When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Introduction

1 It was a warm spring afternoon at what I am calling, for reasons of anonymity , California University (CU), a large public institution on the West Coast. A gaggle of students lined both sides of CU Walk, a pathway where students often gathered during lunchtime to pass out fliers and socialize. There were the usual staples—a table covered with pamphlets from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a cluster of Latino/a students wearing Greek letters, a bake sale for a community service group. The students represented a variety of races and ethnicities. With more than  percent of the undergraduate population being students of color, whites were technically a minority in the student body. The campus was often lauded as one of the most diverse in America.1 Today one group of students seemed to be disagreeing with this assessment. Standing in the grass was a cluster of students holding posterboard signs with large lettering. Two Asian Americans held signs that read, “Why are there so many of me at CU?” A tall black male held a different sign: “Why are there so few of me at CU?” Given the campus climate over the past year, the signs were not too surprising. In recent months, there had been a number of protests, demonstrations, and letters to the editor on the subject of diversity, or lack thereof, at CU. The school, a member of the prestigious University of California (UC) system, was in the midst of a nationally publicized admissions crisis. Even though more than  percent of CU students were people of color, very few were black. Only ninetysix black students were slated to enter in the fall, less than  percent of Introduction 2 WHEN DIVERSITY DROPS the new first-year class. Black student enrollment had been slipping at CU since the passage of Proposition  (known as “Prop. ”) in , which banned affirmative action in the state’s public institutions. Now black student enrollment was the lowest it had been in thirty years. Indeed, there was nothing too unusual about seeing another diversity protest at CU. Perhaps what was more surprising was who these students were and how they came to be standing there with their brightly colored signs. The students were not part of CU’s many ethnic student organizations or political activist groups. Instead, they were part of an evangelical Christian student organization known as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), a campus fellowship (the name commonly used for evangelical student organizations) with chapters across the country. To some, the idea that evangelicals address social issues beyond abortion and same-sex marriage may seem novel, but subcultures within evangelicalism have addressed issues related to race, poverty, and social justice for decades (Heltzel ). For many of its members, IVCF was the first group that had ever challenged them to think about their ethnic identity or diversity issues. The group attracted students from all over the campus, many of whom were in majors where conversations about race were rare. In many ways, IVCF was an educator’s dream: students committed to grappling with issues of race and diversity on their own time and initiative, outside of the classroom. However, IVCF was not always this way. Fewer than twenty years earlier, it had been a predominantly white organization that rarely addressed race. In this book, I document how this community of evangelical college students decided to make race matter and the ensuing complications of that decision over the subsequent years. The group did so by taking on the messy process known as racial reconciliation, which it defined as “people of different races forging relationships based on repentance, forgiveness , justice and love in order to address, heal and redeem the effects of personal and systemic race-based sin” (Tomikawa and Schaupp , ). While racial reconciliation frames efforts to improve race relations through a religious lens, many of the activities associated with it parallel outcomes that are highly valued by nonsectarian universities, such as promoting interracial friendship and having meaningful discussions on race. Most campus fellowships are racially homogeneous (Kim ; Park INTRODUCTION 3 ), and I seek to understand the processes of organizational change that made a multiethnic community like IVCF possible.2 In this respect, the IVCF story is an unusual and optimistic tale of how an organization managed to bridge racial divides in a country where education, residential life, and religion are all characterized by high levels of racial segregation (Emerson and Smith ; Orfield ). Regrettably, this...