In higher education “diverse” almost always means black, Hispanic, or Native American, but yesterday at the University of Virginia meeting of its Board of Visitors it meant Asian. “Officials discuss Asian faculty diversity concerns,” the headline of the front page article in the Cavalier Daily today announces. “[Interim vice provost for faculty advancement Sharon] Hostler says Asian-Americans are overrepresented in University undergraduate student population, underrepresented in faculty.”
As usual, “representation” is a ridiculously opaque, irrelevant criterion to use for either faculty or students.
Overall, Asian-Americans are overrepresented within the University’s student population. Asian-Americans make up 11.4 percent of the undergraduate population, though they are only 4.4 percent of the United States’ population….
And, interestingly, many of UVa’s Asian students are really Asian, not Asian-American:
Admissions Dean Greg Roberts cited a dramatic increase in international applications from Asia as the reason for this overrepresentation, noting that applications from Chinese students increased from 400 to 800 this year.
Does that mean we should count the population of China in determining whether Asians are “overrepresented” at UVa? Interim vice provost for faculty advancement Sharon Hostler didn’t say.
Never mind. Let’s move on to the faculty.
The disproportionate number of Asian-Americans at the University, however, is limited to the student population, as Asian-American faculty actually are underrepresented, Hostler said.
…. She said 2007 data indicates that Asian-Americans comprise 6.5 percent of the tenure-track faculty at the University….
Now I’m really confused (and why am I confident I’m not the only one?). If Asian-Americans are 4.4% of the population, why are Asian-American tenure track professors, at 6.5%, “underrepresented”? Representation, apparently, is one of those words like, well, like “diverse,” whose meaning is quite malleable, depending on whose ox is being gored at the moment.
“Hostler also noted that Asian-Americans are highly underrepresented at the top levels of American higher education,” but Bill Harvey, UVa’s Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity, came forward with a ready explanation for this “underrepresentation” that may stand as one of the most remarkable utterances ever uttered by a chief diversity officer:
Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, said this discrepancy between higher and lower levels of the University faculty may be because of culture. He said Asian-Americans typically do not actively seek out leadership positions and instead may prefer to take a more supportive role. For example, Harvey said, they may appear more comfortable in roles as senior faculty members.
But the problem of Asian underrepresentation in various facets of university life is more far-reaching, or deep-seated, than can be explained by Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey’s analysis of Asian cultural aversion to seeking leadership positions.
Among the University’s Asian-American faculty, there also is a disparity between male and female Asian-American professors, Hostler noted.
“[There are] three times as many Asian-American men on the faculty as there are women,” she said, noting that women make up only 11 percent of the tenure-track professors of Asian descent.
Perhaps Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey has some evidence that being Asian and female is a double-whammy, with Asian cultural preference for playing “supportive role[s]” magnified and reinforced by a similar female cultural predilection. Maybe at some point in the future Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey will be invited to share these views with the faculty and students in the University’s Asian Studies and Women’s Studies courses.
But wait. Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey still had more to say, namely that he is optimistic about the future of “diversity” at UVa … because Asians are so good at math and science.
The University’s recent emphasis on the sciences also may help attract more Asian-American faculty members, Harvey said, noting that he is optimistic about the University faculty’s future diversity
No doubt the wonderful thing about Asians from a Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity’s point of view is that they contribute to “diversity” when you need to count them, they’re invisible when you don’t, and you never need to give them preferences because they’re almost always “overrepresented.”
Readers with good memories will recall that this is not the first time we have encountered some of the strange ideas of Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey. Here, for example, he expressed his devotion to race-exclusive programs and his dismay at their elimination, a rather odd notion of “equity.” And here he explained what he means by “diversity”: “What we want this institution to do is to mirror society.” UVa, of course, doesn’t. Thus Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey’s lamented
that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth’s population.
His proposed solution to this problem, I think, was quite odd: because Hispanics at UVa do not “mirror” their percentage of the Virginia population, they should be rounded up and brought in from other states!
Harvey said as one-third of University students are not from the Commonwealth, the University should actively recruit students from states with large Latino/Hispanic communities.
Well, good help is hard to find, especially at salaries strapped public universities are forced to pay. As I noted here, according to data on faculty salaries reported in the Cavalier Daily, Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey’s salary in 2007 (no doubt higher now) was a paltry $315,000. If the University truly valued “diversity,” you’d think it would pay its Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity something closer to what it has just agreed to pay its new basketball coach: “a five-year contract worth $1.7 million per year … [plus] a $500,000 signing bonus, plus an additional $500,000 if he is still the coach after five years.”
Since the salary of the new coach, Tony Bennett, formerly of Washington State, who is not “diverse,” is over twice as high as that of the departing coach, who is “diverse,” I wonder if any discrimination complaints will reach the offices of the Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity or the Interim Vice Provost For Faculty Advancement.
UPDATE [6 April]
Prof. Anna Chong, director of the University’s Asian Pacific American Studies program, was not amused, finding the Cavalier Daily article “an inauspicious beginning to Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.”
In particular, she argued that
the comments attributed to Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, regarding why APAs are not found in University administration perpetuates the model minority myth. There is no unitary Asian American culture dictating that APAs be passive and “prefer to take a more supportive role.” If anything, the culture that prevents more APAs from taking leadership roles is that of academia itself, which has generally not valued the recruitment and retention of APA faculty.
Chong’s letter also demonstrates what an elastic concept “representation” is when applied to racial or ethnic groups in university settings. “The article,” she writes, “begins by discussing Sharon Hostler’s report on the “overrepresentation” of APA undergraduates.”
However, it is misleading to simply compare the percentage of APA undergradutes with the national APA population. A better indicator might be the APA population at other American Association of Universities institutions, where the University ranks 31 out of 58 and lags behind peer institutions including Harvard, Duke, Berkeley, and Michigan. This concern pits APAs against other minorities in a zero-sum game over diversity statistics, and harkens back to yellow peril anxieties of the early 1900s. If anything, we should celebrate that the APA undergraduate population at the University is so high, rising from only 0.76 percent in 1978.
But is Hostler’s ethnic nose-counting, which is typical of university administrators, really “misleading,” or does it simply employ a benchmark that Prof. Chong finds too low? In short, doesn’t the sort of ethnic nose-counting that Chong prefers — measuring the University against “the APA population at other American Association of Universities institutions” — result in precisely the same “zero-sum game over diversity statistics” that she purports to criticize?
No matter what benchmark is used to gauge the success of “diversity” efforts, “diversity” policies are always a “zero-sum game over diversity statistics.” The only way to win that game is not to play it, treating everyone as an individual, not a two-legged racial or ethnic statistic.
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