The Diversity Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus

1. Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction E thnic diversity in the United States has increased substantially in recent years as a result of immigration from abroad and differential birthrates across ethnic groups within the United States. The management of diversity and the assurance of equal opportunity for all Americans across political, educational, and judicial sectors remain hotly debated issues in contemporary American society. While in decades past equality of opportunity at lower levels of education aroused the most debate , in the past twenty years the focus has shifted to diversity in higher education. Attempts to achieve greater ethnic diversity on college and university campuses began in the mid-nineteenth century with the goal of increasing knowledge, understanding, and harmony among people of different groups and backgrounds (Rudenstine 2001). Although these efforts granted entry to small numbers of new immigrants and some African Americans, significant increases in the diversity of student bodies did not occur until the end of World War II, with the passage of the GI Bill in 1944. Unfortunately, although the bill was successful in increasing access to higher education for many returning veterans, this access was limited primarily to whites and to blacks outside the South. Black veterans in the South still faced significant barriers as a result of discriminatory policies that remained in place at many traditionally white colleges and universities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 effectively removed explicitly discriminatory policies in admissions to institutions of higher education that received federal funding. The removal of explicit barriers, however, did not remove all barriers to equal opportunity for underrepresented ethnic minorities . To remedy this situation, legislators developed active programs, such as affirmative action, to stimulate the participation of ethnic minority groups, especially African Americans, in higher education. Many of these affirmative action programs, originating in the 1960s and 1970s, were subsequently challenged in courts of law and by public opinion. In 1978 the affirmative action program at the Medical School of the University of California at Davis was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. This case presented a challenge to the special admissions program of the UC Davis Medical School, which was designed to ensure the admission of a speci- fied number of students from particular minority groups. In this landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that race might be taken into account as one factor among many in university admission decisions if necessary to promote a “substantial interest,” but it prohibited the setting aside of minority places and the use of differential cutoff points for admission. Therefore, although the judgment invalidated the medical school’s special admissions affirmative action program, it also allowed race to be taken into account as a factor in future admissions decisions. As such, the benefits of exposing students to diverse experiences and ideas—and the necessity of a critical mass of students from any group to achieve these benefits—were acknowledged. It was on the basis of the Bakke decision that colleges and universities continued to consider race in college admissions. Many of these efforts focused on the inclusion of African American students rather than on other minorities. It was not until the mid-1980s that increases in immigration changed the focus from a singular focus on the inclusion of African Americans to a focus on the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in higher education more generally. One result of this shift was a change in focus from the specific issues faced by black students to a more general focus on the issues faced by underrepresented minorities in general. Although increases in minority admissions stagnated during the economic downturns of the mid-1970s to the 1980s, a resurgence of minority recruitment followed in the latter half of the 1980s. By this time, African American students were competing with large numbers of Asian and Latino American students for university admission. As a result, the percentages of black college students in two- and four-year colleges have The Diversity Challenge 4 remained relatively stable over the last two decades, while those of Asian and Latino students have increased. For example, excluding nonresident aliens, minority enrollments at two- and four-year colleges increased from 17 percent of all undergraduate students in 1976 to 26 percent by the fall of 1995 (National Center for Education Statistics 2001). This rise was due primarily to the increased enrollment of...