Presented to Education Committee of the Board of Regents, UW-Madison, April 10, 1997I have been granted 5 minutes to make a presentation on diversity. I must be brief — 575 words is all I can squeeze in.
My urgent recommendation is that the Board of Regents act quickly to establish an independent-minded group to undertake a thorough reexamination of diversity policy and programs in the University of Wisconsin System. The reasons for urgency should be apparent.
- The Design for Diversity program, now in the 9th year of operation, must be reviewed and reconsidered during its 10th year.
- The UW-Madison is poised to begin an accelerated minority recruitment/retention program, recommended by a coalition of minority groups pushing its own special-interest agenda. It calls for reaching proportional representation of freshman minority students by the year 2000.
- Faculty, administrators, staff, and even students avoid open public discussion of diversity for fear of being called insensitive, racist, disruptive, in of all places, a university setting.
- And, perhaps I should add, the legal implications of the Hopwood case in Texas over race-based admissions practices in its Law School.
But five minutes is not enough time to flesh out this proposal. Five minutes affords no time to analyze the intellectual underpinnings of the University of Wisconsin System’s quarter-century diversity policy, appraise its success, and point up the new problems it has created. Five minutes offers no possibility to present illuminating new data to inform us about the effects of diversity policy and its prospects. Five minutes gives no chance to begin a reflective discussion of diversity and alternatives to it. Five minutes gives no opportunity to sketch the pervasive fear surrounding public discussion of diversity among both its opponents and its proponents. And, five minutes provides no time to explain how diversity policy stigmatizes many minority students through a lower admission standard for minority applicants..
This issue is much too complex to be reduced to a 5-minute summary. There must be time for statements and counter statements, to hear all sides, to analyze what went wrong and why, to explore new possibilities, to fashion a new consensus. And, we clearly need more reason and less passion. Indeed, diversity is truly the most sensitive and polarizing topic I have encountered during my more than 40 years of teaching. Requiring anyone to speak in a 5-minute sound bite only heightens these sensitivities and impedes fruitful discussion of this complex topic.
Can much be learned about diversity from this year’s Design for Diversity report which is before you? The answer, I am afraid, is no. What should we make of the small reported increase in minority freshman enrollment? Do the many programs mentioned in the report succeed in enlarging the pool of applicants? Does the Design for Diversity’s record justify last year’s spending of $18.6 million? By how much has a decade of Design for Diversity expenditures — totaling about $130 million since its inception — boosted enrollment of qualified minority students? And, where is the much discussed accountability for diversity programs? Who have been accountable? In what ways?
More questions. Might Design for Diversity funds be spent more effectively? I would say yes, certainly at UW-Madison. Why not augment the budget of our desperately underfunded library system? Why not hire more faculty to help implement the new general education writing requirements approved with much fanfare several years ago? Why not accelerate efforts to equip classrooms with new instructional technology to enhance student learning?
My five minutes is up. There is no more time. Nevertheless, I do look forward to another day when there will be more time to discuss higher education’s most vexing issue — diversity.