Previous |
Next |
April 13, 2007, 12:48 PM ET
Diversity: It's About Moral, Not Market, Values
Efforts to diversify academe will fall short as long as diversity is “pursued as a question of market values rather than a question of moral values,” writes Lori Pierce, an assistant professor of American studies at DePaul University, in today’s First Person column. According to Pierce, all too often, diversity is …
a goal in the strategic plan that can ostensibly be met once some kind of proportional representation has been achieved. Diversity, or so the argument goes, will give a college a competitive edge in the market. More students will be attracted to a multiethnic college environment, bringing their tuition dollars with them. More faculty of color will likewise be attracted and retained, reducing the costs of that annual search to replace the solitary scholar of color who had had enough.
But colleges shouldn’t merely be out to hire “one of each,” she writes; instead they should promote diversity …
not because it is a successful marketing ploy that draws student dollars, but because it reflects our commitment to overcoming the historical legacies of institutional discrimination and privileges that we all live with and benefit from.
A college that’s devoted to diversity could go many years without hiring a minority faculty member and still work “to address issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, of discrimination and privilege,” Pierce notes.
She also calls on professors to do more than just pay lip service to diversity while bemoaning “the lack of qualified candidates.”
Minority students are going to college at greater rates than ever before. Why, then, hasn’t there been a corresponding rise in the number of nonwhite graduate students ?
To get more minorities into the tenure-track pipeline, all faculty members — not just minority professors — must “take responsibility for the abysmal rate of minority faculty representation” and start encouraging and nurturing the minority students who are in their classrooms now, she concludes.
Categories: Faculty-hiring
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.