POINT: Formal efforts to promote diversity remain necessary

Ritualized, formalized diversity is necessary. Elite universities are no longer for the privileged, or so the trend might suggest. The Washington Post reported Monday that Princeton University has tripled its Pell share receiving populace to 22 percent. Broadly, almost everyone agrees that diversity is beneficial for higher education. Yet, some believe that the means to accomplish this has resulted in a formalistic institutionalization of diversity which has done students a disservice. However, it’s precisely this ritualization that makes steps toward diversity meaningful.

It’s true that when we institutionalize diversity, we simplify what diversity means. We ask students to put themselves in socioeconomic and ethnocultural boxes; if they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, we force them to commodify their experiences. And yes, there’s something gross about the admissions committee at an elite educational institution, with its billion-dollar endowment, that looks upon personal statements from students who faced serious challenges with a morbid fascination. For underrepresented students, whose life experiences consist of far more than the challenges they faced as a result of their blackness, brownness or low-income backgrounds, the practice can feel particularly reductionist.

Rose Courteau, a mentor for Minds Matter, a nonprofit college preparation provider, touches on this sentiment in her essay for The Atlantic entitled, “The Problem With How Higher Education Treats Diversity.”

“I don’t want my students to reduce their own lives to stories of hardship — or, at least, I don’t want them to feel that they need to in order to earn a berth at the college they choose,” Coureau wrote. “Still, the pressure for students — particularly underrepresented nonwhite and low-income applicants — to package themselves like this is acute at a time when ‘diversity’ remains the only rationale for affirmative action that the Supreme Court has consistently upheld.”

Contreau alludes to an important point. The commodification of diversity isn’t a result of educational institutions’ desire for diversity. It’s because educational institutions have decided that they want diversity because they think it improves the educational experience for everyone.

“All of our lives are enriched not by surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, so much as they are by including those who are different,” Provost Michael Quick said to USC News in May 2016. “That diversity of experience creates a rich contrast in perspectives that gives us all a chance to challenge our status quo.”

Quick isn’t wrong, but he’s ignoring another, crucial purpose of diversity in higher education: It uplifts historically marginalized communities. It is a specific economic equalizer and enabler of social mobility. If we could accept that diversity in higher education would be important even if it did not enrich the educational atmosphere, maybe we wouldn’t have to pressure students into exploiting their backgrounds.

Yet, the solution is not to de-ritualize diversity, or to reduce our institutional attention toward it. It’s because the historical barriers that black, brown and low-income students face are both systemic and structural. Black and brown students face the school-to-prison pipeline — policies implemented by educational institutions in communities of color that funnel students into the criminal justice system — built by decades of prejudiced policy. The war on drugs results in the threat of unnecessary incarceration for low-level drug offenses. At the most basic level, young people of color from communities in which violence is common — somewhere they might have been pushed to due to racist redlining policies — might fear for their safety. And yet, the decades of police brutality and racial profiling entrenched in stop-and-frisk might give them reason to pause to seek government protection.

The barriers that low-income students and students of color face before they even get to higher education are endless, and inextricably entangled with historical and structural disadvantage that has been codified in law and policy.

Thus, the reason that the lack of diversity in higher education requires a systemic solution is because it is a systemic problem.

The institutionalization of diversity isn’t the problem here, but it is gnarly and complicated. The best course of action isn’t to abandon it completely; it’s to continue to listen to the affected communities, engage in thoughtful reflection and accept that the steps we take forward could have adverse consequences. Then, it’s to make our system better.

Sonali Seth is a senior majoring in policy, planning and development. She is also the special projects editor of the Daily Trojan. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Wednesdays.