Diversity and Higher Education

Gurin, Patricia, Dey, Eric, Hurtado, Sylvia, and Gurin, Gerald. Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes. Harvard Educational Review. Fall 2002. Volume 72. Issue 3. PG 330-366.

In light of the current divisiveness of the affirmative action debate, the researchers and educational authors Patricia Gurin, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin, through their article on "Diversity and Higher Education: Theory and Impact on Educational Outcomes" offer an attempt to generate light as well as heat, by providing an educational and cognitive point-of-view of the potential benefits and detriments of affirmative action at institutions of higher learning. The authors conduced a research study at various institutions of higher learning to determine the social and psychological as well as the legal benefits of greater diversity in education, as achieved through affirmative action programs

This article was written during the height of the legal controversy over the University of Michigan's educational policies regarding affirmative action. At the time, it was alleged that the university was employing a de facto quota system to increase the diversity of its applicants in an illegal fashion. The defendants argued that, had they been minority candidates, they would have been accepted under the university's 'point' system. The school has since employed a different admissions policy to ensure diversity. (University of Michigan New Release, 2002).

However, although the Supreme Court's ruling has tentatively resolved this particular case, the controversy over the value of diversity as well as affirmative action in higher education remains -- is diversity a laudable goal for an institution of higher education to pursue, not simply in terms of an institution's course offerings or stated educational mission? Is diversity also an important component in the way that a school accepts and rejects candidates to its freshman class, to ensure a better educational experience for the class as a whole?

Educators have been challenged to articulate clearly the educational purposes and benefits of diversity, say Patricia Gurin, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin in their article, and through their prose and their study, they hope to offer supporting anecdotal as well as statistical and legal support to diversity's salutary effects. According to this particular article published in the Harvard Educational Review, education is not simply a matter of instilling knowledge in an individual's mind. College education takes place in a holistic fashion, over the course of several years, and is a creation of a dynamic of a particular social community. Were college education not, after all, such a 'total' endeavor in its most purely realized form, there would be little distinction or competition to become a part of elite institutions of education at all. Students desire to attend colleges in such settings in no small part because of the social opportunities such institutions offer. The authors thus provide a psychological and social framework in their article and study, rather than a legal perspective.

Through their framework of adolescent and young adult cognitive development, the authors delineate the common quest for a stable social and vocational identity that plagues all college students, in one way or another, today. Through social interactions, the authors suggest, individuals develop a greater sense of awareness as social selves, particularly during the college period. This period they spend away from their childhood homes, yet they have not yet assumed their permanent career and adult identities. By interacting with individuals of different racial and ethnic groups, individuals are introduced to new possibilities of self-evolution. Their sense of stable selves, of the way life ought to be lived and the way society ought to be constructed, is thus destabilized through the medium of a diverse social setting outside of the classroom and reconstituted in a more democratic fashion through diversity.

Cognitive growth in a way that supports the classroom is constantly fostered, as students go to class and participate in dorm life, with people who are different from themselves, not just in appearance, but in such individual's personal daily rhythms and rituals, and the way individuals perceived as different socially interact with one another. Through the enforcement of diversity, even an elite college can become a truly democratic institution as well as fostering a tradition of elite scholarship.

This diversity, the authors state, only continues within the classroom. When discussing subjects of colonialism, racial intolerance, and identity construction, it is important to have a diverse classroom environment. From an educational perspective of course, every classroom is itself an experiment. Teachers continually observe that every class is different -- if it were not, then education could take place purely by lecturing and reading books. Even lecture-based classes, however, require individual study, the sort of critical individual study that requires social interaction and sharing. Smaller seminars require students to reflect and share personally as well as intellectually about their experiences.

The introduction of diversity introduces the lived experience of students into the classroom in a full and meaningful way, state the authors. In a diverse setting, all students' educations, particularly though not exclusively about historical, social, and psychological issues that pertain to race, are not simply cerebral in their nature rather they gain a foothold in the 'real world' of social life as well. Of course, why not, opponents of affirmative action might counter, deploy real world education through volunteerism in disadvantaged communities, rather than through affirmative action? However, the authors make it clear that it is the interactions between perceived equals that are so critical to social development at this time. By making use of the democratic equality of the college classroom in terms of class, dress, social status, and living quarters, a new and more democratic America can be created, even at the most elite institutions of higher education.

It should be noted that although the Michigan court case may have inspired the research study, the authors using both single- and multi-institutional data from the University of Michigan and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program to examine and to reaffirm the effects of classroom diversity and informal interaction. The benefits of democracy, the authors suggest, are not simply present amongst whites learning about the different so-called minority cultures of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latinos but also from the different interactions of all of these various groups. African-American perceptions of White students, for instance, may be demystified during social interactions in the dorm room, while Whites are encouraged to discuss race in an honest fashion in the classroom.