Diversity support

UMaine President Peter Hoff took a fair amount of heat earlier this year for his emphasis on cultural diversity in his plan called BearWorks. Now, a couple of well-respected educators indirectly support his ideas in a book on affirmative action.

Derek Bok and William G. Bowen don’t mention the University of Maine directly, but they did study 28 top universities with an eye on what happens when the race of applicants is given the same weight as, for instance, where applicants are from or how good they are at sports. Their results go directly against trendy race-neutral admission policies that pretend backgrounds are so similar among applicants that a university would have no reason to look beyond grades in deciding whom to admit.

In an excerpt in the New York Times from “The Shape of the River,” Mr. Bok, former president of Harvard University, and Mr. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, call black graduates of elite universities “the backbone of the black middle class,” but add, ” … it is not individuals alone who gain. Substantial additional benefits accrue to society at large through the leadership and civic participation of the graduates and through the broad contributions that the schools themselves make to the goals of a democratic society.”

The book justifies these conclusions through statistical life histories of 45,184 people who attended the 28 schools between 1976 and 1993. UMaine has an added opportunity for diversity because it has lower admission standards than the top schools studied and it currently is trying to increase its student population, so the primary argument against affirmative action — that it displaces better qualified white kids — might not apply here for many years. It makes President Hoff’s diversity statements, aimed at faculty but appropirate for students also, well-timed, indeed.

That doesn’t mean Umaine should admit students who will be overwhelmed by the work; it doesn’t mean it should hire professors without expertise in their fields. It does mean that, in choosing among qualified students and professors, a campus gains when it actively seeks a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints rather than passively allowing the status quo to remain unchallenged.