This Passes for Diversity?

A poster campaign at Ithaca College features the college’s President Tom Rochon.

During my first year at Ithaca College, after attending a community college in my native Texas, I was surprised to see the college promote itself as a “diverse” institution. They used poster campaigns to emphasize “diverse” aspects of the student population (some of the flyers included notes such as “Born and raised in Long Island,” “Caucasian,” and “Nerd”). The campaign was suspended on March 31, in part because of many complaints by students and faculty.

Natasha Tanner, an Ithaca sophomore, wasn’t amused by the campaign, and neither was I. “[The lack of racial diversity] pisses me off,” says Tanner, a black student originally from Philadelphia. “It perpetuates the way of thinking that we’re supposed to speak for our race and we’re the voice for our race. We’re the spokespeople that are supposed to know everything, which is absurd. It’s a constant battle. Every day in class, there are students who are oblivious and can be because there’s [no one], besides maybe me, saying that they are.”

Ithaca’s lack of diversity and attempts to emphasize diversity on campus is hardly unique. Public schools seem to have few problems attracting minority students, but private colleges are struggling to devise plans and actions that would increase the number of minority applicants. Colleges like Bucknell in Pennsylvania, St. Mary’s in Maryland, Holy Cross in Massachusetts, Mount Union College in Ohio, Maryville in Tennessee, and Coe College in Iowa are all private colleges that have either been criticized for their lack of diversity or have been marked as U.S. News and World Report’s lowest ranking liberal arts institutions in racial diversity in 2009. (U.S. News’ rankings themselves have come under fire in recent years because of their emphasis on “prestige” rather than academic excellence or contributions to society.)

Improved diversity at any institution isn’t an impossible task. Between 1984 and 2004, national enrollment of minority undergraduates increased from 1.9 to 4.7 million, according to a study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Undergraduate students who were black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, and American Indian increased from 18 percent in 1984 to 32 percent in 2004. Most of these minority students (58 percent) were enrolled in minority-serving institutions.

But at Ithaca College the number of minority students has only marginally increased since 2004. Based on the enrollment figures from the last academic year, of the 6,448 students attending Ithaca, 4,824 self-identified as white. But there were only 681 non-white American students, and 744 chose not to indicate a race. I am often the only non-white student in classes of roughly 22 students.

“Of course [Ithaca] does not represent the population of the United States,” says President Tom Rochon, excusing Ithaca’s lack of diversity because it is a regional institution. But he says that “we do everything to present our campus as a diverse campus.” Perhaps that’s exactly the problem: Ithaca isn’t diverse, but it attempts to appear to be so.

Rochon claims that “this is a very high-priority issue.” He referenced several “efforts around recruitment of students, faculty and curriculum” and said that “the admissions staff is sensitive to diversity.” But Rochon couldn’t give specific details on future initiatives or strategies the college plans to ensure racial diversity beyond its current affirmative action policy.

Asma Barlas, a professor for Ithaca College’s Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Ethnicity, had a somewhat different perspective on the college’s diversity initiative. “[Ithaca College is] white, middle-class/upper-middle class. I’m not sure how anybody in their right minds could think that’s diverse,” she said.

Other colleges and universities have also been receiving criticism for the diversity issue. A 2008 article in The Bucknellian noted the criticism Bucknell University had been receiving in terms of diversity, both for lack of diversity and emphasis on ethnic minorities. In 2007, two research projects pointed to lack of diversity as the most common criticism against Bucknell among interviewees. Bucknell has also gone through major debates over diversity as an institutional priority.

The biggest problem many universities and colleges run into is the disconnect between their goals in terms of diversity and the process used to get to those goals, says Bradley Quinn, executive director of Higher Education Advocacy and Special Initiatives of the College Board. Quinn helps oversee the Access and Diversity Collaborative, which offers seminars to admissions and financial aid officers from institutions across the country that intend to explain the constitutionality of race and ethnicity as an admissions factor while trying to find ways to increase and enjoy the benefits of diversity on college campuses.

Quinn says that universities and colleges are beginning to acknowledge the importance of diversity to academic and social learning, but that many don’t understand the steps needed to take to ensure a legally-attained diverse class. While the Collaborative supports the use of race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions decisions, Quinn assures that this factor alone should not be a determining one. Some of the most prestigious schools in the country have been applauded as exemplary in attracting an increasing number of minorities (Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA and MIT, to name a few). No school should make excuses of “lowered standards,” a common argument against affirmative action, for not having a diverse student body.

Perhaps my experience as a Texas-born Mexican, first-generation American college student attending a predominately white and upper-middle class institution like Ithaca makes me especially frustrated at the lack of diversity in higher education. Education beyond high school is still very much dominated by the white and the wealthy in this country—and it scares me to think that the word diversity is being thrown around so freely and vaguely.

I come from one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the country, Fort Worth, Texas—a city with 44.1 percent non-Hispanic whites, where Hispanics (the largest minority group in Fort Worth and Texas overall) make up approximately 33.2 percent of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. My community college counted more than 40 percent of its students as minorities in 2008. I also attended a high school where white students made up less than a third of the student body. After experiences in institutions like these, it becomes impossible to pretend that race doesn’t exist, like many seem to do at Ithaca. It’s impossible for me to ignore such a vulgar attempt at white-washing “diversity” like Ithaca’s poster campaign.

Julissa Treviño is a senior at Ithaca College. An earlier version of this article was published in Buzzsaw, part of our Campus Publications Network.

Related Stories

• The United States of Business Appeasement
• Commentary: Jobs Plan Good for Students, Young Americans
• With Congress in Gridlock, Obama Should Raise the Debt Ceiling Himself
• Obama’s LGBT Support a Stark Contrast to Past Presidents
• DeSean Jackson’s Anti-Gay Slur Defended by Radio Host