THE VALUE OF DIVERSITY
Take hair. If you want to understand the immense value of diversity in higher education, that’s not a bad place to start. For many years, I’ve taught a class in feature writing at George Washington University, and some of the best stories I’ve received focused on the role of women’s hair in the Black community. One student wrote about salons, run by female entrepreneurs, where clients could gather and gossip and support each other. Another wrote about generational tensions between older women who favored artificially straightened hair and their daughters, who proudly displayed their natural curl patterns.
Last spring, one of my students, the daughter of immigrants from West Africa, wrote a marvelous feature about the way different hairstyles — beads and braids, poufs and plaits — reflected different ethnic and tribal traditions. Every person in that classroom learned something that day.
I’m thinking about that student and what she meant to my class as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments next week in two cases that challenge affirmative action practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. These suits are trying to reverse a doctrine, first articulated by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the Bakke case of 1978, which advanced diversity as the core reason for using race in admissions decisions.
As Powell put it, diversity improves “the atmosphere of speculation, experiment and creation” that is “so essential to the quality of higher education.” He contended: “The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.”
Powell’s opinion has been widely criticized because he was the only justice in the five-vote majority that decided Bakke who favored the diversity rationale. And he offered no concrete evidence to support his assertion about the “essential” value of a varied student body.
After more than 30 years as a college teacher, however, I can say with complete confidence that Powell was right then, and he’s right today. Sure, affirmative action can benefit individual students, but in a larger sense, diversity profits the entire college community.
Lack of hard data supporting Powell’s opinion has long bedeviled backers of affirmative action, so four law school professors recently formulated a study centered on the staffs of law school journals. They found that journals that promoted staff diversity published articles that were about 25% more likely to be cited by lawyers in court filings.
“Our article lends credibility to the idea that diverse student bodies, diverse faculties, diverse teams of attorneys and diverse teams of employees generally can perform better than non-diverse teams,” the authors wrote in The Washington Post. “These results, in sum, place empirical heft behind Powell’s much-derided diversity rationale.”
Another class I teach focuses on the role of media in politics, and last spring we studied President Biden’s travels to Atlanta, where he highlighted his support for voting rights legislation. That class included five Black women, two of them from Atlanta; instead of welcoming Biden to their hometown, they were furious with him for not promoting voting rights early or often enough. Frankly, I was stunned, but the whole class learned something important about Biden’s potential problems with Black voters.
Focusing on race in the name of diversity has limits. For instance, I once had a Latina student whose father is a cardiac surgeon in Florida, and a white student whose dad never went to college and drives a truck in New Jersey. Which one is more deserving of extra consideration in admissions? And certain viewpoints — economic conservatives, devout churchgoers — are wildly underrepresented in universities gripped by suffocating liberal orthodoxy.
Still, it would be a huge mistake for this Supreme Court, dominated by a six-vote conservative bloc, to reverse Powell’s diversity doctrine.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that it will.