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It's About Moral, Not Market, Values

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By Lori Pierce

I was nearly 30 years old before I first heard a lecture by an African-American woman with a Ph.D. I had a B.A. from a small, liberal-arts college and a master's from an Ivy League divinity school, but up to that point, I had never been in a classroom where the professor was an African-American woman.

And I had never given that much thought until that one day when I was invited to a hear a visiting lecturer give a talk. I will never forget the odd unsettled feeling I experienced as I sat through her lecture, shifting in my seat, wondering to myself, "What's wrong here?"

At first, I thought I was merely having a physical reaction to my surroundings -- too crowded or too cold. But weeks later, as I recalled the episode, it finally dawned on me: I had never faced myself in the lecture hall before.

It was almost a decade later, at the very end of my graduate-school career, before I found a mentor. Up to that point, I had stumbled through the way many of us do -- aimlessly pursuing my interests whether or not my teachers liked my work, or me. I was well into the dissertation-writing phase when a senior faculty member took an interest in me (or took pity) and began to actively edit my words, challenge my unsupportable arguments, and confidently reassure me that I would get my doctoral degree.

And it wasn't until a faculty member actually said to me, "You're good, you can do this," that I understood what I had been missing.

My presence in the academic world is an accident. I pursued my interests as an end in themselves and, gradually, stumbled into a career. I only began to reflect on my relatively solitary path through the academic world when I began to work as a full-time faculty member.

A liberal-arts college hired me to provide a temporary dose of diversity. It was not a tenure-track position and my colleagues made no real effort to keep me on. (Perhaps I was just a bad fit.) But for two years I wondered just what they were expecting.

As the only African-American female faculty member on the campus, clearly I represented what the college meant by "diversity." But when I asked questions designed to prompt thinking about the relationship between the college's history and mission and the relatively homogeneous state of its faculty and student population, I was met with blank stares.

The day the hometown newspaper ran an interview with me, it also ran an item inviting everyone out to a local high school's slave auction. When I pointed out the painful irony to colleagues, they were sympathetic but not moved to action. Diversity, it seems, didn't mean being committed to a critical analysis of historical systems of oppression and how institutions continue to perpetuate discrimination and privilege. Diversity meant hiring "one of each."

Achieving institutional diversity is often pursued as a question of market values rather than a question of moral values. We appoint compliance officers and give search committees marching orders to go out and find the candidates who fit the bill.

Who hasn't served on a search committee and combed through CV's, applications, and letters of recommendation to find some glimmer of diversity: "She belonged to Delta Sigma Theta!" "He's a Morehouse graduate!" "I wonder if that's a Chinese Lee or a Southern Lee?"

Diversity becomes 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.

That approach is doomed to failure, and the evidence is all around us.

When it comes to gender, faculty ranks are more balanced than ever before (approximately 40 percent of full-time faculty members are women), but 80 percent of full-time teaching faculty members are white. Asian Americans (6 percent), Native Americans (under 1 percent), African Americans (5 percent), and Hispanics (3 percent) remain woefully underrepresented across the board.

That state of affairs promises to continue. A few minority scholars will drift into academe, more by osmosis than anything else. And people will debate the diversity problem ad nauseam, talking about best practices and targeted marketing.

But diversity isn't a problem to be solved. Our task isn't to comb the earth looking for just the right combination of qualities and characteristics that, once found, will make our faculties sufficiently multicultural.

Instead, our task is to approach the matter of diversity as a question of moral values -- our own, our profession's, and our institutions'.

If we value difference, we should do so not as an antidote to tedious homogeneity, but as the stuff of critical thinking. We should value difference, 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. If diversity is our value, then our practices will emerge in ways that are natural and integral to our institutions.

Valuing diversity in a small rural college might mean that many years go by without a minority faculty hire but the campus still works to address issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, of discrimination and privilege, as they become apparent in that campus community.

A campus committed to diversity might not have achieved proportional representation among its faculty or students, but its professors are still working within their professional organizations to encourage minority graduate students whether those students choose to work for them or not.

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? Are professors looking out into their lecture halls and seeing potential colleagues among the first-generation college students? Are we, as faculty members, ignoring the soaring cost of higher education that keeps poor and working-class students from attending or completing college?

I was one of a handful of African-American students at the liberal-arts college I attended as an undergraduate. I came from a family that could boast college graduates dating to the Jim Crow era. I was active in campus life, won awards, applied for competitive fellowships, wrote a senior thesis in an independent study program. I worked closely with several professors.

But not one of them ever said to me, "You should go into the business. We could use someone like you." None of them ever looked into the future and saw me as a colleague.

Those of us in the faculty ranks today have to take responsibility for the abysmal rate of minority faculty representation by taking responsibility for the students who are under our care now. That burden should not fall particularly on the shoulders of minority professors. It is a responsibility we all share by virtue of our privileged positions.

We have a chance to reach out to students who may not, on the surface, seem as if they are our future colleagues. If we hope to solve "the pipeline problem" and achieve the diversity to which we pay such devoted lip service, then we need to spend time reflecting on the distance between what we believe and what we actually do.

Those privileged students -- who were guided through college and graduate school, who saw their faces reflected in that of their professors so regularly that it was unworthy of comment -- have to do more than merely decry the lack of qualified candidates.

Audre Lorde once said that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. We cannot expect to solve the problem of faculty diversity by following the same scripts and pursuing the same policies that we always have.