As the Woke Revolution continues to sweep through higher education, the conflict keeps getting worse. I don’t mean the political and social tensions that woke activism creates. The problem is, rather, the contradiction between the woke mandate of diversity and the university’s dedication to excellence.
The two don’t mix, and as the one goes up, the other must go down.
Is there any institution in American society as caught up in competition, prestige, and status as is the selective college? Is any ranking more noticed than the U.S. News & World Report list of schools? People lump Yale, Harvard, Amherst, Berkeley, Duke, and the rest of the elite institutions together as if they were a united bloc, but the truth is that the rivalries are intense, and mutual scrutiny is nonstop. Princeton’s admissions office watches what Columbia’s does; Emory watches Vanderbilt.
Each looks for a competitive advantage, and if one school’s applicant pool goes up or down significantly, others take notice.
Undermining Excellence
One of the longtime pillars of the U.S. News assessment of schools is the average test scores of entering students. A higher SAT score means a more skilled and talented student body, the reasoning goes, producing a stronger academic climate in the dorms and libraries and dining halls, thus encouraging better outcomes for all. But the SAT doesn’t help with diversity. Asians score well, but they’re already overrepresented on campus. African American and Hispanic/Latino students don’t score so well, which makes it harder for selective schools to admit them and fix their underrepresentation at those schools.The action follows another change in the requirements that the OU Regents approved in July. That change wasn’t a removal; it was an addition: a diversity/inclusion course that all students have to take. In other words, the most rigorous undergraduate activity in the curriculum is no longer necessary, but a full class in what is sure to be an ideological exercise in social dogma is. Several heads of departments protested the loss of capstone (while signaling, of course, their approval of the diversity plan), but the administration is pressing ahead. It’s more important that they appear woke than academic.
Impossible Contradiction
Where is this going? As far as progressives can take it. Woke Revolutionaries know that higher education is the main gatekeeper to the elite. If the hurdles and evaluations and exclusions of the selective university aren’t displaced by diversity commands, professional spheres in American society will remain an area of under-representation. If a few standards have to be lowered, well, that’s a small price to pay for social justice.It does, however, cloud the primary claim of the top schools in the United States. They can’t keep highlighting excellence, because excellence means exclusion, testing and grading, and discrimination. Different groups will be differently impacted, but the more excellent a school strives to be, the more selective it must be. Inclusion doesn’t jibe. Diversity doesn’t either.
Of course, a math department shouldn’t approach a job search in the complacent expectation that it will yield a male. It may be best for a department actively to hope to hire more women and more underrepresented minorities. But once the process begins, everyone has to be taken as an individual, not a group representative. If a male and a female candidate come up more or less even in the screening of job applicants, then hire the woman. But when we step back from the process, we know that most of the top candidates every year are men.
There’s no way around this except to eliminate the evidence of unequal talents. But that means eliminating the very evidence of excellence, too. It’s a bind, and college leaders haven’t found a way out of it. They will continue to trumpet the ideals of both, diversity and excellence, as if the two are thriving on their respective campuses like nowhere else, but the contradiction is getting impossible to conceal. They can’t stop doing so, though; the woke influence on campus compels it. The result is that college presidents, provosts, and deans will sound more and more like salesmen and less like academics.
Colleges already have a credibility problem, coupled with widespread anger over the sticker price. This is only going to make it worse.