Goerwitz

By Richard Goerwitz (June 2008)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are not those of my past academic employers, the University of Chicago and Brown University—or of my current employer, Carleton College. Nor should general statements I make about "top-tier schools" be taken as applying specifically to any of these institutions, unless I explicitly label them otherwise. Also, although in a few cases I allude to data that exists, but that can't be explicitly cited for legal and ethical reasons, hard data I cite is all either published or publicly available.

The Problem

It takes very little effort to see that historically disadvantaged and underrepresented minorities occupy a delicate position at most top-tier liberal arts colleges in the U.S., and that, despite a lot of (mostly deserved) self-satisfaction among college administrators about improvements since the early 60s, the status of such minorities remains an issue of great concern.

For example, just at my current institution alone, and just in the last six months, we've seen a student-newspaper discussion about problems with minority retention rates, an impassioned speech by a student outraged over hearing the "n-word" in class (twice), and a campus climate survey meant to help our Diversity Initiative Group correctly diagnose this and other related problems.

Diagnosing the problem is, of course, one thing. Actually curing it is quite another, mainly because of the ways in which colleges have gone about putting together solutions, using a standard admixture of committees, special programs, and enrollment shaping.

To me, the real solution lies in helping faculty and staff to put themselves in the place of a minority student, posing honest questions about what it really means to be "diverse," and asking ourselves whether diversity is in fact compatible with our ideal of a liberal education.

My belief is that diversity and liberal education, at least in the ways we normally define them, are incompatible—and that if we want to be diverse, our concept of liberal education, and of what it means generally to have a "good education," will need to change.

Some Facts

L et's begin with some facts that, though disconcerting, virtually everyone can agree on: Students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds (African American, Hispanic, Native American, etc.) aren't applying for entrance to liberal arts colleges in numbers that one would expect given the racial and cultural composition of the US as a whole. For example, according to 2000 US census data, thirteen percent of US citizens are of African American descent. Yet, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (URL), most top four-year liberal arts colleges like Carleton, Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, find only about 5% of their applicants self-identifying as African American.

We can follow this up with another straightforward, non-controversial observation: That the lack of such minority applicants to top-tier colleges reduces the potential for admissions officers to create a diverse and culturally rich campus environment, even though diversity and richness positively influence student satisfaction and learning (Astin 1993, p. 429-31) and are widely recognized as core part of a good liberal education.

One option for admissions officers trying to overcome this diversity deficit is to find ways of attracting more minority applicants, e.g., through outreach, special programs, and marketing. But the target group of high-achieving minorities is finite. According to FairTest.org, average SAT scores for African Americans lag about nineteen percent behind those of their white counterparts. Scores for Latinos run about thirteen percent behind (other stats here). In reality, therefore, no amount of marketing can overcome the issue that there just aren't a lot of high-scoring Latino, African American, and other historically disadvantaged minority candidates out there.

Other strategies that admissions officers can draw on to diversify their campuses include admitting a higher percentage of minority applicants, and increasing incentives for those who are admitted to actually attend. Both of these strategies are widely applied. At my institution, for example, we reported to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that in 2004 we accepted 43.6% of black applicants—as against 28.3% overall (as reported to the U.S. Department of Education for that same year; cf. figures for 1994). These numbers are not atypical. Most competitive, top-tier liberal arts schools accept, percentage-wise, significantly more applicants who claim some African, Latino, or Native American descent than white ones (see, e.g., these stats).

Some Conseqences

A

lthough such race-balancing enrollment management practices can produce bookishly neat diversity statistics, they have insidious side-effects. For one thing, they seduce college administrators into "painting by the numbers," going after kids from white areas who may not bring a lot of cultural diversity, simply because they self-identify as being at least partly minority.

To verify that this actually happens at your favorite institution, ask the office of institutional research there to collect the home addresses of current students who claim African American, Latino, or some other historically disadvantaged minority ancestry. Then have them tell you the proportion of addresses bearing zipcodes that, according to the year 2000 US census, reflect areas where that minority amounts to less than two percent of the population. You will typically find a large block of zipcodes falling into this category. In the case of African Americans, for example, you will find ten, twenty, thirty percent, or more of them listing home addresses in neighborhoods that are less than two percent African American (where only about two percent of African Americans, nationally, live). One wonders: Why are so many minority kids from heavily non-minority neighborhoods turning up in top-tier schools? Why the skew?

In reality, some of the skew has to do with the the shape of the admissions pool, and some with qualifications. But, whatever the reason, the dramatic over-representation of minorities who live in non-minority neighborhoods makes the isolation of minorities from more typical neighborhoods that much more profound. One has to ask: Are such admissions practices promoting true diversity? And is it any wonder that many minority students at top-tier schools feel like they've entered a foreign country, or that their peers may therefore see them as such?

Adding to the sense of foreignness is that graduation rates for historically disadvantaged minorities are typically much lower than for whites, and, because these minorities can therefore often use extra counseling, there is often a sense that such groups "don't belong." One sees such attitudes expressed occasionally among faculty—not so much because of racial prejudice, but rather simply because faculty members are products par excellence of the system that is now evaluating minority students. Faculty tend to be the high achievers and high scorers of the previous generation, and they naturally think and teach in ways that reflect and reinforce existing stereotypes of a "good student."

Faculty at top-tier schools are, furthermore, accustomed to a high level of uniformity in the input pool, and simply aren't well prepared to work with minorities that don't fit the usual mold ("we're not equipped for remedial work").

Such perceptions of "not fitting" are also reinforced by measurable facts like the SAT score gap separating students self-identifying as white from students self-identifying as having minority ancestry—as noted above.

Entrance Examinations and Ability

T he pernicious question that always underlies discussions like this is whether lower aggregate entrance examination scores mean lower "intelligence" and lower raw ability.

In fact, though, the only thing that standard entrance examination scores can tell us is that African American, Latino, and Native American high school students are, statistically speaking, less likely to be prepared than their white counterparts a) for taking entrance exams, and, more importantly, b) for regurgitating knowledge about things faculty want to teach students at top-tier liberal arts colleges.

Whether or not this lack of preparedness maps back to intelligence or raw ability depends on what you believe faculty are teaching and what you believe top-tier liberal arts colleges are, in general, actually doing.

What Liberal Arts Colleges Are Actually Doing

O ne of the more fabulous misconceptions held dear by the general public is that liberal arts colleges are primarily in the business of education.

In reality we may be, or we may not be. We simply don't know for sure, because we generally don't measure our ability to educate in a way that would tell us if we're doing it well, badly, or better than anyone else.

Take, for example, the well-known US News ranking system, which evaluates the supposed quality of colleges and universities. What does this ranking system (which most of us complain about, but nevertheless slavishly supply data for and nervously monitor) measure? It measures things like faculty salaries, endowment, incoming SAT and ACT scores, high school GPAs, reputation, retention rate, alumni contribution rate, class size, and so on (on the seeming insanity of this, see Astin 1991, p. 3-4; see also Graham and Thompson 2001). US News rankings are, unfortunately, typical, and highly reflective of how top-tier schools self conceptualize.

You may rightly wonder how anyone can claim to measure the quality of a college, i.e., its ability to educate, by measuring how smart people are before they enter (SAT, ACT, GPA, etc.), how much money it has, how well regarded it is, and so on. You'd think education would be about the difference between what comes in and what goes out (or at least that portion of the difference likely to be attributable to the institution). But the truth is that, although students study, receive grades, and clearly learn something, we don't systematically quantify what they learn in ways that would tell us whether they're learning more or better things at one institution than another (Katz 2008). Nor do we systematically quantify whether what our students learn is primarily a function of teaching quality—rather than, say, of how well prepared incoming students are for what our faculty want to teach them (exceptions do exist: Klein 2005; cf. also NSSE, which none of the US News 2008 top-ten liberal arts colleges currently participate in). In cases where we actually possess objective ways of measuring student intellectual development (GREs, MCATs, LSATs, etc.), we find that we can predict this development largely from the students' entering SAT or ACT scores (Astin 1993, p. 199 ff.). Although teaching and institutional character have some effect, that effect is small enough that we generally don't expend much energy analyzing it, focusing instead on resources and reputation (see Astin 1997, p. 219 ff.).

As absurd as this might sound, the situation actually makes a kind of grim, practical sense. Why should we bother developing ways to quantify our ability to educate and develop students when students, both minority and white, already report great satisfaction with what we do? (And yes, student satisfaction is something top-tier schools actually do measure.) Although warning signs have begun to appear on the horizon, applications continue to roll in. And donations continue to pour into our multi-million (or billion) dollar endowment-coffers. I'm happy. Our well-paid faculty are happy. Our students are extremely happy and generally doing well.

This situation would be insane if, in fact, education were our primary purpose. But education is, for us, more a derivative product. Our primary product (or really, service) is to select, and also prepare, students for a place in the US upper middle and upper classes. We clothe this process in highfalutin rhetoric—rhetoric that, ironically, changes from era to era (see Rothblatt 2003 for a summary). But basically what we're doing, in any given period, is certifying that students are, culturally and intellectually, fit to function in the still overwhelmingly white world of educated North American society. To do that we look primarily at input characteristics like SAT and ACT scores, GPAs, and other measures that happen to correlate strongly with neighborhood, income, and social standing. We also favor heavily those applicants whose parents went to our institutions (so-called "legacies"). In effect, we're really more like an exclusive club or fraternity than a school, and so for us membership criteria are central (look here for a funnier take on this; see also Carey 2008).

We admittedly don't talk openly about this aspect of our mission, if in fact we recognize it consciously ourselves. Rather, we stress breadth, service, engagement, methods, critical thinking, and foundational knowledge. We use fickle terms like "liberal education," and we often gripe about metrics, self-evaluation, and the assessment movement in general. We speak as if we believed human nature to be malleable, and as if we played a pivotal role in perfecting it (an "unconstrained" vision of humanity [Sowell 2002]). Yet we do everything we can to stack the deck in favor of people who already possess the characteristics we say we impart, and then we omit to measure, systematically, what we ourselves add in a way that would distinguish one school from another—or we simply throw up our hands and say that what we do cannot be measured (as noted in Katz 2008).

But we do this for a reason: Our faculty are content, our students think we're great, and we observe that those students who come to our institutions typically end up getting into graduate school or finding jobs, doing something interesting, making decent money, and then giving us some of that money so we can increase our endowment, erect new buildings, buy better equipment, pay faculty more, and retain our status as an exclusive club, i.e., a "top school."

It therefore doesn't matter what we teach students, or, more importantly, whether it has any particular utility. Nor does it matter whether we are actually perfecting young, malleable intellects or not. We assert that we do these things, and that we do them better than other institutions. And we mostly even believe our own rhetoric. But the only non-anecdotal evidence we can provide for our assertions is that those who possess degrees from our institutions seem, for reasons we can't fully quantify, to be making a nice life for themselves among the educated North American elite.

Culture, Community

A t this point I've essentially tipped my hand. Once you understand that a liberal education is fundamentally about culture and acculturation, it becomes much easier to see why a typical minority student might not be attracted to a liberal arts college and might not be as motivated to acquire knowledge associated with such an education as a white student, or why those more motivated to do so might tend to come from white neighborhoods and be more culturally white. One can also see how more heavily minority communities might not offer the same level of embedded support, or socialize students to take advantage of opportunities (Stafford 1991) to the degree that white communities do—and why this cultural (not cognitive) difference might express itself as lower SAT and ACT scores.

Making matters worse is that top-tier schools are largely staffed, as noted earlier, by products of the system—people who scored well on standard tests, and who loved higher ed so much that they went back for more schooling. Their lifestyles and ways of looking at problems all reflect their background. They are overwhelmingly white (example stats). And although they may truly embrace the idea of diversity, in fact their curricula, their values, and the standards by which they measure students as worthy of admission to their institutions, undercut many of the methods by which true diversity is achieved.

With respect to admissions, it is also worth observing that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, environmental influence on college students is the peer group. In particular, having wealthy or socially well-placed peers can positively influence everything from satisfaction with one's education, to cognitive development, to MCAT scores (Astin 1993, p. 188, 224 ff., 408-411). Top-tier liberal arts colleges recognize this, at a gut level, and occasionally at an empirical one as well. And although they don't label it as such, they, in effect, create an environment thoroughly permeated by the culture of high-socioeconomic-standing (SES) students (or ones whose attitudes are similar to those of high-SES students). They also sense, intuitively, that they must carefully limit the quantity and type of students they admit (hence the skew towards minorities from white neighborhoods, noted above). And they fear that if they admit too many students who don't fit their usual admissions profile, the character of the institution will change—which is, of course, correct. In fact it's integral to the basic thesis of this essay.

Given the significance of these practices, you'd think they would be something they would be openly questioning and talking about. But they're not, at least not in those terms.

Anecdotally I can report that when I've attempted to talk about such things openly with academic administrators in various colleges, I've met with hostility, disbelief, and, worst of all, warnings that I should be careful about what I say because it could so easily be misunderstood. (My take on this is that the reason I should be careful is that people will understand exactly what I mean and that this might trigger uncomfortable questions and emotions.) Conversations with admissions officers tend to trigger understandable defensive reactions ("there just aren't enough qualified applicants out there" or "our target market is high school students who [insert input measure here]; to abandon them would be to hurt us competitively, and fundamentally change the character of the institution"). Admissions officers are simply doing what their institutions expect of them. Recall my comments about high-SES students above.

As for faculty, I have found that they are often unaware of what their own institutions' executives are asking of their admissions departments; and they aren't comfortable looking closely into it. And if you tell faculty, statistically, what goes on, they will often deny it ("I can't imagine them doing that").

As for minority students themselves, I find that they are often reluctant to speak out in open and productive ways, and become deeply uncomfortable when others openly do so (believe me, I've made this mistake). In fact, they are trying to do well and just fit in.

Discussion

D espite our rhetoric about being places that promote creativity—places where we are free to question ourselves and the status quo—the fact is that we top-tier liberal arts colleges are far too comfortable, and take ourselves far too seriously, to be very good at open inquiry and self-evaluation. Also, there are certain structural features of the typical top-tier liberal arts college that make open inquiry and self-reflection even more difficult than it would otherwise be.

For one thing, most small liberal arts colleges are really more akin to professional societies than to, say, a business or a typical university. We're too civil to become the political mosh pit one finds in many research institutions. We're too cozy, and don't bring in enough research dollars, to sustain any significant fiefdoms. We also lack (at least on the faculty side) the highly structured hierarchy one finds in, say, a typical community college with well-defined administrative positions and departmental leadership.

At my institution, for example, faculty generally take turns acting as department heads and associate deans. Only recently was the Dean of the College (akin to a provost in many other, larger institutions) made a permanent non-rotating position. Significant decisions, like determining course loads and setting curricular priorities, though vetted through committees and discussed by trustees, are ultimately ratified democratically, by faculty votes. We are, in essence, a collegium with an attached underclass of support staff (see Birnbaum 1991, chapter 4, for a funny, insightful take on this).

At small, top-tier liberal arts schools, faculty and staff feel intense pressure to maintain an atmosphere of calm and mutual respect. We tend to compartmentalize people by field and sub-field, and seldom have the courage to make revolutionary cross-disciplinary generalizations, or openly traipse into "someone else's field" (I can only imagine what my own colleagues will think if they ever read this essay!). At our institutions open, direct conflict and criticism are relatively rare and generally occur via intermediaries and muted feedback mechanisms. When open conflict does break out, it often triggers a mad scramble to study and calm the situation. And regardless of the merits of the case, the party who takes the biggest hit (whether victim or perpetrator) is often the one who has fewer, or shallower, community ties, or who controls fewer resources.

One can easily see, given the environment we have created for ourselves, how it might be difficult to deal with raw, emotional issues that impact a minority of students who, statistically, show lower levels of preparedness, and who (for historical and cultural reasons) often react viscerally to conflicts with the dominant culture. We're just not cut out for productive, direct dialog under such duress. We can do it if there's a pressing need, if something is broken. But, here's the thing: Given that we are top-tier liberal arts schools, and given that graduates of all ethnicities tell us we're great, it's hard to self-conceive as broken.

I recently talked with the faculty member who administers our Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, the goal of which is to "increase the number of minority students who will pursue PhDs in core fields in the arts and sciences" thereby helping to "eradicate racial disparities" (ref). He was unhappy when I spoke about strategic enrollment shaping and how this affects minorities, and said he "couldn't imagine [admissions staff member's name deleted] doing that." The faculty member in question is a friend of mine, and I deeply like and respect him. And after hearing his response I felt bad about even discussing the subject with him. Doubtless I was affronting his students or his program. I was also saying that our institution was broken in one respect that was hard for him, as for many others, to accept.

My contention here, though, is that most supposed top-tier liberal arts colleges are, in fact, broken. At the very least we're staring into the face of an ugly clash between our core value of diversity (which implies cultural breadth and richness) and traditional liberal education, which serves, as explained above, to certify that someone can read, write, and generally reference a common body of language, knowledge, and social conventions that will enable them to function at a high level in North American upper middle and upper class society. Adding insult to injury, we favor those traits in prospective students that predict success in our peculiarly structured curricula—a practice that, by its very nature, tends to suppress diversity (Astin 1997, p. 220).

The insidious truth is that diversity brings in a new set of requirements that have the potential to undermine our whole notion of what it means to be a "good school." Actually, it will force us to redefine what it means to be a good school in terms that may hinge, not on measures of wealth, reputation, and "intelligence" (as existing intelligentsia define it), but rather in terms of our capacity to educate. When all is said and done, a lot of gut-wrenching changes will have to take place, from redefining the criteria by which we grant tenure (see, e.g., Astin 1993, p. 421), to reevaluating the importance of standard entrance exams and of existing academic performance metrics.

Ideas

T here are some quick, practical steps top-tier liberal arts colleges can take to reduce the tension between diversity and traditional liberal education, and help smooth the way for more significant change later on.

One such step is to build out their career-counseling machinery and integrate it better with the curriculum and the tenure-evaluation process. Faculty at top-tier liberal arts colleges are typically white and have typically worked inside higher education for most, if not all, of their adult lives, and so, not surprisingly, what they are often best at is sending students on for more schooling (to graduate and professional schools—a dubious practice, given that far more graduate students are churned out, nationally, than find jobs in their fields). The narrowness of faculty vocational experience and cultural affiliations naturally limits not only their ability to counsel and mentor but also their ability to recognize and measure competence against non-traditional standards. An active career-counseling program that is integrated with the curriculum, and used as part of the tenure-evaluation process, can help faculty expand their horizons, and, as a side-benefit, improve their ability to serve non-majority constituencies, who (as freshman surveys, etc., can tell them) tend to be more socially activist, less hedonistic, and more overtly interested in economic and social mobility than their white counterparts (Astin 1993, p. 115, 121, 125).

In a related vein, academic departments at top-tier liberal arts institutions that are having a hard time attracting minorities should consider initiating discussions with their respective institutions' offices of institutional research. If possible, they should request attitudinal breakdowns of students by gender, ethnicity, and anticipated major. Those institutions that require students to take a standard freshman survey, such as CIRP, will likely find rich quantities of relevant data. This data will likely reveal major attitudinal differences between minorities and whites with respect to "earthly affairs," such as promoting racial understanding, running a successful business, effecting social change, and making good money. This data should be examined in the context of curriculum re-evaluation, and it should be analyzed in conjunction with counselors from the local career office.

Yet another quick step top-tier liberal arts institutions can take to reduce the tension between diversity and their traditional missions, is simply to toss out SAT and ACT scores—not entirely, but as a major hurdle in the admissions decision process. After all, if education is about the difference between what comes in and what does out, wouldn't these institutions stand to gain more with students who come with less? Why should they obsess over input-only measures that serve primarily to restrict the input pool to students who already possess characteristics they claim to impart? Why keep upping the SAT ante, especially when it impacts diversity so negatively and leads to inconsistent, and on some level unfair, admissions patterns? It's easy to get so wrapped up in numbers, input measures, and marketing segments that one loses sight of primary educational goals, namely to teach and learn. Perhaps standards for admission should focus more on things like breadth, leadership, and positive outlook. Perhaps it's time just to take a break from the collection and use of SAT and ACT scores, then re-evaluate that decision after four to six years. Some institutions have already taken this step. And in fact there is now solid research that shows that the level of achievement a prospective student shows in whatever enviroment he or she is currently in (i.e., high school) is better at predicting long-term college outcomes than achievement tests (Geiser and Santelices 2007).

In conjunction with eliminating SAT and ACT scores from the admissions process, top-tier liberal arts colleges should also stop supplying these scores (and other data) to organizations that rank colleges based primarily on resources, reputation, and input characteristics. It's highly hypocritical for such colleges to complain as bitterly as they do about such ranking systems, then slavishly supply the data needed to sustain them—then nervously monitor the results, and utilize those results in self-approbatory marketing literature!

Still another step that could be taken is to admit more foreign students. Foreign students have perhaps the most to offer in terms of diversity (language, culture, life expectations; but, for various reasons, not economics). Yet they are, percentage wise, the least admitted group at many top-tier schools. Much of this has to do with language competence. But if such schools truly value diversity, they will find ways to compensate. The potential gains are great.

Diversity might also be significantly enhanced at top-tier liberal arts colleges if more faculty (part-time or otherwise) were recruited from the ranks of accomplished individuals in non-academic walks of life. At present, most top-tier colleges consider it a hallmark of their superior status that faculty members hold PhDs, and spend a good share of their time publishing books, articles, etc. in refereed academic venues, despite the fact that these things are often inversely correlated with student satisfaction and key learning outcomes (Graham and Thompson 2001; on "research orientation," see Astin 1993, p. 66-7, 281-2 et alibi; cf., though, p. 412). Put differently, despite lacking evidence that it contributes significantly to the quality of the education they offer, top-tier liberal arts schools expend untold time and energy securing faculty "stars," and they boast about how much time their faculty spend in discourse with peers. They also draw their faculty largely from a small, culturally monolithic sector of the economy, and of life. One has to wonder: How can a campus built on such a foundation possibly claim to be diverse? And how can it collectively comprehend, still less address, the interests and needs of the wider community it aspires to serve? How can it possibly attract the number of minority applicants that are needed? I recognize that it's important for teachers to rub shoulders with other experts in their fields. And it's great if their work is popular among peers—if for no other reason than that their recommendations may carry more weight. But popularity is a dangerous metric of academic success because it diverts attention away from the real point of higher education, which is to educate. Ironically, though, we feel forced to use popularity as a key metric because we don't actually know how well we educate. To make matters worse, our fixation on what peers think of our faculty actually ends up undercutting our core value of independence, and our rationale for things like academic tenure. Also, by using peer reputation as an indirect measure of faculty quality, we actually end up restraining trade in new ideas by insisting that our faculty, and their ideas, be palatable to existing scholarly communities composed, as noted, of an embarrassingly narrow range of mostly white upper middle class professionals—who did really well on their SATs!

A final step top-tier schools can take to reduce the tension between diversity and traditional liberal education is to soften "legacy" status (i.e., whether or not an applicant's parent[s], sibling[s], etc. went to the institution to which they are applying) as a primary consideration for admission. After all, legacy applicants currently have less to offer in terms of diversity than almost any other constituency. Yet top-tier colleges show them very, very special favoritism. If such schools truly value diversity and cultural richness, and really aren't just clubs or culture factories, they will reconsider the extent and nature of this policy.

I am under no illusion that all of these proposed changes will go over well with faculty. And actually I find that, as non-faculty, talking with faculty about reforming liberal education can feel like talking with military professionals about foreign policy or like talking with logging companies about natural resources. Sometimes you're summarily dismissed as a dilettante. More often, though, you receive thoughtful responses if you pose your questions gently. But nobody is looking for your input. And if you offer it anyway, you'll often find yourself in an awkward—even hostile—environment.

My input, though, is simple and intuitive: If top-tier liberal arts colleges can re-focus on teaching and learning, they will find themselves, as a welcome side benefit, more diverse, more open, and more capable of providing a comfortable, but rewarding and challenging, home for minorities—with a renewed focus on actual education.

Conclusion

I n practice, modern top-tier liberal arts colleges function as culture clubs that define themselves mainly in terms of wealth, reputation, and membership standards. They have sincerely tried to embrace diversity as a core value, but have not yet fully redefined their institutional missions, or how they go about recruiting, evaluating, and educating, to take diversity fully into account. And often they have trouble talking about diversity in truthful, productive ways. My view is that until they can do these things, students from subcultures that have historically defined themselves largely in opposition to, or conflict with, the dominant culture will always be viewed as less prepared, at least in the ways that college administrators currently think they should be prepared. And, until such institutions broaden their sense of purpose and recognize shortcomings in how they currently assess themselves and their students, the sheer presence of these subcultures in such institutions will tend to create discomfort and uncertainty about their identity and mission.

Although I've focused here mainly on racial and cultural diversity, much of what I've said applies also to economic diversity, and to the problems of classism and social stratification on campus.

What I am advocating, simply, is that top-tier liberal arts institutions broaden their sense of purpose and begin to rethink who they are, not in terms of wealth, reputation, and entrance criteria, but rather in terms of how much they can do with the talent they receive, i.e., in terms of their ability to educate (Astin 1991, 1997). And I advocate (as Klein 2005, Katz 2008, and many others) that they put their creativity and advanced problem-solving skills to work trying to figure out what exactly they do (insofar as it's not just running a culture club) and pinning down at least a few methods for measuring it—in a way that would tell them whether they do it worse, the same, or better, than anyone else.

By understanding (or in some cases admitting) what exactly they do, they will set themselves up for talking intelligently about what they really should do. And in so doing they will set themselves up also for understanding the deep changes needed in order to incorporate diversity fully into institutional missions and overall campus environments.

Resources

I list resources here that I've personally found enlightening and insightful (or that are cited above). I'd love to pad this list with dozens of learned references beyond these, and pretend that I'm smart and well read. But the reality is that I spend most of my time creating databases, reading software manuals, and trying to find somebody to play tennis with. To be honest, when I read for pleasure it's usually at bedtime with my seven year-old daughter, and our idea of literature is the Chronicles of Narnia or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

• Astin 1991. Astin, Alexander. Assessment for Excellence. American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1991. (Amazon)
• Astin 1993. Astin, Alexander W. What Matters in College? Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993. Great quote: "The real issue in reforming undergraduate education, it seems to me, is to effect a better rapprochement between our explicitly stated values and the values that really drive our institutional policies and decisions" (p. 435-6).
• Astin 1997. Astin, Alexander. "Liberal Education and Democracy: The Case for Pragmatism." Pages 207-223 of Education and Democracy, Robert Orrill, ed. College Entrance Examination Board, 1997. Great quote: "If I could change just one thing about the way we academics approach our own work, it would be to develop a greater sense of self-awareness about the values and beliefs that drive our policies, and especially about the extent to which we have, perhaps unconsciously, embraced some of society's least noble and perhaps even self-destructive values and beliefs" (p. 219).
• Birnbaum 1991. Birnbaum, Robert. How Colleges Work. Jossey-Bass, 1991. (Amazon)
• Carleton College Campus Climate Survey—Results (URL; posted some months after this essay was originally written)
• CIRP Overview, by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. (URL). Interesting analyses of CIRP data for well-known schools are often available on the web (e.g., here).
• Carey 2008. "What's Missing from 'Open' Courses." Inside Higher Ed (June 6, 2008). (URL)
• Changes in Staff Distribution and Salaries of Full-Time Employees in Postsecondary Institutions: Fall 1993-2003. Postsecondary Education Descriptive Analysis Report. NCES 2006-152 (ERIC document, ED492936; URL)
• Donhardt 2004. Donhardt, Gary L. "In Search of the Effects of Academic Achievement in Postgraduation Earnings." Research in Higher Education 45:3 (May 2004), p. 271-284.
• Geiser and Santelices 2007. Validity of High-School Grades in Predicting Student Success Beyond the Freshman Year: High-School Record vs. Standardized Tests as Indicators of Four-Year College Outcomes. Research & Occasional Paper Series, Center for Studies in Higher Education 6.07 (available here)
• Gohn and Albin 2006. Gohn, Lyle A. and Albin, Ginger R., editors. Understanding Student Subpopulations. A NASPA e-book (available here)
• Graham and Thompson 2001. Graham, Amy and Thompson, Nicholas. "Broken Ranks." Washington Monthly, September 2001. (URL; note that Amy Graham is the former director of data research for U.S. News & World Report; see also Thompson 2000 below)
• Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. (URL)
• Katz 2008. Katz, Stanley N. "Taking the True Measure of a Liberal Education." Chronicle of Higher Education 54:37 (2008-05-23), A32.
• Klein 2005. Klein, Stephen P. et al. "An Approach to Measuring Cognitive Outcomes Across Higher Education Institutions." Research in Higher Education 46:3 (May, 2005), p. 251-276.
• Nystrand 1975. "The Politics of Rank Ordering." The English Journal 64:3 (March 1975), p. 42-45. (URL)
• Ogbu 2006. Ogbu, John U. "Black Education." Chapter 6 (p. 79-94) of Black Families, Hierette Pipes McAdoo ed. Fourth edition. Sage Publications, 2006. (Amazon)
• Rothblatt 2003. Rothblatt, Sheldon. The Living Arts: Comparative and Historical Reflections on Liberal Education. Part of the Academy in Transition series. Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2003. (URL)
• Smith and Moreno 2006. Smith, Daryl G. and Moreno, José F. "Hiring the Next Generation of Professors: Will Myths Remain Excuses?" Chronicle of Higher Education 53:6 (2006-09-29), 64.
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• A Test of Leadership. A report of the commission appointed by U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings (2006). See the U.S. Department of Education website.
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• Zimmerman and Winston 2004. Zimmerman, David J. and Winston, Gordon C. "Peer Effects in Higher Education." Pages 239-299 of College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It. Caroline M. Hoxby ed. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Note: Although this article contains interesting data and observations, it's written in the worst sort of academic-ese. It's just inexcusable.