W. Lee Hansen

April 6, 2010
The Badger Herald

“Why do you keep stigmatizing our ‘targeted minority’ students? What you write and say makes them feel bad and interferes with their academic achievement.”

That is what campus administrators often tell me after something I write appears in print (e.g., “UW and dead-end diversity, Badger Herald Nov. 13, 2009; “Diversity initiative more words than actions, Badger Herald Feb. 2, 2010). Why do they say this? I suspect it is because of their annoyance with my long-standing criticisms of UW-Madison’s misguided diversity policy. What remains unclear to me is whether “targeted minority” students actually make such comments or whether administrators are describing what they imagine these students are saying.

So, what is stigmatization? It reflects, as sociologist Erving Goffman in his classic 1963 book “Stigma” tells us, the labeling by the majority of a group it regards as lacking some attribute that would make its members similar and equal to the majority group.

Here at UW-Madison, the process of stigmatization begins by designating certain groups of students — African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics and South East Asians — as “targeted minorities.”

Targeted for what, you ask? For special consideration as determined by the enlightened, well-meaning leaders from the majority group. This means giving “targeted minority” students preferences in admission, offering them extra tutoring and academic help, and providing them with their own space where they can associate together, e.g., the Multicultural Student Center, and so on.

Who is doing this stigmatizing? It is campus administrators who apply the “targeted minority” label to them. It is campus administrators who treat “targeted minority” students as if all of them need special academic help to become more like majority students.

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February 3, 2010
The Badger Herald

“Inclusive excellence” has quietly replaced “diversity” and “Plan 2008” as the guiding star in UW-Madison’s four-decade long effort to increase minority representation and success.

Why adopt a new name for its diversity program? The reason is clear. Something had to be done to divert attention from the failed Plan 2008 which the UW System Board of Regents promised back in 1998 would make the UW System a national leader in achieving diversity.

The big question now is this: Can “inclusive excellence” succeed in accomplishing its ambitious goals? Answering this question first requires understanding what “inclusive excellence” means.

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January 28, 2010
Op-Ed Submission

November 20, 2009
The Cap Times

UW-Madison’s long-standing focus on “targeted minorities” is a much-too-provincial view of “diversity” in the global world of the 21st century. This narrow approach ignores the many channels through which students are exposed to the wide range of subject matter, ideas, people, cultures, and attitudes that characterize UW-Madison.

For starters, in 2008-09 UW-Madison undergraduates came from cities large and small, spread across Wisconsin’s 72 counties and all 50 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico, and more than 100 foreign countries.

The most “targeted” of the “targeted minority” groups — African-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics — included 2,088 students. “Targeted” Southeast Asians added another 528 students. To this must be added the 1,149 Asian-American undergraduates who are not counted among “targeted minorities” but bring with them a rich cultural heritage and unmatched academic prowess.

International undergraduate students numbered 1,335 and came from 106 foreign countries. Their presence offers rich opportunities for UW-Madison students to learn about different cultures and peoples. Add to this the 1,234 undergraduate students who last year participated in campus study abroad programs. An uncounted number of additional students went abroad to study or travel on their own. Other undergraduate students have resided abroad, including 127 U.S. citizens who lived in 35 countries when they enrolled at UW-Madison.

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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.

April 28, 2009
Op-Ed Submission

August 28, 2008
Wisconsin State Journal

Your Aug. 28 editorial, “UW diversity effort needs audit,” is most timely. As suggested by your earlier stories under the headline “UW diversity plan at age 10,” little or no information about the impact of Plan 2008 has been forthcoming from either the UW System or UW-Madison.

When the Board of Regents launched its acclaimed Plan 2008 a decade ago, the public was led to believe its wide array of programs and initiatives would ensure the achievement of Plan 2008’s goals. Now that the plan has run its course, involving the expenditure of several hundred million dollars, shouldn’t the public expect that university officials would know which programs worked, which didn’t work well, and which didn’t work at all?

Since they do not, an outside, independent evaluation of UW System diversity programs is much needed.

July 2007
Op-Ed Submission