November 13, 2009
The Badger Herald
The prevailing strategy behind UW-Madison’s more than 40-year effort to increase the presence of “targeted minority” students remains as confusing as ever.
Campus officials regularly lament the low graduation rates of targeted minority students. In the same breath, they say “diversity” is about more than numbers. Yet, the chancellor took great pride in announcing to the Faculty Senate that minority freshmen enrollment reached an all-time high of 11 percent this year.
The persistent gap in graduation rates leads campus officials to call for improved retention programs to help targeted minority students make more rapid and successful progress toward their degrees. These calls ignore the obvious fact that UW-Madison admissions policies, in an effort to increase minority enrollment numbers, admit substantial numbers of these students whose prospects of graduating in a timely fashion are statistically known to be small.
If diversity is all about numbers, the solution is obvious. Simply admit all students, whatever their race and ethnicity, based on their academic qualifications and their likelihood of graduating within six years. Making this determination does not require sophisticated research. The data needed to make such decisions are readily available.
But, if diversity is not about numbers, what is it about? That is difficult to say because ofUW-Madison’s “flavor of the day” approach. This year it is something called “inclusive excellence.” The words may create a warm glow and have superficial appeal. But even Chancellor Martin at the recent Diversity Forum seemed perplexed by the term and its meaning. If she is perplexed, what about the rest of us?
This new term can be viewed as the latest rhetorical effort to hide the failure of campus diversity programs to achieve their goals. When programs fail repeatedly, an institution should have the courage to do something more than giving them new names.
We have seen this tactic used time after time. Recall the sequence of labels. It began back in the late 1960s when “equal opportunity” quickly turned into “affirmative action,” then into “diversity,” followed in 1988 by former Chancellor Donna Shalala’s “Madison Plan” and former UW System President Buzz Shaw’s “Design for Diversity.”
Next came “The Madison Commitment” advanced by former Chancellor David Ward and then Associate Vice Chancellor Gary Sandefur, who is now Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Several years later, the UW System Board of Regents concocted its “Plan 2008.” That plan proved to be nothing more than a grab bag of existing initiatives that prompted former Chancellor Wiley to clothe them in the magic words of “diversity and climate.”
Though widely heralded when adopted, Plan 2008 is generally viewed as a failure — it died a quiet, lingering death more than a year ago. To now, under Martin’s new banner of “inclusive excellence,” continuing what the campus has been doing for so many years but expecting the results to change, is a form of insanity.
Why continue down the blind alleys of the past when a simple remedy is at hand? Admit and enroll students, whatever their race or ethnicity, based on the likelihood of their graduating in timely fashion. Why not abide by both federal and state laws that prohibit discrimination based on, among other important characteristics, race and ethnicity? A quick instruction to the Office of Admissions from the chancellor, or better yet from the Board of Regents, would resolve the matter.