Discriminations

Not only does the higher education establishment resent and resist efforts aimed at making their institutions treat students, faculty, and staff without regard to race, they also oppose efforts to make them account for how much they spend to promote “diversity” and to justify the benefits of such spending as an “attack.”

A week ago I discussed, here, an excellent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Peter Schmidt about a new report from the Independence Institute criticizing the fuzziness and lack of accountability in “diversity” spending at the flagship campus of the University of Colorado.

Today Schmidt reports that this report, and its call for greater scrutiny of “diversity” spending, has diversicrats quaking in their bureaucratic boots (my label and characterization, not Schmidt’s).

News of the Colorado development distressed, but hardly surprised, many of the nearly 170 college administrators, faculty members, and admissions counselors who were gathered [in Clemson, South Carolina] on Monday for Clemson University’s Fifth National Conference on Best Practices in Black Student Achievement.

Although several said they had grown accustomed to justifying their affirmative-action efforts and felt confident they would be able to account for every dollar spent on diversity programs, others said they worried that colleges were ill prepared to defend such efforts against those demanding that they be subjected to a strict cost-benefit analysis.

The prospect of colleges’ being asked to account for every dollar spent on diversity is “something to think about, maybe even sweat about,” said one administrator from a public university in Indiana.

One of Monday’s featured speakers, Damon A. Williams, the University of Connecticut’s assistant vice provost for multicultural and international affairs, said he saw the Independence Institute’s efforts to scrutinize university spending on diversity as representing “the next wave” of attacks on affirmative action. He said he had responded to news of the institute’s report by sending letters to three major national higher-education organizations, which he declined to name, urging them to mobilize colleges elsewhere to defend themselves against similar scrutiny.

“I think many institutions are greatly at risk,” Mr. Williams said. Colleges have only in the past few years begun documenting the educational benefits of diversity, he said, and while they generally can make good arguments that the diversity programs serve a valuable purpose, they have not done enough to document and track the money spent on such efforts and their results.

It is both interesting and revealing that so many higher education officials regard a demand for “scrutiny” of “diversity” spending as an attack.

It seems to me, however, that the universities’ problem goes beyond the increasing necessity to document the benefit of “diversity” programs. Why should they have to do that, they might well ask, when they can’t even document the “benefit” of History or English or a whole slew of the social sciences? But while the benefit of the Humanities might be hard for accountants to justify, their cost isn’t hard to document. At most institutions this is not true of “diversity”spending, and some honest accounting would seem to be entirely in order.

This point, of course, is not entirely lost on all administrators. As Schmidt reports,

Richard Bayer, dean of enrollment services at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, said he saw the inquiry about diversity spending at Colorado as part of a broader movement to demand accountability of higher-education institutions. “To some degree I think it is going to have an impact on diversity on campus,” he said. “It makes you stop and think very carefully about how you are spending your dollars, and are you making a difference.”

Some careful thinking about “diversity,” while novel, would seem to be a good idea.