Diversity Not Merely Skin Deep

The Illinois Board of Higher Education recently sought public comment on its campaign to promote faculty “diversity,” which it equates with skin color or national origin. Most of the current and proposed “steps to increase minority faculty,” however, are unnecessary and unconstitutional.

Faculty surveys show strong support for equal opportunity and “soft” affirmative action (reaching out to all prospective applicants, regardless of race). These same polls reveal strong opposition to faculty hiring preferences. Many college administrators and some faculty are biased in favor of minority candidates. Thus, the job will sometimes go to a minority candidate over an equally well-qualified nonminority. In short, minority applicants are treated equally well or better than nonminority applicants even without special programs.

Strict Scrutiny

It is the legal responsibility of schools to document past or present discrimination before instituting remedial programs. State universities in Illinois defend the Illinois Minority Graduate Incentive Program (IMGIP) and Illinois Consortium for Educational Opportunity Program (ICEOP) by invoking Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Justice Powell introduced racial diversity as one of many factors a school may consider in judging applicants on a case-by-case basis. Powell emphasized schools could not use race as the sole determinant of “diversity” nor use it in a wholesale manner to treat all members of a minority group differently from nonminorities. In other words, schools cannot reduce the idea of “diversity” to skin color.

In subsequent decisions, most notably Croson (1989) and Adarand (1995), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all racial preferences are subject to strict judicial scrutiny. States must show how their programs remedy past discrimination by particular state institutions; they may not resort to general claims of overcoming “societal discrimination.” The courts have ruled that the following reasons are NOT compelling enough to justify racial discrimination by the state:

• achieving racial proportionalism

• providing minority role models

• overcoming general societal discrimination

A strong case could be made that the IMGIP and ICEOP scholarship programs are unconstitutional based on the above case law. Furthermore, employment discrimination from “targeted hiring” of minority candidates clearly violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Even more troubling, these minority scholarship programs require beneficiaries to “seek and accept” faculty positions within the State of Illinois. Do these candidates compete for jobs in open searches (legal) or do they receive jobs set aside for them (illegal)? Many state universities, including my own, have minority recruitment money to provide departments with an “incentive” to interview and hire minority faculty. During budgetary crises, when money is not available for competitive searches, will colleges conduct job searches open only to minorities?

Other Forms of “Diversity”

Justice Powell’s notion of diversity was not exclusively racial; he was concerned with allowing universities to consider many factors to achieve intellectual diversity. By focusing monomaniacally on race, universities have overlooked other groups that are severely underrepresented on college faculty, thus giving lie to their professed concern for “diversity.” For example, faculty surveys highlight the near-absence of Republican and/or conservative faculty in the arts and humanities.

My research into the political affiliation of liberal arts faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale confirms this pattern: 105 Democrats versus 11 Republicans. A partial breakdown by department appears in the table to the right.

True, there may be reasons other than employment discrimination for the underrepresentation of Republicans, just as there are reasons for the underrepresentation of certain minority groups. Yet, based on the diversity rationale, universities ought to be concerned with a “hostile environment” that produces so few Republican professors.

It is wrong for the state to define “diversity” by race and it is illegal for it to pursue policies that favor one group over another. A much more positive and effective approach would be to concentrate on improving the pre-collegiate education of minority students in Illinois. Only then will the state have a large pool of minority applicants able to compete on an equal basis with nonminorities.

Jonathan Bean is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and author of Big Government and Affirmative Action: The Scandalous History of the Small Business Administration (2001). This essay is derived from testimony he prepared for an October 2002 hearing before the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s Study on Faculty Diversity.