Diversity And Excellence: “Additives,” Not Alternatives?

Michèle Lamont is a professor of just about everything at Harvard (Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, and Senior Adviser on Faculty Development and Diversity, Faculty of Arts and Sciences). According to her Dept. of Sociology website,

Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how culture contributes to ethno-racial and class inequality and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Recent areas of interest include racism and anti-racism (how discriminated people -including immigrants- respond to exclusion and understand the relationship between themselves and others), the sociology of the social sciences, and the impact of self-identity on health.

In African and African American Studies,

She has done extensive research on racial and class boundaries in France and the United States. She has published widely in the fields of inequality, culture, race, immigration, knowledge, theory, qualitative methods, and comparative sociology. Her publications include The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration…; The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries; and Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality….

Drawing on that impressive resume, Prof. Lamont has a post on Huffington Post a couple of days ago, Diversity and Excellence in Higher Education: not Alternatives but Additives. Silly me: I always thought an additive was, as this online dictionary puts it, a “substance added in small amounts to something else to improve, strengthen, or otherwise alter it,” like STP in gas. If both excellence and diversity are additives, what are they added to? But let’s not quibble over semantics. Prof. Lamont was born in Canada, after all, and so American English is not her native tongue.

“Diversity and excellence are often pitted against one another in American higher education,” Prof. Lamont writes.

Those who oppose taking diversity into consideration in university admission or other forms of academic selection argue that some “get in” because of their skin color or gender while others “get in” because of their achievement and analytical skills. A detailed analysis of academic evaluation shows that these considerations are most often not alternatives, but additives.

That would be comforting, at least to a degree, if true, but is it true? First, I think it worth noting that even the preliminary assertion here — that critics of “diversity” claim that some “‘get in’ because of their skin color while others “‘get in’ because of their achievement and analytical skills” — is so misleading as to be inaccurate. It implies, maybe even asserts, that we critics believe that having a preferred skin color and “achievement and analytical skills” are mutually exclusive, that some “get in” by skin alone and others by talent alone, but no “diversity” critics I know or read believe that. What we do believe is that preferential treatment based on race — call that “diversity” if you wish — by definition results in some applicants “getting in” who would not have but for their skin color, and, inexorably, that other applicants with high achievement and analytical skills but an unpreferred skin color will not “get in” who would have if their skin color had been of the preferred hue. Can Prof. Lamont disagree? Can anyone?

Prof. Lamont’s primary claim — that “diversity” and “excellence” are “additives,” not “alternatives” — is similarly unpersuasive. To support it she turns to that well-known authority on just about everything, Prof. Lamont. “Indeed,” she writes,

in How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Evaluation (Harvard University Press 2009), I show that many contenders for prestigious fellowships are selected because of a combination of excellence and diversity considerations.

But does this assertion even assert that “diversity” and “excellence” are not at odds, or at least in tension with each other? Let’s look more closely at what she actually argues:

How Professors Think opens the black box of peer review to learn how academics go about selecting candidates for prestigious fellowships. I conducted more than eighty interviews with individuals charged with distributing various fellowships to graduate students and other academics. I found that very good but not perfect proposals are pushed above the proverbial line because of diversity consideration and that diversity is often a tie-breaker between two somewhat faulty proposals. Taking diversity into consideration facilitates the decision-making process and helps “move things along.” Of course, this is not to say that awardees who benefit from diversity considerations are less meritorious–in a varying proportion, some of them are among the “top awardees,” i.e., the first recipients to be chosen; similarly, the “maybe” pile invariably includes many applicants who do and do not benefit from diversity considerations. Combining excellence and various kinds of diversity criteria is valued as an intrinsic good that contributes to the overall quality of the research environment. A white history professor says, “I do believe in having a mix, as much of a mix as possible, as much diversity of whatever kind. And that includes diversity of background or training or interest or maybe even age or personality.”

This argument does nothing to challenge the “diversity” critics’ claim that a concern with “diversity” dilutes devotion to pure “excellence.” To say that they are “additives” — by which I think she means only that they are often considered together in evaluations — does not at all mean that they are not also “alternatives,” that if you have more of one you have less of the other.

Of course, if you define “[c]ombining excellence and varying kinds of diversity” as “an intrinsic good,” then you’ve solved the problem of any possible conflict by definition, no further analysis needed, especially since she minimizes race and ethnicity by implying that everybody is “diverse” in one way or another. And it of course adds nothing to any debate worth having to quote “a white history professor” (what difference does it make that he or she is white?) favoring “as much of a mix as possible, as much diversity of whatever kind.” So what? Can Prof. Lamont cite any critic of race preference “diversity” who objects to “diversity of background or training or interest or maybe even age or personality?” It is racial discrimination we oppose, not discrimination “of whatever kind.”

The fact that “some” applicants who are “diverse” (a “varying proportion,” Prof. Lamont says) will also be among the top, i.e., who would “get in” even without their “diversity,” does not refute the obvious fact that their “diversity” makes winners out of some applicants who otherwise would not have won, and its inevitable corollary: that some losers would have been winners if they had been “diverse.” As Prof. Lamont acknowledges, her own research confirmed “that very good but not perfect proposals are pushed above the proverbial line because of diversity consideration….”

To say that diversity and excellence are “additives,” in short, is to say almost nothing. It is true that they are not at war with each other in every single applicant, but neither are they always, even usually, allies. Most of the time, if you have more of one you have less of the other.

Maybe that makes them “subtractives.”