Diversity Dimentia
by Lee Shainen
HAVE YOU EVER participated in a hiring process that was
disbanded for lack of a diverse candidate pool? I have. It
is enormously frustrating for everyone involved. The bad taste
of this experience led me to volunteer to serve on an ad-hoc
committee appointed to review hiring procedures at my college.
However, it turned out that the committee’s primary goal was
to recommend ways to increase faculty diversity. I managed
to keep my cool and stayed with it until completion. It was,
as they say, educational.
After many months, I was pleased to see the committee’s definition
of diversity expand to include race, ethnicity, culture, age,
special challenges, and socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds.
A broad definition of diversity is an essential safeguard
to keep any one group from being targeted for hire over another.
A limited definition based primarily on appearance (besides
being embarrassingly superficial) can actually have the long-term
effect of making college faculties less diverse intellectually.
It’s not hard to imagine, in such a paranoid hiring climate,
the favorite candidates being the ones who look the most different
from but think the most like the current faculty and administrators.
Well-intentioned educators serving on similar committees
around the country are faced with the same dilemma: define
diversity, then figure out how to get there. Unfortunately, the gravitational pull of the issue is towards facial diversity and not point of view or uniqueness of thinking.
One solution our committee suggested, which has been implemented, was to have each department with an open position do a self-assessment to ascertain its strengths and weaknesses in terms of intellectual training and skills, as well as its diversity. The department then would compose a job description that would emphasize what was lacking. This put the responsibility for a genuinely diverse faculty on the shoulders of the faculty.
Twenty years ago, while teaching composition at the University
of Arizona in the afternoons, I was also pitching garbage cans for the City of Tucson in the mornings. Although no one wanted to sit in the front seats, my classes were popular, and at faculty gatherings my stories of the alleys were always in demand. I was an oddity. I had a different perspective than was ordinarily found at the front of a university classroom.
Now that you have heard that story, let me ask you if you
have an image of me yet? Race? Gender? Age? Does it matter?
My unexpected combination of jobs exploded the stereotypes
of the college professor and the guy who picks up the trash.
In other words, our experiences, even more than our DNA, are
what make us unique. That’s why I was dismayed to be a finalist
for a position that was withdrawn because the candidate pool
was deemed not diverse enough.
Besides being narrow and insulting, there is another problem
with using an interior-decorator-cum-statistician approach
to fill teaching vacancies. University and college administrators
are faced with a very non-diverse applicant pool. For example,
in 1997 there were 4,009 accredited institutions of higher
education in the US. As in most years, there were thousands
of openings announced, but if an institution were looking
to fill, say, a math vacancy with a minority candidate, in
1996 there were nine doctorates in mathematics conferred to
Black Americans, nine to Hispanic Americans, and one to a
Native American. Slim pickings, wouldn’t you say?
In 1996, according to the US Department of Education, 44,645
doctorates were conferred, with almost 88 percent going to
whites and nonresident aliens. Guess what the minority make-up
of instructional faculty in higher education was in 1995-96?
Thirteen percent. Slightly more than the number of degrees
conferred.
I expected to find greater discrepancies in the numbers.
What I learned instead was this: since 1984, the number of
women in graduate school has exceeded the number of men, the
number of white males earning degrees at all levels of education
has decreased, and faculty under 50 are considerably more
diverse than those over 50. What does this all mean? We need
to be patient with the changes that are already underway and
not impose artificial quotas under the masquerade of socially
enlightened policy.
What to do? Perhaps it would be worthwhile for administrators
to remember something Henry Brooks Adams said about teaching
a hundred years ago: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never
tell where his influence stops.” I often think of these words
when choosing curriculum, when thinking about how to present
material, or how to respond to students’ questions in class
or about problems they are facing out of the classroom. They
are humbling words. Words that whisper to take care, be true,
seek to inspire and ignite a love for knowledge. You see,
it always comes down to one teacher in one classroom. And what we owe to those students is simple: always, always put the absolute best teacher in that classroom. That’s it. Then, sleep well, trust, and be patient with what was wrought.
