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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Diversity Harms Human Relations
When Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, released the findings of a study of people’s behavior in diverse neighborhoods last year, they received lots of immediate press and commentary (such as here and here and here). The paper itself is here, and its central conclusion is that “in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”
The problem doesn’t result in violence or overt racism. Instead, people withdraw from community life (“hunker down”), feel pessimistic about public action, and vote and volunteer less often. The paper holds out the hope of overcoming isolation and mistrust, as “successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities” (Putnam cites the U.S. military as an example). But the negative consequences dominate, and Putnam is honest about how startled he was by the results.
Putnam reiterates the findings in a long and interesting interview in the Jan-Feb issue of The American Interest.
“Many things affect civic participation — how much education you’ve had, how long you’ve lived here, and so on,” he admits. “So it’s clear that factors other than diversity account for some of the data. It’s just that everybody, well-educated and not well-educated, old-timers and newcomers alike, is affected negatively by increasing diversity. Holding constant socioeconomic resources, mobility, and many other things, as well, everybody is less likely to be engaged when they’re living in a more diverse town or city. That’s the research conclusion I found most startling: It’s not just that in the context of diversity people are less trusting of people who look different. It’s that in the context of diversity people are less trusting even of folks who look just like them.”
This is a serious conclusion that follows from a solid methodology, and many scholars have cited and analyzed the work in journals and conferences. And the publicity surrounding the study was widespread. But I haven’t heard any statements about diversity by leaders and policy makers and administrators that take Putnam’s study into account. Are there any college presidents or Offices of Diversity and similar persons and units in higher education that have introduced a note of skepticism into their pro-diversity platforms and utterances?
Posted at 10:22:12 AM on March 21, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
I was suspicious when the interviewer called Rochester, NY, a small town and Putnam didn’t correct him, but I got over it—thanks for the link to the interview. But how could you have missed this Putnam comment from it?
There were a lot of people on the Right who warned that I would encounter political correctness criticism from the Left, and I thought I might, too. But I’ve gotten almost no criticism from the Left. I have gotten criticism from the Right over this diversity project, oddly enough. My argument about diversity and immigration is double-edged: Learning to live with diversity is difficult, but not impossible. I thought that the Left would attack me for saying “difficult”, but they mostly haven’t. Instead, I’ve taken a lot of flack from the Right for saying “not impossible.” This is nothing new: There’s been a lot of academic criticism of my work. That’s totally normal, of course; that’s what academics do. But I have rarely taken flack that I consider unfair, including on this most recent work on diversity.
Never let a fact get in the way of your preconceptions, man! Keep up the good work.
— The Constructivist · Mar 21, 11:50 AM · #
Mark, are you trying to derive an “ought” from an “is” here? I mean, it’s not very surprising news to find out that communities turn isolationist when people who seem different move in. (This is exactly the line of the white community board in Raisin in the Sun: We’re not racist, we don’t hate black people, but people are better off around others who live the same way of life.)
To hint that colleges should avoid diversity because it might some cognitive strain on students to learn and adapt and tolerate different ways of life is sort of scary. Especially considering that Putnam’s research is all about how one group perceives another. Black Americans don’t really live all that differently than white Americans, even if white Americans freak out when blacks move next door. The true ideological differences between races is far less than the difference between, say, Protestant and Catholic belief practices.
Let’s also remember that desegregation was not about the beauty of diversity. It was about — again, as Raisin the Sun reminds us — money: neighborhoods for blacks were exploited by white owners. More affordable and maintained housing was available in white neighborhoods.
Diversity is a stupid reason for college admissions. But it has been effective at challenging the lingering effects of racism at such institutions and at the institutions that feed into colleges.
— Luther Blissett · Mar 22, 09:41 AM · #
Luther, I agree with your insights regarding the true ideological differences among ethnic groups. I am just completing my eighth year as Vice President for Academics at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. We have 2,400 students from approximately 75 countries. The international students represent about 50% of our student body. Our domestic students are equally divided among white, Asian, and Pacific Islander. These students live and study together in relative harmony because they share the same religion. Religion, then, becomes the common thread that ties these students together. Our Alums always list “learning to appreciate other cultures” as the number one benefit of studying on our campus. This is especially important because most of these students come from countries and ethnic groups that have had conflect with other countries and ethnic groups represented on campus. (Korea and Japan, Tonga and Samoa, PRC and ROC, etc.). We expect our graduates to be international citizens who are open to and wlling to understand others. As I have viewed these interactions and visited with graduates I have concluded that sharing religious beliefs makes it easier to bond with an individual student from a different ethnic group. Once you have bonded with that particular individual, you are predisposed to reach out to others from that “new” culture, regardless of their religious affiliation.
— Keith Roberts · Mar 24, 05:21 AM · #
I am sure there has not been much reaction from the so-called “Left” because it is fairly obvious that in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow, segregationist and “melting pot” culture, diversity or even civil participation and trust would be difficult. Why would it be otherwise? That does not mean “diversity” should not be attempted or that it is not necessary in housing, education or employment. I am more concerned about the public policy implications of such a study. Shall we return to de facto or de jure segregation? Is apartheid preferable? Such an absurd study has potentially absurd results and thus deserves the response that it seems to be receiving. If it is true that by 2050, nearly one-half of all Americans will be Hispanic, black and Asian, I suggest that “diversity” and related issues including integration will be public policy imperatives. Segregation (i.e., whites vs. other ethnic groups) in education, employment and housing will or should be increasingly a non-issue.
— SJ Wilcher · Mar 24, 05:59 AM · #
If all cultures are high performance and if people all dislike low performance (with their cumbersome use of unfamiliar unautomated laborious procedures) then any diversity intrusion into a community causes necessary intearctions at low performance—so people withdraw from that cognitive emotive loads of that type of performance. Nothing is going to make low performance as fun and automatic as high performance and people only highly perform their own over-learned culture(s). So diversity is a performance cost—pure, simple, always, everywhere, no if, ands, or buts. It may have strong benefits but that does nothing to reduce costs per se. Hunkering down means the diversity intrusion is avoided, walled off, contact with it is reduced, and people try to live within their established preferred high performances. A culture, however, of learning, and suffering, and openness, and awe, and re-defining us-ness can be established but it is a painfilled culture with routines changing more than usual high performance routines so it is an un-culture-like culture, a self contradiction. This, if established, makes diversity intrusions better welcomed. But again, the cost is still there, standing, undiministed, ineluctable.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 24, 06:10 AM · #
Living in an sociologically diverse community is political engagement, whatever one’s record of attendance at bureaucratic functions, like elections, or simply nutty functions, like caucuses. And since when is the inspiration of trust supposed to be based upon the perception of someone’s biological race or economic class? Holding such an assumption, which was disproved by the study, should be what is surprising, not the fact that such a ludicrous assumption was in fact disproved.
— Jesse · Mar 24, 07:53 AM · #
I don’t trust you Mark Bauerlein. Stay away from my guacamole and chips. Don’t come to my fiesta and stay away from my sister.
— Martin · Mar 24, 09:38 AM · #
And what if people living in a high-performance monoculture don’t want to experience the jarring transition to diversity? We know what’s best for them in the long run, of course. But still, what do we do with these unenlightened folks who don’t want to be part of our project. I suggest we call them Racists and force them to participate. They’ll thank us later, or maybe their kids will anyway.
The big question is why they can’t see the Truth? It’s so obvious. Why do they make us force them? We Are The World.
— T Paine · Mar 24, 02:44 PM · #
(1, the “small town” being referred to in the interview was not Rochester, NY — which Putnam left early in his childhood — but Port Clinton, OH.)
Anyone who works with residence life on a college campus knows that diversity both unites and divides. Diversity always means that the same and the strange are both put into question by their encounter.
Wow. Big surprise.
Let me get this straight: We are to have free markets and open borders (oops, no, that last part is from the European Union, not the U.S.) but we don’t want people to be involved. There’s a disconnect here.
It’s kinda like your first taste of an ethnic food different from your own. Initially, the tongue is startled, surprised — and may reject the experience as, well, distasteful.
But then, further acquaintance with it can slowly win you over (or not). But if it does, then it goes into the repertoire of the familiar, and often even the desired, when hunger strikes. (“Let’s all go out for…pizza, Chinese, Thai, etc.”)
It is the human condition to be anchored in groups, in the familiar — and then to assimilate other contexts and other interactions. Stop now and the mind, collective and individual, will atrophy.
And that’s not good for markets now, is it?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 26, 12:34 AM · #