Are the Walls Really Down? Behavioral and Organizational Barriers to Faculty and Staff Diversity (review)
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Some people believe that affirmative action and diversity initiatives are no longer necessary because the concerns they were created to address have been resolved. They view the modest increase in the number of women and minority faculty and administrators in higher education today as proof that the “playing field has been leveled.” However, after reading Are the Walls Really Down?, they will learn that not only is the playing field still not level, but that women and minority faculty and administrators encounter much more sophisticated discriminatory acts as well as greater physiological and psychological stress than ever before.
In the process of gaining this understanding, readers will be introduced to an extensive vocabulary of terms, a compilation of cross-disciplinary diversity and assessment strategies, and a theoretical framework that authors Evans and Chun suggest can be used to identify and decode new “second-generation” forms of organizational and behavioral barriers to diversity.
The monograph opens with a executive summary that explains the continued need for affirmative [End Page 142] action and diversity in higher education, introduces the concept of reciprocal empowerment as a 21st-century approach to achieving, critiquing, and sustaining institutional diversity, then alludes to the host of examples of best practices in strategic planning and assessment that have been identified in public research institutions throughout the United States. Then follows a brief foreword from the series editor who indicates that the document is the last of a three-part series; therefore, readers may need to review the other two volumes to understand the full contribution of this current work. I have the first book in the series written by Darryl Smith (2005). While the theme of diversity carries from one volume to the next, readers will not be disadvantaged from not having read them as a trilogy because each can easily stand alone.
In the first section, “The Theoretical Framework: Psychosocial Oppression and Diversity,” the authors start by combining a discussion on issues that reaffirm the need for diversity with a overview of what they call a “report card” on affirmative action. The discussion is rather lengthy and is used to situate the next topic in the section, which introduces the need for a cross-disciplinary framework to understand why barriers to diversity continue to persist.
In one of the subsections of Section 1, the authors provide another lengthy discussion on how power, privilege, and oppression are transmitted in institutions today and how each shapes the experiences of women and minorities. Of particular note is the use of Hardiman and Jackson’s (1997) social oppression model which illustrates the simultaneity of interlocking systems of oppression to inform the discussion. The model of reciprocal empowerment is next introduced as the antidote for oppression. In the process of defining the model, they define a litany of concepts to illustrate certain aspects of the model.
The authors also provide helpful examples of how the three primary dimensions of reciprocal empowerment have been implemented in various institutions. Section 1 does not conclude with the introduction of the model as might be imagined. Rather, it continues with an in-depth discussion of two additional frameworks that demonstrate the dynamism of oppression related to organizational and behavioral barriers to diversity: the metaphor of voice to illustrate silence and disempowerment, and the biopsychosical framework to illustrate stress-related concerns that women and minorities experience in discriminatory academic climates. Overall, the first section of the monograph is very wordy and laborious to follow due to a slight overkill on issues that, while important to diversity, are not necessary to introduce the theoretical framework that really is the heart of the section.
“Affirmative Action and Diversity: Partners and Protagonists,” the second section, offers a historical overview of affirmative action from inception to its current status. Included are discussions on changes in Executive Orders that give legal...
