harmonicminer

The previous post in this series is here.

At the Carnegie Foundation, we find an article regarding the issue of diversity at Christian universities and colleges:

…

Rallies sponsored by Promise Keepers, the parachurch movement that appeals to men to renounce their sins, are more racially integrated than faculty meetings at Stanford or MIT, and multiculturalism is as likely to be celebrated at a typical evangelical megachurch as it is at Wesleyan or UC–Santa Cruz. The reason is simple: contemporary American evangelicalism is extraordinarily diverse. African Americans are strongly attracted to Pentecostal and evangelical forms of worship; increasing numbers of Hispanics have left their Catholicism behind to be born again; and Asian immigrants, primarily from Korea and China, have fueled evangelical growth from California to Massachusetts.

Yet despite all this ferment, America’s evangelical colleges are not diverse institutions by any stretch of the imagination. Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, which trains more evangelical clergy than any other institution in the United States, is stunningly multicultural, but its success in this area has not been matched by undergraduate institutions. Only about 2 percent of Wheaton students are African American, for example, compared to 8 percent at Earlham and 7 percent at Oberlin, similar but non-evangelical Midwestern institutions. Among universities, Baylor has a relatively robust African-American percentage (6 percent), but it is still lower than at nearby public universities such as the University of Houston (15 percent) or the University of Tulsa (8 percent).

One reason why evangelical colleges lag behind secular ones in their ability to attract a racially diverse student body may be because of their relative lack of religious diversity.

Here the article spends several paragraphs singing the praises of “religious diversity” and praising the choice, where it has occurred, to sacrifice “communal understandings” for the sake of “diversity,” at institutions like Baylor, Boston College, and Brandeis.   And then:

…Does the lack of religious diversity at evangelical colleges contribute to the lack of racial diversity? In theory, it should not. Faith statements say nothing about race and in that sense should attract anyone who subscribes to the faith in question, irrespective of skin color. But in practice, faith statements reinforce a history of appealing to particular communities, particular high schools, and particular churches, which is not the way to bring to campus those who might offer fresh perspectives shaped by backgrounds and upbringings different from those of the Christian students typically attracted to these schools. Diversity, unlike tap water, cannot easily be turned on or have its temperature adjusted.

Boy, ain’t THAT the truth.  As I’ve pointed out in other posts, diversity seems always to come with a giant slice of Left-progressive cake, whether or not it’s iced with God talk and scripture quotations.

But this is what evangelical colleges and universities are trying to do. They want students from many racial backgrounds to attend so they learn to speak in the language of diversity, but they also want to preserve their particular religious identity so they also speak in the language of uniformity. Because evangelical Christianity is itself so multiracial, colleges that speak in its name ought to be more diverse than secular ones. But because they lack sufficient appreciation for diversity in all its aspects—religious and intellectual, as well as racial and ethnic—they fall behind secular institutions in their ability to bring together students from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The writer of this article is nibbling at some truth, but seems reluctant to bite into the gooey center. Yes, it’s true that once a Christian university begins to “diversify” in a certain way, it often brings with it some issues that challenge the mission of the university as it may have been previously understood.  The problem is simple:  Christian universities who want to be diverse have too often selected representatives for diversity who are from the Left.  After awhile, somebody notices this, identifies it as a problem, and is then at risk of being labeled “anti-diversity” or even “racist” when instead they are merely anti-Left and pro-traditional-Christian understandings about faith and values.  The faster a Christian university tries to “diversify,” the more likely it is to have these problems.

There’s really only one solution for Christian universities that want to “diversify” and still maintain their traditional Christian focus.  The solution is to go slow.  Don’t be stampeded by strident activism on the part of anyone, faculty, students, trustees, administration, or whoever.  Carefully consider each step, each new hire (not just minorities, but everyone), each new policy, each new position, from the standpoint that asks, “How will this affect our traditional understandings of ourselves, our Christian mission, and our institutional heritage?”  Be aware of the danger in bringing to campus as your “diversity representatives, speakers and role models” people whose orientations are not consistent with those of your institution.  That doesn’t mean you should never bring them.  It does mean there is danger in a steady diet of them, and they should be balanced, at a minimum, by speakers who support your institution’s traditional perspectives on major issues, but who also see value in gradual “diversification.”

Either there are plenty of “minority” people who basically agree with an institution’s heritage and traditional perspectives on Christianity, faith and values, or there aren’t such people.  If there are, the institution will be well advised to find them, instead of simply bringing as many “people of color” to campus as possible, from whatever perspective, and hoping that everything turns out well.  On the other hand, if there aren’t many “people of color” that can be identified who will support an institution’s traditions, a choice is required:  either diversify, or maintain the traditional identity.

What a Christian university or college must not do is to pretend that there is no issue here, and that diversity is an intrinsic good that transcends all other considerations.  In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss the issue of “white diversity activists” who frequently seem to be a greater danger to the traditional ethos of Christian institutions than the minority ones.  These white activists, in a spasm of white guilt, seem to believe that their commitment to diversity will only appear genuine if they full-throatedly embrace the agenda of the Left.  But whether from whites or minorities, it is the connection of diversity to the Left that is the problem.  “People of color” who see this problem are at risk of being labeled “Uncle Toms.”

Unstated by the author of the article quoted above is this:  all the institutions that have embraced diversity at the cost of theological community have moved farther Left in the last couple of decades, or were reasonably Left to start with.   It is an open question whether they will identify with any religious roots they may have had, over the next couple of decades.  Even now, a quick visit to their web portals does not reveal any immediate evidence of religious heritage or religious intent, unless a person really digs around a bit to find it.

Christian universities have a choice to make, in the end.  They can please the world, look good in US News and World Report (and on Carnegie websites), make their accrediting agencies smile and dance, and try to look respectable to secular, “progressively” oriented universities (which is to say, most of them), or they can understand that by their mere presence and identity, they ARE the diversity in higher education already, and do not need to make themselves “look like” other institutions for the sake of a soundbite, a photo op, or a bit of statistical data.

The next post in this series is here.

Probing The Black-White Achievement Gap

The Kellogg Foundation is funding a survey of four college campuses by Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and the Educational Testing Service to examine how students of color’s experiences on college campuses impact the notorious black-white achievement gap.

Namely, it will examine how the students feel “welcome and unwelcome, respected and disrespected, supported and unsupported, and encouraged and discouraged.”

However, will the researchers be interested in evidence that the black-white achievement gap is connected to aspects of parenting and peer identification that begin long before college? That is, will there be room in their assessment for, as it is put these days, culture over structure?

In his detailed survey of Shaker Heights, Ohio, Black Students in an Affluent Suburb, the late Berkeley Anthropology Professor John Ogbu found that black parents often aren’t aware of how closely they need to attend to their children’s homework and are less likely to confer with their children’s teachers, and that black teens have a tendency to disidentify from school as “white.” Subsequent studies have shown that black students are likely to spend less time on homework than white or Asian students and are less likely to be popular if they achieve in school.

There is, to wit, a culture issue – and not just parenthetically. To mention these things is not “black bashing.” All of them are latter-day results of discrimination in the past, of the kind that Richard Thompson Ford of late described in his The Race Card. They are traits internalized unconsciously – if your parents didn’t help you with your homework because they had modest education and were working two jobs, why would you spontaneously attend to your own child’s, even if you went to college and work just one job?

However, dramatic conversations about “white privilege” and “legacies” leave these problems unresolved. Our attention must be focused on efforts such as that of the Minority Student Action Network mentoring middle-class black students long before college. Or on replicating as widely as possible the methods of the Knowledge is Power Program academies and other programs that distract black kids from thinking of braininess as racially inauthentic.

Or looking at how in the charter school run by the Harlem Children’s Zone, zeroing in on poverty block by block, study by heavyweights such as Harvard’s star Wunderkind economist Roland Fryer is showing that longer hours spent in school each day are leading to sterling achievement by students growing up in circumstances that we are told condemn all but superstars to failure. Even among eighth graders, considered the toughest nuts to crack intervention-wise.

I learned the latter attending a bookstore talk recently by Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson on his new book More Than Just Race. The talk, however, was Exhibit A of the kind of unconscious bias that could mar the Kellogg study – a bias that runs throughout academic address of race issues. Wilson’s book argues that culture is key in addressing inner city blacks’ concerns. But throughout the talk, Wilson stressed that structural factors – i.e. “institutional racism” – matter more. He couches the cultural point in gingerly hedging and hair-splitting, e.g. “Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences [with discrimination and disrespect] may transmit to children, through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances.”

Will the Kellogg study be mediated by a like take on the cultural argument, i.e. that it is immoral to address culture when black people are concerned (except parenthetically)? Will the researchers be able to face finding that the black-white achievement gap is not related in any significant way to what happens on campus?

Of course, there will be students attesting that they “experience racism” on campus. However, with protests every couple of years on how “racist” the campus is despite the diversity counseling and black dorms, departments and event budgets, group identification lends the typical student of color a sense of duty to stand up for the idea that racism is part of their experience, even if highly “subtle” (useful: a Stanford survey covered in David Sacks and Peter Thiel’s The Diversity Myth).

To pretend this isn’t true is to exempt people of color from yet another universal human trait, the tendency known to social psychologists as humans’ susceptibility to priming in surveys. Another term is people’s susceptibility to demand characteristics, referring to subjects’ anticipating what the surveyor is seeking and trying to give the “proper” answer. Asking a black undergrad “Have you experienced racism on campus?” in today’s typical campus atmosphere is like asking a white one whether he thinks black people are of lesser intelligence. A certain answer is to be expected.

The real issue: is the amount of racism such students have experienced – and most will attest to something or other – realistically of a kind that would interfere with their schoolwork? This question applies equally to Claude Steele’s famous “stereotype threat” thesis that black students are thrown by private worry that they are not thought of as intelligent. That is, do the students describe experiences that would reinforce this worry specifically?

After all, the notion that any shards of socially unpleasant experience unquestionably hold down black students’ GPAs is an infantilization – given that we assume that Asian students experience unpleasant experierences (and amply attest to such) and yet it does not impact their campus performance. Why are black students supposedly less resilient than Korean ones? And where is the benefit to society in pretending that they aren’t?

Of course, the Kellogg project might actually reveal racism as a serious culprit on campus. I am open to that result if it’s what the data truly reveal. However, the researchers, if their intentions are sincerely to help, face a challenge to be similarly open-minded.

After all, a conclusion that subtle aspects of racism are the deciding factor in our problems is inherently a dead end. It is the last result we should want to find, because no society in human history has ever been perfectly blind to differences of color or tribe. We can’t make America that perfect.

That’s why the Kellogg report will be such a disappointment if it ends up limning the classic portrait of brown-skinned college students going through variations – although “subtle,” of course – on what James Meredith endured in 1962 at Ole Miss. One wonders whether the researchers, however, would be at all disappointed to find this result. If they would instead feel accomplished, vindicated, enlightened to find it, then won’t it color the questions they ask and how they interpret the answers?

Culture matters, and not just parenthetically. Pretend otherwise and certain people feel good, while the ones we purport to be concerned about tread water.