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Foreword
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreword The movement to rescind affirmative action by court decisions or state mandates is forcing leaders in higher education to rethink their strategies and to explore new ways to achieve diversity. Public institutions in California, Florida, and Texas are experimenting with undergraduate admission policies that automatically admit the top few percent of in-state high school graduates. This is only one solution, a kind of quick fix that helps only undergraduate students in states with high-density minority populations. But conditions in society have changed so much today that the legal means for achieving equitable access to higher education are becoming far more complex than some numerical formula. The issue now is not about the value of affirmative action, for that has been proved. The important question is, how should we value and ensure diversity on our campuses so that everyone benefits? Learning new ways to see and value diversity will be more productive for higher education in the long run than any stopgap measures now in place. This is an underlying premise in Robert Ibarra’s book Beyond Affirmative Action, in which he introduces a novel theory about diversity that could fundamentally change higher education in America. Others share this perception of it as well. One reviewer claimed that Ibarra’s were the best new ideas he had seen as an administrator in higher education in more than ten years. One reason for my enthusiasm comes from watching these ideas emerge as he wrote his preliminary report on Latinos in graduate education. I saw how they grew from useful concepts for understanding why people do what they do into a powerful model for change. I think Ibarra is onto something quite new and important. His book explores the premise that higher education has not evolved its thinking about affirmative action since the program was first implemented . In the early 1960s the goal was to eliminate barriers—by creating active recruiting and retention programs—that had limited or barred altogether minority students’ access to higher education. The continued focus on these goals, he suggests, hid the fact that the culture of higher education is a major contributor to the persistence of underrepresentation of minorities in our institutions. Educators have always known that academic culture can negatively affect all students to some degree, not just minorities. Some graduate students are simply turned off by it and leave. What Ibarra found is a new perspective on how culture, context, and cognitive teaching/learning conditions in academia affect the achievement of many students and faculty, especially women and ethnic minorities. The breakthrough comes in showing, for the first time, why and how the cultural context of academia creates or destroys these conditions for success. What you have here are ideas that go beyond current thinking on affirmative action and multiculturalism . Rather than discard these models, however, Ibarra builds a multicontextual theory upon their foundations. One reason I find Ibarra’s book so valuable is his rich discussion of academic culture and the value of diversity. His ideas are helpful for gauging how gender and ethnic differences play a vital role in the intellectual life of a university. For instance, many of the women and minority faculty members we have hired at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have made striking contributions to the research and teaching mission of this institution. In many cases they are at the forefront of newly emerging fields or they are leading many of us into new areas in traditional departments and colleges, such as law, anthropology, sociology, education, psychology, literature, and music, to name but a few. Quite apart from this we have powerful academic reasons for valuing diversity—it opens up new ways of thinking, teaching, learning, and conducting research that result in new knowledge from viewing the world through different cultural contexts and cognitive learning styles. What Ibarra shows us is that we often fail to recognize these important events. Instead we are content with seeking diversity because “it’s the law” or “it’s the right thing to do.” This book will change that perspective to one that promotes diversity because it is the only way to tap the full spectrum of human potential and experience and to open up new ways to advance knowledge. J D. W Chancellor, University of Wisconsin–Madison Foreword xii ...