Privilege and Diversity in the Academy

Frances A. Maher, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135939908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Over the past several decades, higher education has been transformed by the entry of faculty of color and women into the university system. Through detailed institutional ethnographies of three very different universities, Privilege and Diversity in the Academy explores how this diversification has dismantled and reconfigured relationships of privilege and diversity in higher education. Authors Maher and Tetreault use examples from a top-ranked private university, a comprehensive urban university, and a major public university to illustrate how privilege is enacted, resisted, and transformed as changes occur in the student bodies and faculties of these schools. In their analyses, they identify the institutional structures that facilitate the success of a diverse faculty and make valuable observations about patterns of institutional change and resistance.

1

Frameworks of Analysis:

Histories and Theories of Privilege

I am a first-generation college person myself. My parents didn’t go to college. So on one level I share feelings with some people from underrepresented backgrounds who, the research shows, both feel the need to work incredibly hard to be successful but also wonder if their colleagues question their legitimacy. I have been successful as an academic but certainly have my days when I wonder when people will “find out” that I really don’t belong here. I certainly don’t mean to say that I have had the same experience as women and persons of color. The position and experience of a White male is very different. But the question of “belonging” has always been there for me.

Terrence McDonald—Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and Arts, University of Michigan¹

It is something that is not supposed to matter because the university is a place of upward mobility. There is the fairness justification. To be fair, people with different racial and ethnic identifications should have a chance to be professors. People also understand the importance of role models—it is good for Latinas to see a Latina in the front of the classroom. But this other justification or rationale for diversity, the one that says that one’s social and cultural contexts matter for one’s perspectives on the world, is much less well understood, and still much more difficult to communicate. One’s race, ethnicity, cultural background, religion, and gender can all be sources of different understandings and different questions about what is good, what is bad, what is real, what is right, what is beautiful, and what is just. These different perspectives are a source of knowledge and truth. This is a really hard idea and one that takes a great deal of expertise and experience to acknowledge. It is so much easier to imagine that our various frameworks are neutral or free from the commitments that accompany our social positions.

Hazel Markus—Codirector, Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University²

This book is about an unfinished journey. Beginning some 35 years ago, at universities across the country, students and faculty from underrepresented groups demanded entrance and full acceptance into the academy—as undergraduates and graduate students, as faculty, as scholars, and as institutional leaders. As the previous quotes suggest, the new consciousness that they brought to the whole enterprise of higher education challenged the prevailing notions of equity as a simple notion of fairness—“everybody should have a chance to be a professor”—and uncovered persistent patterns of a White, male, heterosexual, and middle-class domination of higher education. The newcomers’ presence, in turn, would fuel long-term transformations in ideas about legitimate knowledge and where it comes from. What counts as knowledge—“what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is true, what is beautiful, what is just”—can all be different because of how you have been positioned.

Both McDonald and Markus speak of these transformations in terms of positionality, namely, the idea that it is individuals’ social locations, their “set of contexts and perspectives,” that enables their particular view of the world.³ In our first book, The Feminist Classroom, we used this concept of positionality to analyze the shifts in classroom and curricular knowledge occasioned by the entrance of White women and people of color into the professoriat.⁴ Puzzled, however, by the ongoing sense of marginality held by many of the newcomers, we decided in this book to turn to issues of institutional positionality. How are people’s positionalities determined and changed by the institutional contexts they inhabit? When and how do newcomers’ own agendas become levers for institutional transformation?

Much of the dominant literature on higher education today focuses on topics such as the growing role of corporate values over academic values, the supposed shift in higher education from a social institution to an industry, and the decline and irrelevance of the liberal arts in the face of scientific and technological dominance.⁵ Frustrated by the abstractions and omissions of this negative national literature, especially how fleetingly it touches on demographic changes in the faculty, we decided to examine these changes and their implications for institutional structures and scholarship in several sites, touching only secondarily on changes in student bodies. Stanford University, Rutgers University—Newark (RU—N), and the University of Michigan, although vastly different from each other, have all experienced intense engagement with these issues: Stanford as the elite university most caught up in the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, RU—N as the U.S. News and World Report’s most diverse campus in the United States, and Michigan as the site of the recent successful defense of the principle of affirmative action in admissions in the two 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases of Grutter vs. Bollinger and Gratz vs. Bollinger.

Through the lenses provided by the stories of these universities, we trace the evolution of more diverse faculties, from the period of the 1960s student sit-ins on campuses across the country to today’s more diverse campus environments. In the mid-1960s, according to one respondent, African American faculty could not fill a card table at Stanford, whereas today there are 45 African American faculty members. Female faculty in two of the institutions, RU—N and Michigan, filed class-action complaints in the 1970s against their institutions for sex discrimination; today, female administrators at Michigan and Stanford help grapple with how to integrate women’s gender roles with their professional roles. And yet these individual and institutional stories are ones not only of progress but of the contradictions that remain.

To provide a frame for this book, we first present in this chapter our working definitions of privilege and diversity and our methodological approach. These are followed by an exploration of the larger historical and societal contexts that have shaped the responses of these universities to the challenges of diversity over the past several decades. These include the reconfiguring of hierarchies in the higher education system beginning with the Cold War, the GI Bill, and the creation of the 1950s suburbs. How did Stanford come to be associated with “Big Science,” technology, and the Silicon Valley miracle of the 1990s? What do we need to understand about the growth and increasing segregation and separation of American cities and suburbs to understand Newark, New Jersey, and to situate RU—N today in this story? What has it meant for Michigan to be a top research university with public university commitments? How has the national bifurcation of universities into comprehensive and research universities following World War II shaped the experiences of people inside them? How does the current craze for institutional rankings differentially affect institutional and departmental cultures?

Comparing critical events and ongoing developments across three settings, we document how the institutions’ histories and dominant academic cultures have shaped their projects of changing the representations of women and people of color on their faculties, building women’s studies and ethnic studies programs, altering departmental and interdepartmental structures and policies, and transforming traditional standards of success and scholarly paradigms. We also look at the forces that have persistently operated to contain and marginalize these efforts over time.

Some Definitions

We have chosen the terms privilege and diversity as a framework for our work. For much of the past 30 years, discussions of these issues have taken the form of a rhetorical opposition between the supposed two poles of diversity and excellence, where excellence is a code word for commonly agreed-on high standards of academic performance—in other words, rigorous scholarship with universal applicability—and a deservedly high stature for those who meet these standards. Diversity has then meant a spreading out of, a dilution of, and a threat to those standards.

However, to us the use of the term excellence is employed not so much as a mark of quality as a mark of privilege—that is, the power of elites to control the norms of the scholarly enterprise in such a way as to keep new people, new topics, and new methodologies at bay. The operations of privilege, embedded in the structures, processes, and standards of the academy, are the barriers against and through which the newcomers must negotiate their way. Privi-lege—from the Latin privus (private) and lex, legis (law)—in its root meaning pertains to a law, in this case often silent and unseen, that works for or against individuals and groups.⁶ In the case of the American academy, privilege has accrued mostly to a male elite that dominates hiring practices, scholarly norms, departmental and governance structures, and many other dimensions of university life.⁷

We have found it harder to write about privilege than diversity because, at an individual level, privilege is often unspoken, an unmarked category. It means rarely having to be conscious of your gender, race, class, or sexuality. A pervading emphasis in our culture on individual experience and achievements rather than the collective dimensions of group experiences represents a profound lack of consciousness about the social, cultural, and economic determinants of the position of the privileged and their relationship to others. We want to better understand these often invisible historical and structural contexts that operate to situate various groups of faculty differently within institutional power structures. We hope to contribute to a fresh understanding of how these “silent laws” have worked to define who gets to attend, who gets to teach, who gets to administrate, and what will be researched and studied in higher education today. Examining them reveals the persisting powers of the dominant voices to continue to “call the tune” and to marginalize women, men of color, first-generation college students, and gays and lesbians, among many others.

For both men of color and women, the operations of privilege have meant attempting to assimilate to these norms as a way of avoiding this marginaliza-tion. bell hooks held that “assimilation, touted as an answer to racial divisions, is dehumanizing; it requires eradication of one’s blackness so that a white self can come into being.”⁸ Jane Roland Martin argued, “The academy charges an exorbitant admission fee to those women that wish to belong.” She likened their position to that of immigrants in the 19th century, saying that “rather than thinking that the academy’s mores might be enriched by women’s presence, it is generally taken for granted that our belonging in the academy entails our conformity to the existing values of the host society.”⁹ In an article based on his recent book, Japanese American and law professor Kenji Yoshino argued that he and other gay academics have felt obliged to “keep our orientation from looming large. That was a desire to ‘cover,’ Erving Goffman’s word for how individuals with known stigmatized traits mute them to make themselves more socially acceptable.” He went on to assert that “covering” represents a new form of assimilation that gays can help other groups understand:

All outsider groups feel the bite of the covering demand. African Americans are told to “dress White” and abandon “street talk”; Asian Americans are told to avoid seeming “fresh off the boat”; women are told to “play like men” at work and make their child-care responsibilities invisible; gay people are told to be “straight acting” and not to “flaunt.” … It used to be that individuals were excluded from the workplace … solely on the basis of race, sex, orientation, religion, or disability. Now individuals need not be straight White male able-bodied Protestants. They need only act like straight White male able-bodied Protestants. That, of course, is progress. But it is not equality.¹⁰

This book also employs the term diversity to analyze the challenges to institutional privilege brought about by the entrance of new groups into the academy. By diversity we mean people and ideas that are different from the assumed norm of White, heterosexual, middle-class, and college-educated men. Throughout our analysis, we assume that identities, whether of privilege or oppression, are not fixed or inherent but rather defined by their locations and definitions within shifting networks of relationships and institutional structures, arrangements that can be analyzed and changed. For example, we have seen how, in some institutional discourses of higher education, the term diversity has moved from being seen as the polar opposite of excellence to becoming one of its defining features. It is now said that you cannot have excellence without diversity. This shift may be seen as a subtle marker for how much progress has been made.

Methodological Frameworks

In this work we have created comparative, institution-wide analyses through these twin lenses of privilege and diversity, lenses through which we explore defining issues and critical events, institutional practices and structures, and the various influences of individuals as actors within each context. Our methodological approach may be defined as institutional ethnography, as described in the work of Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith.¹¹ Its purpose is “to explicate the actual social relations in which people’s lives are embedded and to make . the ruling relations themselves, including the social organization of knowledge,” that shape everyday university life visible for investigation.¹²

Like all ethnographies, institutional ethnography provides a “thick description” of people’s behaviors in particular settings, derived from comparisons among individual narratives, relevant documents, and other analyses of important events. Ethnography is driven by the search to discover “how it happens” in terms of the identification of an issue, critical event, or area of everyday practice. In our case these events concern the discourses around gender, race, ethnicity, and, to a certain extent, sexuality and class on these three campuses. We investigate how the university organizes and shapes the everyday world of faculty members’ and administrators’ experience of diversity issues. Beginning with people’s own stories, we compare institutional accounts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Frameworks of Analysis: Histories and Theories of Privilege
• 2 Portraits of Three Institutions
• 3 Diversifying the Faculty
• 4 Linking Diversity to Excellence and Deconstructing Privilege
• 5 Structural Privilege, Interdisciplinarity, and Calls for Change
• 6 The New Scholarship of Diversity and Its Relation to Institutional Structures
• 7 Privilege and Diversity: Relating Local and National Discourses
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index