Seeking Diversity, Selecting Discrimination
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Seeking Diversity, Selecting Discrimination Campus Diversity: The Hidden C o n s e n s u s , J o h n M . C a r e y, Katherine Clayton, Yusaku Horiuchi, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 274, $29.93 hardcover. George R. La Noue # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The authors, Carey and Horiuchi, Dartmouth College professors holding named chairs, and Clayton, an undergraduate student, begin with the following proposition: “The media, politicians, and the courts portray campuses as divided over diversity and affirmative action.” As their book title suggests, the authors set out to determine if a “hidden” campus diversity consensus exists for using “underrepresented” group preferences in admissions and faculty hiring. It probably will be a surprise to most readers that these preferences are a “hidden” consensus on campus. The George R. La Noue is Research Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; [email protected]. He is the author of Silenced Stages: The Loss of Academic Freedom and Campus Policy Debates (2019).
educational establishment and elite campuses consistently boast of their support for diversity actions and have added staff to implement a wide variety of diversity programming. The authors, however, employ an unusual research method to show that students as well at a selective group of campuses are on board with the diversity train. The research method is called “conjoint analysis,” which as Inside Higher Education (IHE) states was “first developed by marketing analysts” and is a tool used, according to Carey, “to sell you pizza with all the trimmings.” The process essentially asks respondents what decisions they would make given different variables. In this case, students at Dartmouth College, the University of California, San Diego, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Nevada, Reno were asked what choices they would make in admissions and faculty hiring given the various characteristics hypothetical candidates presented. (10) About 2,000 students of the roughly 95,000 students enrolled at these campuses responded to the main survey. This is not a small sample, but whether its response rate was representative is unknown. A partial subset of three other campus surveys is found in the appendix.
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According to the authors, scholarly excellence was the top priority for survey respondents and a majority of th em op po se d ra ce -co ns cio us admissions and hiring policies in the abstract by more than 2 to 1. (122) When considering individual candidates, however, students generally favored members of all traditionally underrepresented groups. Or as IHE put it, “the students [surveyed] prefer students of every race and ethnicity over whites. And they prefer faculty candidates in the same way.” Specifically, white respondents preferred Asian student applicants by 2 percentage points, 5 points for Hispanics, 7 points for blacks, and 13 points for Native Americans. (99) The preferen
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