{"id":149,"date":"2009-11-13T12:15:19","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T17:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ssc.wisc.edu\/~whansen\/?p=149"},"modified":"2011-12-16T12:16:31","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T17:16:31","slug":"uw-and-dead-end-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/?p=149","title":{"rendered":"UW and dead-end diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

November 13, 2009
\nThe Badger Herald <\/a><\/p>\n

The prevailing strategy behind\u00a0UW-Madison\u2019s more than 40-year effort to increase the presence of \u201ctargeted minority\u201d students remains as confusing as ever.<\/p>\n

Campus officials regularly lament the low graduation rates of targeted minority students. In the same breath, they say \u201cdiversity\u201d is about more than numbers. Yet, the chancellor took great pride in announcing to the Faculty\u00a0Senate that minority freshmen enrollment reached an all-time high of 11 percent this year.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0UW-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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But, if diversity is not about numbers, what is it about? That is difficult to say because ofUW-Madison\u2019s \u201cflavor of the day\u201d approach. This year it is something called \u201cinclusive excellence.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We have seen this tactic used time after time. Recall the sequence of labels. It began back in the late 1960s when \u201cequal opportunity\u201d quickly turned into \u201caffirmative action,\u201d then into \u201cdiversity,\u201d followed in 1988 by former Chancellor Donna Shalala\u2019s \u201cMadison Plan\u201d and former\u00a0UW System President Buzz Shaw\u2019s \u201cDesign for Diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next came \u201cThe\u00a0Madison Commitment\u201d 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\u00a0UW System\u00a0Board of Regents concocted its \u201cPlan 2008.\u201d 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 \u201cdiversity and climate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though widely heralded when adopted,\u00a0Plan 2008 is generally viewed as a failure \u2014 it died a quiet, lingering death more than a year ago. To now, under Martin\u2019s new banner of \u201cinclusive excellence,\u201d continuing what the campus has been doing for so many years but expecting the results to change, is a form of insanity.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Board of Regents, would resolve the matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

November 13, 2009 The Badger Herald The prevailing strategy behind\u00a0UW-Madison\u2019s more than 40-year effort to increase the presence of \u201ctargeted minority\u201d students remains as confusing as ever. Campus officials regularly lament the low graduation rates of targeted minority students. In … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/users.ssc.wisc.edu\/~wlhansen\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}