adjective
1. too great or intense to be expressed in words; unutterable
2. too sacred to be uttered
3. indescribable; indefinable
Today brings two striking examples of how equity, “the quality of being fair or impartial,” is understood in both the lower and higher reaches of academia today. From the lower, Bradley Bethel, an assistant learning specialist at Ohio State, argues in Inside Higher Ed that raising NCAA admissions standards for incoming freshmen “would amount to nothing less than discrimination against the thousands of high school athletes whose urban and rural schools cannot provide them with the quality education they deserve.”
Really? In a certain sense all academic standards “discriminate” against everyone, not just athletes, who can’t meet them, but does that sense make any sense for a, well, academic institution?
Bethel describes a student who
walks into my office every day to practice reading and writing…. I am one of the learning specialists he sees, and when he first came to me, he could barely compose a full paragraph. Now, just a few months into his freshman year of college, he can write three-page papers that earn him Cs….
My fellow learning specialists and I have helped countless athletes become success stories. Our experience testifies to the fact that an ACT score does not reflect an athlete’s innate ability.
I’m not sure if anyone actually believes that an ACT or SAT score reflects an athlete’s, or anyone’s, “innate ability,” but many will question why a flagship academic institution in a financially strapped state should not only admit students who “in front of a book [are] reserved and awkward” and can “barely compose a full paragraph” but also provide a 21-person Student-Athlete Support Services Office (SASSO) to teach them reading and writing.
An from the other end of the academic hierarchy comes Mary Ann Mason, a professor and faculty co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, who argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the current and continuing gender inequity in higher education is unlikely to change “without serious structural transformation.”
“Gender equity,” she writes, can be measured in three ways: “representation on the faculty, pay, and family formation.” (Note, in passing, that an absence of discrimination based on sex doesn’t make the list.) Women, she demonstrates, are at the bottom of the pyramid on all three scores.
We found that, across all disciplines, women with children were 38 percent less likely than men with children to achieve tenure. Most women do not even enter a tenure-track position. Instead, they are twice as likely as men with children to work in part-time or nontenure-track positions.
Many women (and some men) take part-time jobs because they don’t think they can handle a demanding full-time, tenure-track post during the early years of raising children. Some expect to eventually switch to the tenure track. They may not be so concerned about their low pay and marginalized status because they believe that being an adjunct is a temporary phase, one that will end once the children are older….
Most women, it seems, cannot have it all — tenure and a family — while most men can.
Mason argues that “gender equity is even more unbalanced in terms of marriage and family than it is in terms of career aspirations — a more sharply angled pyramid.” And, she notes, “[t]hat raises the fundamental issue of what gender equity means.”
She suggests adding a “baby-gap test” to the pay test and the representation test to get a truer measure of gender equity. Evaluating equity in this manner, she concludes,
reveals that women have much further to go than would otherwise be evident. It also seems obvious that unless we level the playing fields for mothers, gender equality is not just a matter of time.
Whether or not Mason’s rhetorical shift here from “gender equity” to “gender equality” is significant, she never describes the “structural transformation” that would be necessary to “level the playing fields” by, presumably, making men and women equally interested in and responsible for having and raising children.
Let us assume that current — and if Prof. Mason is correct, foreseeable — gender relations in higher education are inequitable. Still, the enormity and reach of the leveling “structural transformation” that would be required suggests that enduring some inequities may be preferable to the extreme measures necessary to eliminate them.
