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Columns::November 18, 2002
Senior VP is named to governor-elect’s transition team
Kellogg College president will deliver annual McBee Lecture
One good turn
Aquatic toxicologist patents new genetically engineered ‘lab fish’
When the weather outside gets frightful: Plan for inclement winter conditions announced
Child’s play
Campus Closeup
Newsmakers
Update: Private Giving
Forum essay: Keeping pace with demand
Campus News
University of Michigan researchers: Creating a diverse university requires commitment from entire campus
By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu
Creating a diverse university requires commitment and effort from the whole campus--and time--but it is possible.
That was the conclusion to be drawn from the first Fall Diversity Lecture sponsored Nov. 7 by UGA’s Office of Institutional Diversity. The speakers were John Matlock and Katrina Wade-Golden of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives at the University of Michigan. They described the Michigan Student Study, a 12-year project to collect and analyze data on University of Michigan students, and the support it provided for the effort to increase diversity on the University of Michigan campus.
“I don’t think we could have had a better presentation for our first Fall Diversity Lecture,” said Rodney Bennett, dean of students and interim associate provost for institutional diversity. “Institutional diversity is not the responsibility of just one office, and the lecture made that clear.”
“We invited these speakers because we wanted folks who had similar experiences in a similar setting,” said Tracy Ford, director of UGA’s institutional diversity office. “And we wanted people who had accomplished great things in the area of diversity.”
Two lawsuits challenging the University of Michigan’s use of race as one element in admissions decisions--for undergraduates and for law students--are currently in the courts. Data from the Michigan Student Study was presented in court to demonstrate the positive value of diversity on campus.
Matlock, who is associate vice provost and director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives at Michigan, explained that the Michigan Student Study was one element of what was called the Michigan Mandate. “It was U-M’s long-range plan to link campus diversity and academic excellence,” he said. “Our president was very aggressive in supporting diversity efforts, but he wanted some control over the future. How will we know if it works? Will students be more or less committed to campus diversity over time?”
Matlock’s office developed a project that aimed to provide “evidence, not anecdotes.” They combined several surveys with focus-group discussions and one-on-one interviews to capture the experience over the four-year period of those students who entered in 1990. The final survey went to alumni eight years after graduation.
“The project itself is very comprehensive,” Wade-Golden said. She is now research coordinator, having begun with the project when she was an undergraduate. “We realized we didn’t really know much about the students,” and so they set out to find out.
They learned, for example, that 80 percent of the entering fresh-men had never shared a bedroom, and that far more than half, of all racial categories, came from a generally racially segregated background.
Once the data was in, they developed themes and recommendations. All are detailed on the U-M Web site (www.umich.edu/~oami/mss). The data was also the basis of the expert testimony in the lawsuits that diversity is of educational benefit to the campus as a whole. That argument is also summarized on the Web site.
Matlock said the research about the benefits of diversity distinguished between “learning outcomes” and “democracy outcomes.” For example, there was a correlation between experience of diversity and higher scores on a test measuring complex thinking and an interest in graduate-level education, but also with “an understanding that group differences are compatible with societal unity” and higher levels of citizenship.
“This type of in-depth assessment was critical,” Matlock said, for buttressing the court case.
The recommendations are aimed at other institutions interested in diversity, and emphasize the overwhelming importance of broad participation--by administrators, students, faculty, and external supporters. “We’ve had very strong leadership from four presidents,” Matlock said. “We had tremendous support from the corporate community,” which sees the need for employees who are comfortable with diversity.
Over the past 20 years, the minority presence in the U-M student body has increased significantly, from 9.4 percent in 1981 to 13.6 percent in 1987, when the Michigan Mandate was adopted, to 20.5 percent when the study began in 1991 and 26 percent today. These higher numbers, Matlock said, are a result of specific admissions policies and of the diversity program.
“I’m pretty optimistic,” he said. “We’re so far into this, it won’t change even if the lawsuit is lost.”
“The good turnout for the lecture--students, faculty, staff--shows there is a lot of interest here in dialogue,” said Bennett. “It is important for us all to remember that the successes at the University of Michigan didn’t happen overnight. They started on this process 20 years ago.”
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