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Cold Reality Intrudes on Diversity Conference in Disney World
Ohanian Comment: Evelyn Hu-DeHart asked her audience to consider the fact that "Diversity has created jobs for all of us. It is a career. It is an industry." And that's why members of the audience don't make waves. I feel the same way about Reading First: It has become an industry for too many people and professional organizations. So they don't make waves.
Educators must come to grips with the fact that they are a big part of the problem.
By Peter Schmidt
Orlando, Fla.
The brochures for the 21st annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education boasted of its being "the leading and most comprehensive national forum" on the issues it covers. About 2,000 people registered for the event, held this week at the Coronado Springs Resort in Disney World's Animal Kingdom.
In a move befitting this wild locale, one of the nation's leading proponents of diversity in higher education turned on her audience in a biting speech delivered on Thursday. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, suggested that colleges let people attend this annual conference—typically held in family-friendly tourist destinations—to reward them for not making waves by pushing for more equity and black and Hispanic representation on campus.
Calling herself "a hard-nosed critic from the inside," Ms. Hu-DeHart said, "Let's face it: Diversity has created jobs for all of us. It is a career. It is an industry."
"We do what we need to keep our jobs," she said. "But as long as we keep doing our job the way we are told to do it, we are covering up for our universities."
"You all are covering up," she said. "You all are complicit in this."
Driven by Business, not Social Justice
The problem, she argued, is that those who attend the conference—and work in college offices dealing with diversity and minority issues—help their institutions create the impression that they are far more concerned with diversity and equity than is actually the case.
To try to prove her point, she asked her audience to comb through the program for the five-day meeting and note the job descriptions of those who would be speaking, and think about those who seemed absent from this event. The group found plenty of listings for chief diversity officers, administrators and staff members from campus offices in charge of student support, outside diversity consultants, and faculty members in the fields of education, psychology, and ethnic studies. But they found little evidence of the presence of college trustees, presidents, provosts, academic deans, or professors in more traditional academic fields, especially mathematics and science.
Many of those missing, she said, are "the heart of the academic side" of colleges, people who have power over research, curriculum, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty members.
Meanwhile, she said, the reality on campuses is that ethnic-studies programs account for a disproportionate share of black and Hispanic professors, and that a large share of the faculty members that colleges count as minority members are either Asian-Americans or from abroad. The ideal of diversity being pursued by colleges, she said, is far more rooted in a business-driven desire to have different types of people on campuses than the pursuit of social justice for those who have historically been excluded from education in the United States.
Ms. Hu-DeHart was especially hard on chief diversity officers, arguing that their existence within college administrations helps distract attention from the responsibility that presidents and provosts bear for the lack of diversity on campus.
"Walk away from your job as it is and renegotiate," Ms. Hu-DeHart urged.
Her audience seemed receptive to her message, although none said they would be threatening to quit their jobs anytime soon.
— Evelyn Hu-DeHart
Chronicle of Higher Education
2008-05-30
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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