The Graduate Division-sponsored conference, “Achieving Graduate Diversity in a Post-Proposition 209 Environment,” drew some 250 participants from the campus, the community, and other universities for a day of speeches, seminars, and workshops on topics ranging from recruitment to retention.
Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl opened the September 23 conference by defending the achievements of affirmative action. Quoting from The Shape of the River, a just-published study by former Harvard University President Derek Bok and former Princeton University President William G. Bowen, Berdahl said that those who argue that society is better off if selective institutions do not use race as a factor in college admissions are “flat wrong.”
The Bok and Bowen study shows that African Americans, for example, graduate at higher levels from selective schools, go on to earn higher degrees, and are more involved in community leadership than African American students who graduate from less selective schools. Furthermore, white students at selective universities were much more likely to know at least two African American students well than were white students at less selective universities.
At the same time, Berdahl said, Proposition 209 has forced society to acknowledge that the beneficiaries of affirmative action have been mostly from the middle class. To reach the disadvantaged, society must address the inadequacies of the public elementary and secondary schools. Proposition 209 has drawn Berkeley and other universities into more active partnerships in solving public school problems.
“Sometimes we do the right thing for the wrong reasons,” Berdahl said. “Proposition 209 has caused us to do things we should have been doing anyway.”
Berdahl concluded his remarks by noting that the solutions must begin at the elementary school level, if not preschool. He also stressed that faculty need to play a stronger role in mentoring, especially for students who don’t come from education-oriented backgrounds, and that universities should rethink the meaning of merit and undertake more research along the lines of the Bok-Bowen study.
Most importantly, he said, we need to simply keep at it. Over and over again, he emphasized that we must stress the value that students and faculty of different backgrounds bring to graduate education.
Changing the Climate
In the plenary session, Shirley Hune, associate dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), gave a talk entitled “Doing Diversity: Adding to the Chill or Warming the Climate of Academe?” In her presentation, Hune called for nothing less than transforming the culture of the academy.
Hune began by recounting her own history as the first member of her Asian-American family to go to college in the 1960s; she did not have a single woman faculty member or faculty member of color during her entire four years. When she returned for graduate school in the 1970s, she was thrilled to study under two African-American professors and to choose among courses that included ethnic studies, women’s studies, and social history. “The academy was changing,” she said. “And I wanted to be a part of that.”
Twenty years later, she doesn’t believe the academy has changed enough.
“For women and minorities,” she said, “our colleges and universities remain an inhospitable, racialized, and gender-biased environment.”
In her research and in conversations, Hune hears complaints from students who are routinely referred to in their departments as “the Indian student” or “the Vietnamese student,” or who are asked in their classrooms to express the opinion of “your people.” Some so fear being labeled an ethnic scholar that they avoid ethnic studies in an effort to be seen as mainstream.
Minorities find themselves isolated and overburdened, Hune said. They lack the “critical mass” needed for a support system. Departmental culture, cliques within departments, the types of courses that Teaching Assistants (TAs) are assigned, and the selection process for TAs— what Hune called “everyday microbehaviors”—all can contribute to an inhospitable climate.
Hune decried the lack of diversity on campus search committees and complained about the rhetoric espoused by UCLA faculty that only the top students from the top schools are good enough for them. Such a mind-set excludes many minority graduate students, who often come from working-class backgrounds, are the first in their families to go to college, and have few mentors to steer them to top schools. And worse, the stereotype isn’t even true. In reality, Hune said, most UCLA graduate students come not from Ivy League colleges but from California state colleges. “Yet what message are we sending?” she asked.
Hune was adamant about why universities need to make the climate a warmer one.
“Graduate diversity matters in critical ways,” she said. “A diverse graduate student pool is the pool of candidates for diversifying faculty, and any decline in the number of graduate students of color and women jeopardizes the composition of our future faculty. A diverse graduate student body is also critical for undergraduate education: women and minorities can play an active role as TAs, acting as role models, validating research topics and areas of study, and identifying undergraduates for graduate study. Diverse graduate students bring different and fresh perspectives to the field, the classroom, research methodology, and research topics.”
The Mentoring Pyramid
Other conference seminars explored how to go about changing the climate of academe. In a workshop on mentoring, Richard Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University, described the “pyramid of mentoring” structure he’s developed at the Houston, Texas university for a program called “Spend a Summer with a Scientist.” The program, originally aimed at underrepresented minority students, is designed to give students the opportunity to gain research experience.
The lead mentor—in Rice’s case, Tapia himself—must be viewed as having clout within the university and able to serve as an advocate for his students. Beneath the lead mentor come junior faculty, postdocs, senior graduate students, and junior graduate students, on down to undergraduates.
The “machine” Tapia’s put in place operates well even when he’s not there to lead it. “Everybody has to give some,” Tapia said. “I don’t overburden students or faculty.”
The structure creates a strong community of faculty and students who alert Tapia when a student is in trouble, either academically or personally. Tapia in turn “calls in the troops” to talk the student through. Such a support network helps break down isolation, which, he warned, is a far greater threat to underrepresented students than academic problems.
Tapia would like to see mentoring pyramids throughout the university, not just in special programs. Like Hune, he aims to do nothing less than change university culture. Still, in practical terms, he advises that it’s unrealistic to expect full faculty participation. His goal is to recruit two or three faculty members from each department.
A Community of Students
Improving public schools and giving disadvantaged students a leg up through summer research programs are tools to help recruit underrepresented students. But what about retaining the minority students already in graduate school? In the same mentoring workshop, Hatem Bazian, a graduate student in Near Eastern Studies at Berkeley, listed some of the challenges minority students face.
Expectations are often higher for minority students, he said, but no one spells out just what those expectations are. Financial needs are different; graduate students of color often have families to support. Already feeling isolated, minority students may resist asking questions. Many departments have no faculty of color, and those who are willing to help out across departments can end up overextended and burned out. Departmental advisers deal only with academic issues, not personal or even practical questions, like where to find an inexpensive file cabinet.
Addressing such challenges means not only looking at programs that work—rare enough—but adapting them to meet restrictions imposed by Proposition 209.
Bazian would like to see the University institutionalize a program now in place at the Graduate School of Education in which upper-level graduate students mentor other graduate students. While the program was initiated and is run by graduate students, the peer mentors are not volunteers but are paid by the school.
The Graduate Mentorship Program was formed, at least in pre-Proposition 209 days, because, as peer mentor Julianna Lopez said, “While we brought minority students in, we did nothing to keep them.” Lopez and other peer mentors talked about the program during a conference workshop on retention and financial resources.
“The model universities have of students is old,” said peer mentor Pam Norton. “They see a young, single, white male, a monk who can devote himself to his studies, rather than a 45-year-old returning student of color who’s a single mother, like me. I was not only unable to fit that model, I wasn’t willing. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my family.”
Today, the Graduate Mentorship Program’s mission statement describes serving graduate students who have been historically underrepresented in graduate education as well as all students who feel the need for academic support and those at critical transition points in their academic experience. Peer mentors answer questions students may be afraid to ask their professors: Just what is a position paper? They also give students the kind of information faculty advisers either don’t know or won’t give: Is it really impossible to hold a job while attending graduate school? Does anyone really do all that reading?
Providing a support group helps overcome the isolation that is detrimental to all graduate students, but especially to those who are isolated by virtue of being in the minority.
“It’s not just students of color who are asking for community,” points out peer mentor Colin Ormsby. “It’s all students.”
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