Affirmative Action Encourages Educational Diversity
Patricia Gurin, Eric L. Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin
Patricia Gurin is chair of the department of psychology at the University of Michigan. Eric L. Dey is executive associate dean and an associate professor at the University of Michigan school of education. Sylvia Hurtado is associate professor and director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. Gerald Gurin is a professor and research scientist emeritus at the University of Michigan.
In the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote the pivotal opinion, arguing that the "atmosphere of 'speculation, experiment and creation'--so essential to the quality of higher education--is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body.... It is not too much to say that the nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples." Since the Bakke decision, the educational benefits of diversity as a compelling governmental interest have provided the primary justification for affirmative action at selective institutions across the country. However, the diversity argument has not been supported in all lower court cases since the original Bakke decision. For example, in Hopwood v. University of Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied that diversity has any impact on educational experience: "The use of race, in and of itself, to choose students simply achieves a student body that looks different. Such a criterion is no more rational on its own terms than would be choices based upon the physical size or blood type of applicants." If this statement were true, there would be no basis for arguing that there was a compelling interest in a racially/ethnically diverse student body. However, such a conclusion flies in the face of the role that race and ethnicity have played in our polity and society. As Victor Bolden, David Goldberg, and Dennis Parker point out, "No constitutional compromise was required over blood type; no civil war was fought and no Southern Manifesto signed over physical size."
Since the Hopwood decision, courts across the country have produced conflicting rulings on diversity as a compelling governmental interest. In Smith v. University of Washington Law School (2001), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's rating that Bakke is still good law and stands for the proposition that educational diversity can be a compelling governmental interest that justifies race-sensitive admissions programs. In Johnson v. Board of Regents of the University of Georgia (2001), the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rule on the question of whether diversity is a compelling governmental interest but struck down the University of Georgia's admissions policy on the grounds that it was not "narrowly tailored" to that interest. In two cases involving the University of Michigan, one challenging its undergraduate admissions and the other its law school admissions, two different rulings on diversity as a compelling governmental interest were given at the district court level. In Gratz v. Bollinger, et al. (2000), the court ruled on summary judgment in favor of the University of Michigan, upholding its current undergraduate admissions policy and finding that diversity was a compelling governmental interest that justified the policy. In Grutter v. Bollinger, et al. (2002), the court held that the educational benefits of diversity are not a compelling state interest, and even if they were, the law school's policy was not "narrowly tailored" to the interest of diversity. Both cases were appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard arguments in December 2001. This court overturned the lower court decision in Grutter, deciding in favor of the university and setting the stage for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is clear from these now-famous higher education cases that the question of whether Bakke is still good law and whether diversity is a compelling state interest justifying the use of race-sensitive admissions policies remains controversial. It is also clear that diversity is the primary basis for arguing the constitutionality of using race as one of many factors in college admission, and thus research on whether and how diversity might affect education is of crucial legal and practical importance.
It is important to explain how higher education might expose students to racial and ethnic diversity, since they may experience it in several ways. First, students attend colleges with different levels of racial/ethnic diversity in their student bodies. This has been termed structural diversity, or the numerical representation of diverse groups. Although structural diversity increases the probability that students will encounter others of diverse backgrounds, given the U.S. history of race relations, simply attending an ethnically diverse college does not guarantee that students will have the meaningful intergroup interactions that social psychologist Gordon Allport suggested in his classic book, The Nature of Prejudice, are important for the reduction of racial prejudice. For this reason, a second definition of racial/ethnic diversity is important, one that involves both the frequency and the quality of intergroup interaction as keys to meaningful diversity experiences during college, or what we term informal interaction diversity. Although these informal interactions with racially diverse peers can occur in many campus contexts, the majority of them occur outside of the classroom. Such interactions may include informal discussions, daily interactions in residence halls, campus events, and social activities. Finally, a third form of diversity experience includes learning about diverse people (content knowledge) and gaining experience with diverse peers in the classroom, or what we term classroom diversity. We contend that the impact of racial/ethnic diversity on educational outcomes comes primarily from engagement with diverse peers in the informal campus environment and in college classrooms. Structural diversity is a necessary but insufficient condition for maximal educational benefits; therefore, the theory that guides our study is based on students' actual engagement with diverse peers.
Recent reviews of educational research, as well as summaries of new studies, present an emerging body of scholarship that speaks directly to the benefits of a racially/ethnically diverse postsecondary educational experience. The evidence for the diversity rationale for affirmative action has come from four approaches to research:
It is important to note that, across these different approaches and different samples of students and faculty, researchers have found similar results showing that a wide variety of individual, institutional, and societal benefits are linked with diversity experiences.
The research reported here is an example of the fourth approach in which we compare how different types of diversity experiences are associated with differences in educational outcomes among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. We first present the theoretical foundation for the educational value of racial/ethnic diversity, and then we examine the effects of two kinds of diversity experiences--diversity in the formal classroom and in the informal campus environment--on different educational outcomes.
Racial and ethnic diversity may promote a broad range of educational outcomes, but we focus on two general categories. Learning outcomes include active thinking skills, intellectual engagement and motivation, and a variety of academic skills. Democracy outcomes include perspective-taking, citizenship engagement, racial and cultural understanding, and judgment of the compatibility among different groups in a democracy. The impact of diversity on learning and democracy outcomes is believed to be especially important during the college years because students are at a critical developmental stage, which takes place in institutions explicitly constituted to promote late adolescent development.
In essays that profoundly affected our understanding of social development, psychologist Erik Erikson introduced the concept of identity and argued that late adolescence and early adulthood are the unique times when a sense of personal and social identity is formed. Identity involves two important elements: a persistent sameness within oneself and a persistent sharing with others. Erikson theorized that identity develops best when young people are given a psychosocial moratorium--a time and a place in which they can experiment with different social roles before making permanent commitments to an occupation, to intimate relationships, to social and political groups and ideas, and to a philosophy of life. We argue that such a moratorium should ideally involve a confrontation with diversity and complexity, lest young people passively make commitments based on their past experiences, rather than actively think and make decisions informed by new and more complex perspectives and relationships.
Institutions of higher education can provide an opportunity for such a psychosocial moratorium, thus supporting young adults through this identity development stage. Residential colleges and universities provide many students with an opportunity to experiment with new ideas, new relationships, and new roles. Peer influences play a normative role in this development, and students are able to explore options and possibilities before making permanent adult commitments. Yet not all institutions of higher education serve this developmental function equally well. Higher education is especially influential when its social milieu is different from students' home and community background and when it is diverse and complex enough to encourage intellectual experimentation and recognition of varied future possibilities. We maintain that attending college in one's home environment or replicating the home community's social life and expectations in a homogeneous college that is simply an extension of the home community impedes the personal struggle and conscious thought that are so important for identity development.
Sociologist Theodore Newcomb's classic study of students at Bennington College supported Erikson's assertion that late adolescence is a time to determine one's relationship to the sociopolitical world and affirmed the developmental impact of the college experience. Newcomb's study demonstrated that political and social attitudes--what Erikson would call one aspect of social identity--are quite malleable in late adolescence and that change occurred particularly in those students to whom Beanington presented new and different ideas and attitudes. Peer influence was critical in shaping the attitudinal changes that Newcomb documented. Follow-ups with these students showed that the attitudes formed during the college experience were quite stable, even twenty-five and fifty years later.
Developmental theorists emphasize that discontinuity and discrepancy spur cognitive growth. Jean Piaget termed this process disequilibrium. Drawing on these theories, psychologist Diane Ruble offers a model that ties developmental change to life transitions such as going to college. Transitions are significant because they present new situations about which individuals know little and in which they will experience uncertainty. The early phase of a transition, what Ruble calls construction, is especially important, since people have to seek information in order to make sense of the new situation. Under these conditions individuals are likely to undergo cognitive growth unless they are able to retreat to a familiar world. Ruble's model gives special importance to the first year of college, since it is during this time that classroom and social relationships discrepant from students' home environments become especially important in fostering cognitive growth.
Writing long before the controversies about diversity and affirmative action became politically important or were studied academically, Erikson, Newcomb, and Piaget were not making an explicit case for racial/ethnic diversity. Nonetheless, their arguments about the significance of discontinuity and the power of a late adolescence/early adulthood moratorium provide a strong theoretical rationale for the importance of bringing students from varied backgrounds together to create a diverse and complex learning environment.
Campus environments and policies that foster interaction among diverse students are discontinuous from the home environments of many American students. Because of the racial separation that persists in this country, most students have lived in segregated communities before coming to college. The work of Gary Orfield and associates documents a deepening segregation in U.S. public schools. This segregated precollege educational background means that many students, White and minority alike, enter college without experience with diverse peers. Colleges that diversify their student bodies and institute policies that foster genuine interaction across race and ethnicity provide the first opportunity for many students to learn from peers with different cultures, values, and experiences. Genuine interaction goes far beyond mere contact and includes learning about difference in background, experience, and perspectives, as well as getting to know one another individually in an intimate enough way to discern common goals and personal qualities. In this kind of interaction--in and out of the classroom--diverse peers will learn from each other. This can be viewed as extending the traditional conception of a liberal education as one "intended to break down the narrow certainties and provincial vision with which we are born," [according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities]....
We might expect that a curriculum that deals explicitly with social and cultural diversity and a learning environment in which diverse students interact frequently with one another would affect the content of what is learned. However, based on the recent social psychological research that we discuss below, we consider the less obvious notion that features of the learning environment affect students' modes of thought. In this study we hypothesize that a curriculum that exposes students to knowledge about race and ethnicity acquired through the curriculum and classroom environment and to interactions with peers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in the informal college environment will foster a learning environment that supports active thinking and intellectual engagement.
Research in social psychology over the past twenty years has shown that active engagement in learning and thinking cannot be assumed. This research confirms that much apparent thinking and thoughtful action are actually automatic, or what psychologist Ellen Langer calls mindless. To some extent, mindlessness is the result of previous learning that has become so routine that thinking is unnecessary. Instead, scripts or schemas that are activated and operate automatically guide these learned routines. Some argue that mindlessness is necessary because there are too many stimuli in the world to which to pay attention. It is more efficient for us to select only a few stimuli or, better still, to go on automatic pilot--to be what some people call cognitive misers.
Psychologist John Bargh reviews both historical and recent research evidence showing that automatic psychological processes play a pervasive role in all aspects of everyday thinking. He concludes that automatic thinking is evident not only in perceptual processes (such as categorization) and in the execution of perceptional and motor skills (such as driving and typing), but that it is also pervasive in evaluation, emotional reactions, determination of goals, and social behavior itself. Bargh uses the term preconscious to describe processes that act as mental servants to take over from conscious, effortful thinking. One of our tasks as educators is to interrupt these automatic processes and facilitate active thinking in our students.
In one early study indicating the pervasiveness of automatic thinking, Langer described the many positive psychological benefits that people derive from using active, effortful, conscious modes of thought. She also argued that such thinking helps people develop new ideas and ways of processing information that may have been available to them but were simply not often used. In several experimental studies, she showed that such thinking increases alertness and greater mental activity, which fosters better learning and supports the developmental goals of higher education.
What are the conditions that encourage effortful, mindful, and conscious modes of thought? Langer contends that people will engage in such modes of thought when they encounter a situation for which they have no script or when the environment demands more than their current scripts provide, such as an encounter discrepant with their past experience. These conditions are similar to what sociologist Rose Coser calls complex social structures--situations where we encounter people who are unfamiliar to us, when these people challenge us to think or act in new ways, when people and relationships change and thus produce unpredictability, and when people we encounter hold different expectations of us. Coser shows that people who function within complex social structures develop a clearer and stronger sense of individuality and a deeper understanding of the social world.
The specific environmental features that Langer and Coser suggest will promote mental activity are compatible with cognitive-developmental theories. In general, those theories posit that cognitive growth is fostered by discontinuity and discrepancy (as in Piaget's notion of disequilibrium). To learn or grow cognitively, individuals need to recognize cognitive conflicts or contradictions, situations that, as psychologist Diane Ruble argues, then lead to a state of uncertainty, instability, and possibly anxiety. Ruble states:
Such a state may occur for a number of reasons. ... It may be generated either internally via the recognition of incompatible cognitions or externally during social interaction. The latter is particularly relevant to many types of life transitions, because such transitions are likely to alter the probability of encountering people whose viewpoints differ from one's own.
Racial and ethnic diversity in the student body and university efforts to foster opportunities for diverse students to interact and learn from each other in and out of the classroom offer college students who have grown up in the racially segregated United States the very features that these theories suggest will foster active thinking and personal development. These features include:
A White student, evaluating a course on intergroup relations that one of the authors taught at the University of Michigan, conveys the importance of these facets of diversity:
I come from a town in Michigan where everyone was white, middle-class and generally pretty closed-down to the rest of the world, although we didn't think so. It never touched us, so I never questioned the fact that we were "normal" and everyone else was "different." Listening to other students in the class, especially the African American students from Detroit and other urban areas just blew me away. We only live a few hours away and yet we live in completely separate worlds. Even more shocking was the fact that they knew about "my world" and I knew nothing about theirs. Nor did I think that this was even a problem at first. I realize now that many people like me can go through life and not have to see another point of view, that somehow we are protected from it. The beginning for me was when I realized that not everyone shares the same views as I, and that our different experiences have a lot to do with that.
One of our primary goals was to discover whether such encounters with diversity contribute to learning outcomes, not only among students at the University of Michigan but also among those attending a variety of four-year institutions across the country. A second key goal was to understand the extent to which these same diversity experiences contribute to the development of the skills and dispositions that students will need to be leaders in a pluralistic democracy.
From the time the founding fathers debated what form U.S. democracy should take--representational or directly participatory--education has been seen as the key to achieving an informed citizenry. In the compromise they reached involving both representation and broad participation, education was the mechanism that was to make broad participation possible. Benjamin Barber argues that it was [Thomas] Jefferson, certainly no advocate of diversity, who most forcefully argued that broad civic participation required education: "It remained clear to Jefferson to the end of his life that a theory of democracy that is rooted in active participation and continuing consent by each generation of citizens demands a civic pedagogy rooted in the obligation to educate all who would be citizens." To be sure, Jefferson was talking about education for those he defined as the body of citizens and not for the many who were not citizens at that time.
If education is the very foundation of democracy, how do experiences with racial/ethnic diversity affect the process of learning to become citizens? We contend that students educated in diverse institutions will be more motivated and better able to participate in an increasingly heterogeneous and complex society. In Democratic Education in an Age of Difference, Richard Guarasci and Grant Cornwell concur, claiming that "community and democratic citizenship are strengthened when undergraduates understand and experience social connections with those outside of their often parochial 'autobiographies,' and when they experience the way their lives are necessarily shaped by others."
However, the compatibility of diversity and democracy is not self-evident. Current critics of multicultural education worry that identities based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, and other categorizations are inimical to the unity needed for democracy. Yet the tension between unity and diversity, however politically charged, is not new in the United States.
In Fear of Diversity, Arlene Saxonhouse describes how the pre-Socratic playwrights as well as Plato and Aristotle dealt with the fear that "differences bring on chaos and thus demand that the world be put into an orderly pattern." While Plato envisioned a city in which unity and harmony would be based on the shared characteristics of a homogeneous citizenry, Aristotle recognized the value of heterogeneity and welcomed the diverse. Saxonhouse writes: "Aristotle embraces diversity as the others had not. ... The typologies that fill almost every page of Aristotle's Politics show him uniting and separating, finding underlying unity and significant differences." Aristotle advanced a political theory in which unity could be achieved through differences and contended that democracy based on such a unity would be more likely to thrive than one based on homogeneity. What makes democracy work, according to Aristotle, is equality among citizens (admittedly, in his time only free men, not women or slaves) who hold diverse perspectives and whose relationships are governed by freedom and rules of civil discourse. It is a multiplicity of perspectives and discourses in response to the inevitable conflicts that arise when citizens have differing points of view, not unanimity, that help democracy thrive.
Diversity, plurality, equality, and freedom are also implied in Piaget's theory of intellectual and moral development. He argues that children and adolescents can best develop a capacity to understand the ideas and feelings of others--what he calls perspective-taking--and move to a more advanced stage of moral reasoning when they interact with peers who have different points of view. Both differing perspectives and equality in relationships are important for intellectual and moral development. In a homogeneous environment in which young people are not forced to confront the relativity or limitations of their point of view, they are likely to conform to a single perspective defined by an authority. In a hierarchical environment in which young people are not obliged to discuss and argue with others on an equal basis, they are not likely to do the cognitive and emotional work that is required to understand how other people think and feel. These cognitive and emotional processes promote the moral development needed to make a pluralistic democracy work.
In the United States, however, common conceptions of democracy do not treat difference as being compatible with unity. In general, popular understandings of democracy and citizenship take one of two forms: 1) a liberal individualist conception in which citizens participate by voting for public servants to represent them and by other individual acts, and 2) a direct participatory conception in which people from similar backgrounds who are familiar with each other come together to debate the common good, as in the New England town meeting. Both of these conceptions privilege individuals and similarities rather than groups and differences.
The increasingly heterogeneous U.S. population challenges these popular conceptions of democracy. Consequently, we are now facing cultural, academic, and political debates over the extent to which American democracy can survive increasing heterogeneity and group-based social and political claims. Yet, it is clear that an ethnic hierarchy or one-way assimilation, both of which call for muting differences and cultural identities, is much less likely to prevail than in the past.
The theories of Aristotle and Piaget both suggest that difference and democracy can be compatible. The conditions deemed important for this compatibility include the presence of diverse others and diverse perspectives, equality among peers, and discussion according to rules of civil discourse. We hypothesize that these conditions foster the orientations that students will need to be citizens and leaders in the postcollege world: perspective-taking, mutuality and reciprocity, acceptance of conflict as a normal part of life, capacity to perceive differences and commonalties both within and between social groups, interest in the wider social world, and citizen participation.