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Michael B. Paulsen
Editor
Higher
Education:
Handbook
of Theory
and Research
Volume 32
123
Higher Education: Handbook of Theory
and Research
Volume XXXII
The Series Editor:
John M. Braxton, Ph.D., Department of Leadership, Policy & Organization, Payne Hall,
Peabody #514, 230 Appleton Place, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203-5721, USA,
john.m.braxton@vanderbilt.edu
(College Faculty)
Stephen L. DesJardins, Ph.D., School of Education, #2108D SEB, 610 E. University Avenue,
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1259, USA, sdesj@umich.edu
(Research Methodology)
Linda Eisenmann, Ph.D., Office of the Provost, Wheaton College, 26 E. Main Street, Norton,
MA 02766, USA, eisenmann_linda@wheatoncollege.edu
(History and Philosophy)
Linda Serra Hagedorn, Ph.D., Department of Educational Leadership Studies, Iowa State
University, N243 Lagomarcino Hall, Ames, IA 50011, USA, lindah@iastate.edu
(Community Colleges)
Sylvia Hurtado, Ph.D., Higher Education Research Institute, 3005 Moore Hall, Box 951521,
University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA, shurtado@gseis.ucla.edu
(Diversity Issues)
Adrianna Kezar, Ph.D., Rossier School of Education, 3470 Trousdale Parkway, WPH 701,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA, kezar@usc.edu
(Organization and Administration)
Laura W. Perna, Ph.D., Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700
Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA, lperna@gse.upenn.edu
(Policy)
Raymond D. Perry, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, 404 Duff Roblin Building, The
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2N2, rperry@cc.umanitoba.ca
(Curriculum and Instruction)
Scott L. Thomas, Ph.D., School of Educational Studies, Claremont Graduate University, 150
E. Tenth Street, Claremont, CA 91711, USA, scott.thomas@cgu.edu
(College Students)
Marvin A. Titus, Ph.D., Department of Counseling, Higher Education & Special Education
Benjamin Bldg., 2200, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA,
mtitus@umd.edu
(Finance and Economics)
Volume 32
Editor
Michael B. Paulsen
Department of Educational Policy
and Leadership Studies
N491 Lindquist Center
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA, USA
v
vi Contents
vii
viii Contributors
Jennifer Lenahan Cleary is the associate director of the professional science mas-
ter’s (PSM) program at Rutgers University and a former senior researcher at the
Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. She specializes in research, program
development, and program evaluation that occurs at the nexus of higher education
and the labor market. Currently, she focuses on employer partnership development
and understanding labor market trends. Over 15 years at the Heldrich Center, she
ix
x About the Authors
Nida Denson is a senior research fellow in the School of Social Sciences and
Psychology at Western Sydney University. Her research interests include diversity
and diversity-related initiatives in education, racism, educational contexts and cam-
pus climates, underrepresented minority populations in higher education, and fac-
ulty work-life balance. She previously published a meta-analysis in the Review of
Educational Research on how curricular and cocurricular diversity activities influ-
ence racial bias. Her recent work has been published in Educational Researcher,
Journal of Higher Education, and Research in Higher Education.
Strategy Network and an affiliate with the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement
of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE).
Pei Pei Liu is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Her research examines secondary and postsecondary classrooms as developmental
settings and focuses on the role of effective instruction in building teacher-student
relationships and supporting student outcomes. Previously a high school teacher
and administrator in the Boston Public Schools and internationally, she works in
both K-12 teacher education and higher education faculty development at Harvard.
Daryl G. Smith is senior research fellow and professor emerita of education and
psychology at Claremont Graduate University. She has written extensively about
diversity issues in higher education, building capacity for diversity, and faculty
diversity and has consulted widely with many campuses and foundations. She is the
author of Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work. Smith was a
Fulbright senior specialist in South Africa in 2010 and 2012. Smith received her
B.A. from Cornell University, M.A. from Stanford University, and Ph.D. from
Claremont Graduate University.
Michelle Van Noy, Ph.D., is associate director of the Education and Employment
Research Center at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, the
State University of New Jersey. She is on the faculty of the Labor Studies and
Employment Relations Department and the Ph.D. program in higher education. She
studies the role of higher education, particularly community colleges, in workforce
development. Her research focuses on how colleges organize their programs to pre-
pare students for the workforce, how students make choices about majors and careers,
and how employers engage with education and use credentials in the hiring process.
xiv About the Authors
Daryl G. Smith
Context of a Career
enrich community and friendships. Even as I recognized the power of shared values
in that small town, I found homogeneity stifling. My years at Cornell took place
during a transitional period in society. Those years were transformative for me.
Cornell was an Ivy League university and a Land Grant University at the same time
located in a beautiful area of upstate New York. Gorges and waterfalls were part of
my every day experience on campus. My leadership experiences on north campus
and in campus leadership cemented my interest in pursuing student affairs profes-
sionally. Earning a degree in mathematics from an Ivy League institution has served
me well, particularly in quantitative analysis. It also afforded me a measure of
respect that was denied to many female colleagues. However, it was my introduc-
tion to social psychology and history that shaped me intellectually. The study of
intergroup relations, discrimination and prejudice provided the foundation for my
administrative career and influenced my eventual decision to get a PhD in social
psychology.
My years at Cornell gave me proximity to those who were more radical than I in
their methods for bringing about change. They made me seem moderate, but through
them I became more attuned to the inequities in society that were soon to be chal-
lenged in dramatic ways. In the late 60s and 70s it was campus activism that pushed
the university to make changes that would prove foundational. Out of dialogue and
turmoil we saw the emergence of ethnic and women’s studies, the hiring of more
diverse faculty, and recognition that identity has intellectual significance. But it was
societal activism beyond the campus––Title IX, the women’s, civil rights, and gay
rights movements, and legislation that addressed affirmative action and disabilities
that pushed institutions to make changes that have not always been embraced with
ease. Viewed through today’s knowledge even those critical social movements have
been limited by their inability to engage the diversity within themselves. The wom-
en’s movement was largely white and middle class, with heterosexual women fear-
ing to be associated with lesbians and women of color. The civil rights movement
too often ignored the critical role of women in its success, etc.
I expected that I would have a career in student affairs. My goal was to be a dean
of students eventually. I enrolled at Stanford University in 1966 and earned a
Masters in student personnel administration. Subsequently, I worked as Dean of
Freshman Women and Assistant Dean of Students at St Lawrence University for 2
years and then moved to Pomona College, a member of a consortium of highly
selective undergraduate colleges east of Los Angeles. Campus norms included
in loco parentis, and there was a great deal of sexism built into the system. Student
and faculty diversity was noticeably thin but activism was a rising theme. My posi-
tion at Pomona also mentioned something about institutional research, though there
wasn’t much clarity in 1968 about what that should include, but it intrigued me.
It should be noted that the academic study of students, and the field of higher
education, was embryonic in the sixties and early seventies. The scholars I encoun-
tered in graduate school and in my early professional career were themselves at the
relative beginning of the study of college students and institutions. Students offered
a convenient population to study and campuses were responsive.
4 D.G. Smith
The first edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education was published in 1966.
Having a national newspaper that covered higher education was seminal because it
immediately connected institutions to national media and gave a national/interna-
tional platform to events and perspectives in higher education. The Chronicle was
key to strengthening the existence of a field of higher education. However, it would
not have been successful but for the newly instituted federal requirements for well
publicized, accessible national searches in hiring. Change Magazine developed to
address key issues in higher education. In 1966, Sandy Astin at the American
Council on Education began CIRP (the College Institutional Research program)
that for over 50 years has provided national data on entering college students. At the
same time that CIRP provided a national lens on college students, C. Robert Pace,
George Stern and others were laying the groundwork for studying college environ-
ments. Arthur Chickering’s theory of identity development, with its signature con-
cept of student development, would not be published until 1969 (Chickering, 1969).
Though much of this research focused on students, student outcomes and experi-
ences, it laid a foundation for the study of institutions, faculty, and policy. Federal
data has been collected on higher education even from the nineteenth century, but
until 1970 the only racial categories used were black and white. Having first been
the Association of Professors of Higher Education (as part of the American
Association of Higher Education), ASHE was formally launched in 1976.
While at Pomona, I married and had a child; I was surprised when many faculty
were judgmental about my intention to continue to work. The implication was that
I could not be a good mother as well as a good administrator. Those were the days
when women were openly paid less than men “because they didn’t have families to
support.” Indeed, women could not have a credit card in their own name, even if
they were employed.
I decided to continue my education in a PhD program in 1972. Claremont
Graduate School afforded me the opportunity to create a dual degree in Social
Psychology and in Higher Education, with an additional emphasis in the emerging
field of evaluation. Because I hadn’t taken enough psychology courses as an under-
graduate I had to get a second masters in psychology. This was in the early seventies
and while I was advised that it was not optimum for someone who was working and
had a family to pursue a PhD, the context gave me focus and I completed the degree
in 1975. My dream job expanded to be a dean of students, but also to teach psychol-
ogy and develop IR for a campus. That position emerged just down the street, at
Scripps College, where a national search was underway for a Dean of Students.
Scripps College introduced me to women’s colleges and the important role they
played for women as well as to important scholarship on women. By putting women
at the center of a college’s mission they have differed from coed institutions pro-
foundly. These institutions have tended to be more gender balanced in faculty,
1 The Privileged Journey of Scholarship and Practice 5
Boards of Trustees, and even senior leadership than “coed” institutions. I became
aware that in all my previous work at coed institutions there was hesitation in focus-
ing on women’s issues or men’s issues after the designed separation between women
and men had been removed. This awareness represented a significant shift to look-
ing at identities, not just from an individual view, but to an institutional one. That
time also introduced me to the special contributions of additional special purpose
institutions including HBCU women’s colleges, particularly Spelman College and
Bennett College, and to tribal colleges.
I served as a college administrator through tumultuous times. It was a period that
challenged, and even frightened, many. Almost every practice was questioned con-
frontationally. Sit-ins, protests, and bomb threats were common. I personally con-
fronted the inequities in pay, discrimination in hiring, the challenges to being a
working mother, and the slow progress for civil rights. I saw the need for campuses
to broaden the intellectual work of the academy to include gender, race, class, and
sexuality, as a matter of intellectual excellence not political pressure. And I saw the
power of non-violence over violence to bring about change. My eight years as Dean
of Students at Scripps College and the following 3 years as VP for Planning and
Research provided a window on the embedded nature of identity in institutional
culture, policies, and values.
The 21 years in which I held administrative positions were enormously satisfy-
ing. I felt excited and good about my work with students and the institutions in
which I served. Increasingly, however, I found myself drawn to teaching and schol-
arly pursuits. At Scripps I taught courses in social psychology and I began to teach
a course in governance at CGU. In addition, I began to delve more deeply into the
scholarship in ethnic studies, women’s studies and student and adult development.
When in the late 70s and early 80s, national and international events led to growing
fiscal crises, the work in planning and evaluation grew exponentially. The evalua-
tion and assessment movement for student learning and institutional effectiveness
also produced new research and literature in the field. These experiences whet my
interest in moving from practice to scholar.
At the beginning of my career I never would have imagined becoming a “scholar,”
but I became more and more clear that I wanted to make a contribution to the field
of higher education through research. In 1987 I was offered a tenure-track position
at Claremont Graduate School. It was a bit daunting to pursue tenure at that point in
my life. I had only published my dissertation and articles for student affairs jour-
nals. But in 1975 the Association for Professors of Higher Education (pre ASHE)
had selected my dissertation, Process-Outcome Study of Learning in Higher
Education, for the dissertation of the Year award (Smith, 1975). It was a seminal
experience that suggested that perhaps I could do research that mattered. CGU, in
its national search for that position, had to take a chance on an experienced admin-
istrator with good teaching experience and a few publications over others with a
more established scholarly career. This was also a time of personal transitions as I
began a supportive and long term partnership and marriage to another woman.
CGU was a perfect fit for me. The School of Educational Studies was founded in
1925 with an emphasis on adult learners who bring experience to their doctoral work.
6 D.G. Smith
time was: “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are
Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982). In addition, the inter-
sectionality and the complexity of race and ethnicity emerged in the scholarly litera-
ture in part to challenge the notion that race is a binary of Black and White. Jose
Moreno’s (1999) pointed history of Chicano/as and the court battles that preceded
Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and Ron Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror:
A History of Multicultural America (1993) are just two books that capture the move
to more fully engage history through multiple identities. Being on a college campus
all these years has kept me involved in the need for change and underscored my
gratitude for those who push for change and justice. And just like our campuses and
our society I have been continually challenged to see things that I might not have
seen before.
Professional Organizations
Scripps for some time and she asked me about my plans for the future. I said I
thought I’d like to move into strategic planning and institutional research, some of
which I had done and enjoyed as a dean. When she asked me to sit down and write
a description of my dream job I resisted. I said I was too busy, but she persisted. I
mollified her but popped the assignment into my desk drawer afterward. The fol-
lowing week the President of Scripps called me to his office to tell me that the col-
lege was thinking of creating a new position: vice president for strategic planning.
He asked me if I was interested and to draft a job description. I returned within
minutes after pulling the job description from my desk. What followed were 3 inter-
esting and fulfilling years in the position of VP for Planning and Research at Scripps.
That method of inviting people to think and dream of what their futures might be is
something I carry with me to this today. I do believe that part of professional devel-
opment and mentoring is to invite people to imagine oneself in places one might not
normally imagine and then to seek out people who might be helpful in the journey.
In describing this time, I am reminded of Roberta Expinoza’s (2011) research on
pivotal moments in the lives of first generation students, when someone, often a
faculty member or teacher, encouraged them to consider a possibility or encouraged
them when they needed it.
When I joined the faculty at CGU in 1987 ASHE became my academic home
(though I had been a regular attendee since 1976). The opportunity to be engaged
nationally with many stellar and supportive scholars while working alongside sup-
portive colleagues at CGU has provided me with the intellectual and practical
grounding in things like publishing and developing a scholarly agenda, let alone
guiding a lifelong administrator through the steps to tenure. I have never lost my
sense that scholarship, research and practice are inextricably connected.
When ASHE was being challenged to address diversity in its membership as well
as in its scholarship, The Committee on Ethnic Participation (CEP) was formed to
provide a forum for members who were concerned about diversity and wanted to
advocate for institutional transformation. Mildred García, Laura Rendon, Caroline
Turner, Estella Bensimon, and Wynetta Lee were among those central to these
efforts and I was pleased to participate as a member and to be supportive as an
ASHE Board member. In my role as Chair of the ASHE Readers Series I was also
endeavoring to ensure that the canon of higher education changed to incorporate the
best in new scholarship on diversity in topics such as the History of Higher
Education, College Students, Governance, the Economics of Higher education, and
Institutional planning and Research. I have endeavored to give back to ASHE
through participation, a little of what I have been given. Receiving the ASHE ser-
vice award in 1995 and then the Howard R. Bowen Career Achievement Award in
2012 has been humbling and thrilling. This has been the professional home that has
nurtured my passion for research and writing, has provided collaborators and
friends, that has permitted me to contribute, and now makes me feel so honored and
so humbled.
Over the years, extensive work with the Association of American Colleges
and Universities, serving on the Board of the American Association of Higher
Education (AAHE), chairing the Editorial Board of the Journal of Higher Education,
1 The Privileged Journey of Scholarship and Practice 9
being part of the conversations on the next generation of diversity work in medicine
at the Association of American Medical Colleges under Marc Nivet’s leadership,
and serving on a Kellogg Foundation project Advisory committee on diversity in the
health professions at Harvard Medical School under Joan Reede and Emorcia Hill’s
leadership has provided many locations where I could partner with talented people
pushing the envelope of change.
Accreditation
As VP for Planning and Research I was able to engage my interest in the role of data
in institutional planning, in assessing the college experience, and quality. Scripps
was very small, and much of the early research was done with pad and calculator
and a work-study student. This position, however, provided numerous opportunities
to participate in accreditation teams that were looking at the role of planning, insti-
tutional capacity, quality, and effectiveness. By participating on many WASC
(Western Association of Schools and Colleges) teams, I also began to learn about
accreditation and its role in higher education.
Active involvement in accreditation created extraordinary opportunities to think
more deeply about excellence and the assessment of excellence. It also forced me to
look at numerous self-studies and ask how campuses were demonstrating success in
achieving their mission. I took away a number of lessons from these experiences.
One was that until WASC began requiring the use of evidence (data), there was very
little of it presented in self-study reports and very little interrogation of data by visit-
ing teams (with the exception of financial data). In the early years retention meant,
quite literally, how a campus would retain student records if it closed. It was years
before student graduation and retention would become part of a campus’ presenta-
tion concerning student success. It continues to be a struggle to find disaggregated
data on student success by race, gender and especially class.
And yet why wouldn’t these data be essential for most institutions that serve
undergraduates? When the federal government began requiring the reporting of
graduation rates the default metric was graduation of entering full-time first-time
students who graduated within 150 % of the normal time, i.e., 4-year institutions
were looking at this cohort and its graduation rates within 6 years. The immediate
outcry was that this metric did not capture the profile of many campuses where there
were increasingly adult and part-time student bodies. This is absolutely true. I spent
hours on task forces in which people criticized this federal definition. However, the
time spent criticizing has often seemed to me to be a substitute for addressing the
core issue of graduation and completion rates of students in any program at any rate.
Separating time to degree from completion and retention and then looking at reten-
tion and completion for any entering cohort (part-time or full time) disaggregated
by race and gender (and class if possible) provides a basic metric for looking at
success. Time to degree, learning outcomes, and quality of the experience can then
be added.
10 D.G. Smith
I have observed a dynamic between federal or state regulation and higher educa-
tion. Rather than engaging the issue and developing strategies more appropriate to
the campus, higher education and many campuses spend more time fighting the
inadequacy of the regulation. This has happened for graduation rates, for diversifi-
cation in hiring, for sexual violence on campus, for access to those with disabilities,
and for many issues of equity.
In the 1990s WASC decided to move diversity to a central position when com-
posing teams, arranging visits, and asking for self-studies. I sat on an advisory panel
for the WASC initiative on diversity and recall the pressure on that group to “define”
diversity. I had avoided that task because I knew that in the academic world we
could spend decades debating definitions. But in the end, I had to think through how
I would describe what we meant when we referred to diversity because the default
definition seemed to be a list of identities that should be included, but were difficult
to differentiate. That exercise helped frame my diversity work (Smith, 1995). As I
reviewed the history and research on diversity in higher education from an institu-
tional perspective I realized that most of the work could be mapped onto four dimen-
sions and the dimensions conceptually created space for an inclusive approach to
diversity but also a differentiated one.
Figure 1.1 displays the four dimensions of diversity and located it significantly
around institutional mission.
The first dimension is really the historic root of diversity in higher education –
access and success of historically underrepresented students. Here one is looking at
admissions (who has access) but also who succeeds. Contemporary efforts address
whether and how different groups are succeeding and thriving.
The second dimension focuses on climate and intergroup relations on the campus
for students, staff, and faculty. What is the climate, culture and ultimate attractiveness
1 The Privileged Journey of Scholarship and Practice 11
of the institution or its departments? This dimension is often the focus of concern
for groups who have experienced marginalization based on many identities.
The third domain for diversity goes to the academic core – education and
scholarship. This domain addresses the question of the knowledge that all students
and professionals need to have in a pluralistic society and the capacity of faculty to
provide the research, teaching, and curricular base for that knowledge in their fields
and as a faculty.
This dimension also includes a concern for intergroup relationships. How do
groups engage across difference? What is the capacity of the leadership on campus
to address difficult dialogues –whether about race, religion, sexuality, gender iden-
tity or any of the contentious topics that emerge in a pluralistic society or intercon-
nected world? While some institutions have begun to address, quite formally,
intergroup relationships among students, there has been less facilitation of inter-
group relationships among faculty and staff. Again, competence in this area includes
the recognition of the asymmetry of privilege given any particular identity and the
capacity to engage the multidimensionality and intersectionality of identities in an
intergroup context.
The institutional viability and vitality domain, in particular, addresses institu-
tional level concerns about capacity, including a mission statement that engages
diversity deeply and not superficially. It suggests that core indicators of excellence
and priorities for strategic planning are directly linked to diversity and not parallel
to diversity efforts. Interrupting parallel conversations between excellence and
diversity and integrating them is an important step for institutional change that is
sustainable. This domain also includes how the institution is viewed from the per-
spective of diverse communities and whether it has the leadership capacity with the
requisite expertise to meet the demands of serving a pluralistic society. Finally the
domain includes the ability of the institution to hire and retain diverse faculty and
staff.
In 1990, The Ford Foundation had begun a program called the Campus Diversity
Initiative (CDI) to try to promote institutional transformation with regard to histori-
cally underrepresented students. Edgar Beckham was the program officer and he
was gifted in working with campuses and also in trying to bring together campuses
to learn from each other through annual national and regional meetings. In 1995,
Beckham invited myself, Mildred Garcia, Yolanda Moses and Caryn McTighe
Musil to undertake an evaluation of the CDI by looking at the institutional impact
of the first round of grants made under the CDI to 19 residential colleges and uni-
versities. We had worked together over many years. Yolanda and I met while she
was a Dean at Cal Poly Pomona. Millie and I had collaborated at ASHE and Caryn
and I met through AAC&U. That project resulted in the publication of Diversity in
Higher Education: A work in Progress (Musil, Garcia, Moses, & Smith, 1995).
Another outcome of this and other projects were deep and long lasting professional
and personal friendships. We all participated in Yolanda’s inauguration as President
of CCNY and Millie’s three presidential appointments in New York and California.
And, we continue to make the effort to meet annually just to stay in touch.
During this same period, a number of other foundations were funding diversity
projects across the country. Again, thanks to Edgar Beckham and Ford, our Ford
evaluation team along with evaluation teams from the Kellogg Foundation, Hewlett
Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Lilly Foundation were invited to
collaborate on a series of publications that would serve as a kind of meta-analysis of
what we were learning from these efforts, particularly about institutional change.
That resulted in three publications on change, research and assessment. (García,
Hudgins, Musil, Nettles, & Sedlacek, 2001; Musil et al., 1999; Nettles et al., 2002;
Smith et al., 2000).
Several years into the CDI, Ford began to invite small teams from India and
South Africa to the annual meetings and was working with campuses in those coun-
tries to develop initiatives. The annual meetings were rich opportunities to learn and
often to sustain individuals through some difficult times. At one such meeting in
1992, when all of us were discouraged by the recent Hopwood decisions in Texas, a
student leader from South Africa, stood up in a town meeting called to discuss the
implications of the court decisions limiting affirmative action, and chastised the
group for allowing a few court decisions to discourage us. Coming from a student
in recently post apartheid South Africa, this was an important reminder that there
would be setbacks and we couldn’t allow ourselves to give up. Indeed, there have
been set backs and progress in recent years. Yet, the embedded structural issues
concerning both race and gender, the continuing problems of police violence and
sexual violence only underscore the unfinished business of diversity.
The legal challenges to affirmative action in admissions spawned a number of
really important settings in which lawyers working on the cases collaborated with
researchers to make sure that the questions and design of research would provide
usable evidence for the policy decisions under scrutiny in the courts. Probably the
best example of this partnership was the research that developed at the University of
1 The Privileged Journey of Scholarship and Practice 13
Michigan in preparation for the Supreme Court. Patricia Gurin’s research on the
educational benefits of diversity and Jonathan Alger’s work to develop a research-
based amicus brief were truly impressive (Gurin, 1999). Designing studies that
could contribute to our understanding of whether and how diversity affects learning
was crucially important and has established a strong body of research that has only
grown, and grown more sophisticated.
In 1997, the Ford Foundation, under the leadership of Alison Bernstein and
Edgar Beckham, conceived of a tri national conference on Diversity, Democracy
and Higher education with teams from South Africa (the newest democracy), India
(the largest democracy) and the U.S. (the oldest democracy). One team of seven
from each country met annually in one of the three countries and participated in a
travelling seminar. I was fortunate to participate in the South Africa (1998) and U.S.
seminars (1999). Out of those meetings came a number of publications. In South
Africa, I think it is fair to say that all of us were struck by the significance to South
Africans of the new constitution. Within our first hours there we had received copies
of the full constitution, the abbreviated constitution and the pictorial one for those
who couldn’t read. While many of us took the significance of democracy for granted,
the aspiration of a democracy that works for all became an underlying theme of my
own future work on diversity in higher education. The other observation from that
extraordinary experience was that while each country had different salient identities
that underscored their diversity efforts (with the exception of gender), the themes
that emerged about institutional change, scholarship, the need for strategic evalua-
tion, adding new knowledge to the curriculum and the role of the faculty transcended
nations (Beckham, 2000, 2002; Cross et al., 1999; Smith, 1999).
During this period of the late 1990s, a number of foundations in addition to the Ford
Foundation were supporting campus efforts to address the success of historically
underrepresented minorities in higher education. The James Irvine Foundation had
spent millions supporting the work of private colleges and universities in California.
In 1997, they asked me to review the progress up to that date and make recommen-
dations for how they should do grant making in the future. A report “The Progress
of a Decade: An Imperative for the Future” outlined some of the lessons from the
review of grants to 21 California institutions and 2 grants to WASC amounting to
about $20,000,000 (Smith, 1997).
What clearly emerged was the need to reframe the work of diversity from the
development of projects and programs and the evaluation of projects and programs
to a more fundamental question of how institutions themselves had changed as a
result of institutional efforts and considerable foundation resources. For the most
part, the review suggested that programs would be funded as long as there were
outside funds to support them, that they existed too often in parallel to core institu-
tional functions, and that they were only generically related to mission and strategic
priorities.
14 D.G. Smith
In 2000, as they developed the next phase of the Campus Diversity Initiative, the
Foundation sent out a request for proposals to evaluation teams who could work
with campuses to build their capacity to evaluate their institutional progress on
diversity. The CDI that resulted was a $29 million dollar effort to assist 28 indepen-
dent colleges and universities in California with improving campus diversity. The
opportunity to work with 28 campuses and to develop institutional level data to
evaluate was an important opportunity. Sharon Parker and I, at CGU, and Alma
Clayton-Pedersen at AAC&U developed a proposal to work with campuses that
would receive Irvine funding. It was important that we knew we could work well
together for this large and complex project. Sharon and I had met when she was at
Stanford and again on an evaluation for the Compact for Faculty Diversity. Alma
and I met first, I think, through ASHE and her work at Vanderbilt. The foundation
funding would include an expectation that campuses would evaluate their progress
using organizational learning as a framework and that senior leadership would be
involved. Irvine was interested in access and success for URM students and for low
income students and campuses were asked to submit proposals to pursue that effort.
Our role was to work with campuses to design and conduct evaluations on their
progress. In a sense it was a multi-case study approach to change. The work involved
a diverse team of 12 evaluators, doctoral students, a postdoctoral researcher and an
intense partnership between the three co-PIs. It was an extraordinary opportunity
and over 5 years we learned a great deal about facilitators of change, impediments
to change, and the communication efforts required both within institutions and
among institutions to sustain progress. Our purpose was to assist the Foundation
and the individual campuses. Another primary objective, however, was to contribute
to the field concerning diversity on campus, the role of evaluation and the new
knowledge that was being developed through the research. Out of the project came
a report (Smith, 2004), a monograph (Clayton-Pedersen, Parker, Smith, Moreno, &
Teraguchi, 2007), a research report about building capacity (Smith, Parker, Clayton-
Pedersen, Moreno, & Teraguchi, 2006), and three research briefs that explored
faculty retention (Moreno, Smith, Clayton-Pedersen, Parker, & Teraguchi, 2006),
“unknown students” (Smith, Moreno, Clayton-Pedersen, Parker, & Teraguchi,
2005) and the intersection of race and class (Moreno, Smith, Parker, Clayton-
Pedersen, & Teraguchi, 2006). Additional work on organizational learning emerged
(Smith & Parker, 2005) as did the awareness that programs and projects were not
going to be sufficient for change (Shireman, 2003).
In all of these many collaborations over the years, I experienced and learned the
value of creating diverse teams that worked well together. The outcome was always
better than had any one of us had to produce the study or report. And the process
was inspiring. In addition, there was a comfort in having so much talent and per-
spectives around the table that we reduced the probability of missing something or
improperly framing an issue. I remember chairing one meeting when we were dis-
cussing the results of the Irvine study and the role of the Chief Diversity Officer
(CDO). It appeared to me from our case studies that institutions with a CDO had
made more institutional progress on student success, hiring, curriculum change, etc.
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