Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work by Daryl G. Smith (review)

In this second edition of Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making it Work, Smith articulates and expands upon the premise that diversity must be at the center of higher education. She sees a societal imperative for this work, arguing convincingly that “higher education must play a critical role if we are to achieve the promise of democracy: developing a pluralist society that works” (p. vii). At the same time, she presents practical strategies for using organizational learning to measure progress and emphasizes the importance of using disaggregated institutional data to monitor that progress and identify unmet needs. Smith’s book is thus both a social text for researchers and a pragmatic guide for administrators. This refreshed second edition offers those familiar with her work—and those coming to it for the first time—a more comprehensive list of sources and tables as well as updated material about multiple and intersecting identities, including gender identities; about the roles of diversity officers on college campuses; and about the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty. The result is a valuable resource for faculty, administrators, researchers, and students of higher education.

Drawing upon a diverse body of literature from the fields of higher education, student development, cognitive development, sociology, organizational learning, political science, leadership theory, and social psychology, Smith explains the importance of embedding diversity in institutional frameworks (p. 53). She does so by drawing an unexpected parallel between technology and diversity: both are essential, not parallel, to our work. The analogy she draws reminds us that universities have faced similar challenges in the past: many decades ago, universities knew that they would need to change to accommodate new technology, but they did not know exactly what they would need to do. Nevertheless, these institutions understood the potential magnitude of the infrastructural changes that new technology could require. Just as technology transformed the academy (and our lives outside of it), so too, Smith argues, will diversity. She contends that the competitiveness of colleges and universities in a rapidly changing global environment depends on our abilities to view diversity in these terms.

In Diversity’s Promise, Smith also spends considerable time discussing the concept of identity. She claims that individual and group identity markers—including race, ethnicity, gender, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, language, and ability—are meaningful both for those individuals and groups and for institutions and society. At the same time, she suggests that “deep ambivalence about the role of identity emerges in many contexts” (p. 190), which leads to the question of “whether identity is simply divisive and ought to be eliminated, if at all possible, from institutional strategies” (p. 190). To this end, Smith cites several practical concerns about how identity tends to unfold within university environments, including criticisms about self-segregation, about the potential for undermining or diluting shared institutional values or efforts, and about campus communities’ abilities to have the necessary but difficult conversations about diversity. Smith conveys her own concerns that the academy is unprepared (and perhaps unwilling) to adequately engage the complexity that accompanies issues of identity. Without this commitment, higher education will miss an opportunity, she fears, to positively impact our shared democratic future.

Smith herself is not ambivalent about the important role both identity and diversity play in building campuses’ capacity to create effective and sustainable diversity strategies. She contends, and I agree, that to do this well, the crux of our attention should focus on the “best conditions under which people from different backgrounds can be brought together” (p. 192) and “the conditions under which intergroup contact leads to the reduction of prejudice” (p. 193). Initially described by Allport (1954), Smith cites four conditions that create an environment conducive to fostering productive exchange between people from different backgrounds: equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support. She recommends that the design of campus-based intergroup efforts embody these conditions.

While consistently forward-looking...