Dive Brief:
- The Atlantic profiles the growing problem of colleges seeking diversity among students and faculty at universities throughout the country, which is frequently promoted along terms of access and melding of perspectives, but often leads to minorities being marginalized for the same reasons.
- For students of all races, diversity is often viewed as a commodity by which they can gain worldly perspective on other cultures, but research suggests that only holds true as long as the agents of diversity (other minority students) are contributing to the benefit of a largely white student body.
- These complex ideas are at the core of why campuses continue to struggle with how to create welcoming experiences for all types of students.
Dive Insight:
For college presidents, diversity is simultaneously a mandatory challenge of campus leadership, and a constant crisis in waiting. There is no way to counter historic perceptions of students based upon race and geography and charged by affluence or the lack there of, while promoting to all students that a campus is welcoming of all types of ideas, faces and voices.
The concept is to begin with diversity in leadership, which helps to model in the recruitment, engagement and development processes at all levels of faculty and student culture.