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.