Diversity, Inc. by Pamela Newkirk

Author:Pamela Newkirk [Newkirk, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

While faculty diversity hiring has slowed, Columbia has remained at the forefront of the diversity movement. The school has also doubled down on student diversity, a challenge that Mitchell said is infinitely easier, given fresh opportunities each year to select a new class. The incoming undergraduate class of 2022 was its most diverse ever, with 16 percent Black, 17 percent Latino, 28 percent Asian, and 17 percent first generation.

“As we come into our own, the opposition attacks and demonizes,” said Mitchell. “I’m proud of the accomplishments. The challenge now is to sustain an arc of progress. The models are there.”17

Columbia can sustain its $10 million-a-year investment in diversity for five years, until 2023. The question is, what will happen afterward. “He understands legacy,” said Mitchell of Bollinger, who in 2018 entered his seventeenth year at the helm of Columbia. “My intention is to move this toward endowment,” which would require an investment of $200 million to endow the entire program. It is an ambitious fundraising goal that will likely compete with other development priorities, but Mitchell is hopeful. “The only security is long-term security. That is the direction.”

In the meantime, he said, schools must continually build bridges to steer underrepresented minorities to PhD programs and to STEM. He said schools will continue to be challenged by pipeline issues resulting from the decline of public education. While there are significantly more PhDs among underrepresented minorities, “is it enough to achieve diversity across the nation? Not a chance.… But it’s not just the numbers,” Mitchell said, alluding to retention and the protests that have gripped college campuses. “It’s the climate.”

However, Mitchell said he’s encouraged by the wave of diversity initiatives now under way at many of Columbia’s peer institutions. Since 2015, hundreds of millions of dollars have been pledged to address diversity at other prestigious schools, including a $50 million commitment by Yale, $25 million by Dartmouth, $25 million by Johns Hopkins, $50 million by Cornell, and $165 million by Brown, $100 million of which will be endowed. “We’re revisiting things nationally that were supposedly resolved fifty years ago,” Mitchell said. “We have short memories. We’re reliving and revising.”

“It’s risky business,” added Middleton, noting the backlash diversity initiatives often provoke. “Somebody’s got to get through and get over.”

Change, Middleton said, requires leadership, resources, and intentionality at the top. “People figured that I could do it alone,” he said of the years he spent promoting diversity at the University of Missouri before he became the interim president. “I never had the kind of resources that I needed to really address the problem.”

Diversity efforts are not only threatened by the courts, legislatures, and resistance from faculty but can also be undermined by the indifference of leadership, alumni, and patrons.

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