators who maybe never felt like higher education legitimately included them, we hope the book can be at least one step in the process of helping you to feel less alienated, marginalized, and alone because, ultimately, in order to enact diversity-and-inclusion, we must all be in this together.

We emphasize race and ethnicity in this book, highlighting action toward racial/ethnic diversity-and-inclusion in the student population in higher education. We do this not as a way to claim that other categories and identities such as gender, socioeconomic status, religion, ability/disability, or sexual orientation are unimportant; rather we attempt to bring in these categories whenever possible. But we focus on race/ethnicity here because we stand in a time when Race [Still] Matters (West, 1993/2001). Even as we craftthis very argument, we cannot turn away from the current reality that skin color still imposes upon many people the script they feel allowed to enact in their lives. Examining the U.S. Census data, we learn that race and ethnicity still predicts the likelihood that a child will grow up in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012a). Black and Hispanic children are almost twice as likely to be living in poverty than are White children, and these racial gaps have not shifted all that much in nearly 30 years (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012a).³ Race and ethnicity still predicts the students with whom a child will attend school; schools continue to be racially segregated in many cities, states, and regions (Ross et al., 2012). And the color of a person’s skin continues to be a predictor of whether that child will go to college and earn a degree (Ross et al., 2012). Race still matters. We point our book in that direction as a way to continue our collective journey toward hopefully, one day, making race matter less as a predictor of inequity.

Those who Painted the Scenery: Reflections on Diversity in Higher Education

We enter a dialogue about diversity in higher education that has been going on loudly since at least the 1960s and has continued on college campuses with the Black Lives Matter social movement that was initiated as a response to numerous police murders of unarmed Black men and women (Taylor, 2016). A review of the work that synthesizes the topic of diversity in higher education uncovers three general topics. Scholarship on diversity in higher education has explored the following:

1. The diversity of students and how to better understand them and serve new populations,
2. Ideas for administrators and faculty who teach and work with diversity on campuses, and
3. Structural approaches that aim to explore higher education diversity as emblematic of larger sociostructural issues.

In considering the diversity of students on college campuses and how to better serve them, many scholars and practitioners treat diversity-as-an-adjective. The idea is to notice new populations that could be served by campuses, to recruit those students to campus, and then to ensure that those students are successful. The students who are new to the campus (often students of color) are often viewed with a deficit approach, meaning that these students are seen as lacking something in their backgrounds that the campuses could “fix”. Or worse, as campuses become more demographically diverse and diversity is viewed as an individual-level issue to learn, diversity-as-an-adjective, the learning of diversity, might become an asset for White students, meaning that White students begin to think that diversity is for their educational benefit (Warikoo, 2016).

Another area of discussion on diversity in higher education places campus leaders, teachers, or administrators in the lead role of facilitating a better path toward embracing diversity on college campuses. Some of the work that focuses on teachers and administrators treats diversity-as-an-adjective or something to be “managed” on campuses. The risk with this approach is the students of color are seen as part of what needs to be managed or dealt with, and diversity, again, is primarily viewed as an adjective. The problem with this approach is the management of diversity can become deficiency minded where students of color are viewed as the challengers, or the problems to be fixed on campus.

Some research about administrators emphasizes learning what administrators need to do to be more culturally responsive (Cuyjet, Howard-Hamilton, & Cooper, 2011). That work is important and useful, creating leaders who will be better able to create inclusive practices and policies. But the focus is an individual-level approach where administrators are viewed as individuals who are committed to change their campuses with their leadership practices and held accountable for doing so.

A third line of research offers a view of the larger scenery of society and social structures as a way to reveal what might be happening with diversity on college campuses. Some scholars in this area call for an institutional focus on diversity instead of a gaze toward students in order for Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education to work (Smith, 2009). For example, Stulberg, Weinberg, and their contributors (2012) provided a synthesis of the way that inequities in higher education connect with primary and secondary school inequality and larger social inequalities (racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, etc.). Maher and Tetreault (2007) use institutional ethnography with three institutions (Rutgers University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan) to reveal ways that Privilege and Diversity in the Academy are manifested from admissions decisions for students, to diversifying the faculty, to institutional conversations about issues like excellence. There are also laudable studies that emphasize administrators’ facilitation of diversity initiatives that seem to be more about institutional change. For example, some of these works primarily study administrators’ experiences in facilitating successful diversity initiatives on college campuses (Bonner, Marbley, & Howard-Hamilton, 2011; Brown-Glaude, 2008; Hurtado et al., 1999).

Diversity-as-an-Action

While there have been three primary streams of diversity-related scholarship, we take a slightly different approach in this book, connecting diversity with action, specifically, the act of inclusion. We root our work in an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2000; hooks, 2000) that initiated with critical race feminist scholars who called on everyone to view categories of race, class, and gender and social structures as overlapping (Shields, 2008; Zinn & Dill, 1994). Crenshaw’s work with violence against women of color offered the word “intersectionality” to encompass this kind of thinking (Crenshaw, 1991; Crenshaw, Gotanta, Peller, & Thomas, 1996). Intersectionality is a way of making explicit the manner in which people’s experiences and identities cannot be parsed out into separate categories (such as race, gender, etc.) and how identities must be considered within existing social structures. Within this way of thinking, issues such as oppression, discrimination, subjugation, and domination are called to the forefront. In other words, as scholars using this approach, it would be important to not only think about categories like race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, but to also consider how history and power structures might influence people’s experiences of those categories. In other words, a person who self-identifies as Black in the United States may have family memories of slavery, overt racism, or racial discrimination. An intersectional approach would require that one take this history into account when thinking about race. But it would also require that one go deeper than the racial identity and think about how one’s gender, class, or sexual orientation might also influence racial experiences. Part of taking an intersectional approach is an attempt not to privilege ethnicity/race over other identities (e.g., hooks, 2000; Hurtado, 1996). It is also important to note that within this approach, anyone, regardless of their group membership(s) can be marginalized, depending on the context in which one finds oneself (hooks, 2000; Hurtado, 1996).

We do want to note here that our analyses are unlikely to wholly represent all students who feel underrepresented in college. For example, many students with physical or mental disabilities may be underrepresented. Other students feel underrepresented and are marginalized because of their sexual identity as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, or questioning (LGBTQ) person. Still other students likely feel underrepresented because of their religious backgrounds as Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or other religious beliefs. While ability issues, sexual orient...