VCU student protest. Image credit: thedemands.org
by James A. Bacon
Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim make a scary prediction: The expansion of diversity programs in response to racial protests in American universities will serve to isolate and alienate African-American students and increase racial tensions, the very opposite of their intended result.
Haidt and Jussim, professors at New York University and Rutgers University respectively, advance their argument in an important Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. Their argument is as germane here in Virginia as anywhere in the United States, where African-Americans students at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University have demanded that the universities enroll more blacks, hire more black professors, implement sensitivity “training” programs, and dedicate more funds to black cultural organizations.
“The existing research literature suggests that such reforms will fail to achieve their stated aims of reducing discrimination and inequality,” write the authors in “Hard Truths about Race on Campus.” “In fact, we think that they are likely to damage race relations and to make campus life more uncomfortable for everyone, particularly black students.”
What follows is essentially a Reader’s Digest summation of the Haidt-Jussim argument. I have done my best to avoid injecting my own perspectives into the narrative until the “bottom line” segment, although I readily concede that I agree whole-heartedly with the conclusions.
It is a trait of humankind to draw distinctions between “us” and “them,” and for people to discriminate in favor of in-group members. That does not mean that drawing distinctions based on race is inevitable, however. When groups face a common threat or challenge, enmity dissolves and a mindset of “one for all and all for one” emerges.
The problem is that the demands of black students on many college campuses would sharpen race-based distinctions.
A common demand is to admit more black students into college. In a world in which the K-12 pipeline of graduating high school students vary widely by race in their academic preparation, meeting that goal would require adopting different admission standards for applicants of different races. Even now, in the absence of such aggressive recruiting, Asian students enter with combined math/verbal SAT scores on the order of 80 points higher than white students and 200 points higher than black students.
If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other school are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.
Not only would such aggressive recruiting of black students perpetuate negative stereotypes, it would perpetuate segregation on campus. Students tend to befriend those who are similar to themselves in academic development. “If a school increases its affirmative action efforts in ways that expand those gaps, it is likely to end up with more self-segregation and fewer cross-race friendships, and therefore with even stronger feelings of alienation among black students.”
As minority students retreat into the ethnic enclaves enabled by increased funding for cultural organizations, the perception will increase that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling that they are victimized by virtue of their ethnicity. “If the goal is to foster a welcoming and inclusive culture on campus, the best current research suggests that the effort will backfire.”
Could such results be offset by diversity “training”? The limited literature on the subject suggests not. Such programs “often induce ironic negative effects (such as reactance or backlash) by implying that participants are at fault for current diversity challenges.”
How about “microaggression” training? That, too, will likely inflame racial tensions.
The term itself encourages moralistic responses to actions that are often unintentional and sometimes even well-meaning. Once something is labeled an act of aggression, it activates an oppressor-victim narrative, which calls out to members of the aggrieved group to rally around the victim. As the threshold for what counts as an offense falls ever lower, cross-racial interactions become more dangerous and conflict increases.
How would your behavior change if anything you said could be misinterpreted, taken out of context and then reported — anonymously and with no verification — to a central authority to punish you? Wouldn’t faculty and students of all races grow more anxious and guarded whenever students from other backgrounds were present?
Haidt and Jussim contrast higher ed with the experience of the U.S. Army, which is widely regarded as one of the most successfully integrated institutions in the country. Rather than compromise its standards, the Army invested more resources in training and mentoring black soldiers so they could meet rigorous promotion standards. “The Army also promoted cooperation and positive-sum thinking by emphasizing pride in the Arm and in America.”
The politics and programs that universities have pursued over the past half-century don’t seem to be working, at least as judged by the recent campus unrest, so reflexively expanding them probably isn’t the answer. The time might be right for a bold college president to propose a different approach, one based on the available evidence about what works and what doesn’t.
Bacon’s bottom line: One encouraging sign is that both UVa and VCU have strong track records of narrowing the gap between black and white graduation rates — a response designed to narrow differences between the races and work against negative stereotypes. Whether that will reduce black alienation is open to question, however, given that UVa and VCU are the two Virginia institutions listed by We the Protesters where black students have issued demands.
In my personal experience in the world outside the ivory tower, more interaction between people of different races is a good thing, whether it takes place in the workplace, neighborhoods or public settings like stores and churches. Only by interacting with one another can people of good will build interracial friendships. And only if hundreds of millions of Americans build such friendships can we ever hope to move to a post-racial society. Universities are places where such friendships could be readily forged. Sadly, as Haidt and Jussim observe, black activists are calling for measures that will further isolate, marginalize and alienate blacks on campus.
