An alternative view point on the diversity efforts

For people who are seriously interested in this issue, I would like share an alternative view point due to Bill Harbaugh, University of Oregon, Economics Department.

I strongly support these ideas, and invite everybody to read the wholestory at

http://nanonomics.typepad.com/

To start, please read these exceptionfrom http://nanonomics.typepad.com/

“The biggest problem with the university’s current diversity efforts, which is aggravated in the new diversity plan, is that the majority of the available resources are devoted to supporting people who already have PhD’s. Virtually every person with a PhD has an income substantially above the state average. Most Oregonians have a hard time viewing people in this situation as disadvantaged, and rightly so.

Subsidies to attract more minority Professors to UO do not do much to create new minority PhDs — they just move people who already have a PhD from one university to another. Students who have not begun preparing f or college by 9th grade are very unlikely to attend college and succeed in it. They just won’t have done the preparatory course work. Obviously, graduating college is a necessary condition for becoming a professor.

It takes a torturous chain of reasoning to argue that the current strategy of $90,000+ grants for minority job hires, or the new plan of cluster hires and critical mass, is going to convince minority 8th graders to start studying hard preparing themselves for getting into college and then pursuing a rigorous 10 years of academic training. But this is what would have to happen, for this strategy to increase the country’s aggregate supply of minority professors.

In fact, there seems to be little evidence that the current program of bonuses based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation even does much to increase the diversity of faculty at UO. Regardless, to the extent current efforts have an effect at UO, they do so by luring minorities from another university, or by convincing a successful minority student to try academic life rather than, say, practicing law or medicine. The gain to the country, in terms of a more diverse professional and academic class, is zero.”

See http://nanonomics.typepad.com/for more.

We are welcome serious discussion.

Boris Botvinnik

Boris Botvinnik, Professor of mathematics at University of Oregon, at 5:40 am EDT on May 13, 2006

Having “one ” or"two” minotity faculty members in these departments or schools do not have any impact on the teaching or the retaining of minority students. It has been my experience that these “selected minority” professors DO NOT like to mentor minority students. They prefer to mentor caucasian students. I suppose that they want to be regarded as being there for every student. They are seldom ever helpful to students of color. Some of these individuals are sometimes quite hostile to these minoruty students, and will seldom go out of their way to assist them with anything. This happens at the predominantly caucasian high schools, and in the undrgraduate and graduate departments of major colleges/ universities. The few minority students at these instiutions shy away from these individuals because they know that these minority teachers or professors will be even more unkind and or unhelpful to them. Although they are bright, there is a tendency for them to perform comparatively poorly. There are exceptions, of course.

I applaud the idea od “critical mass” mentoring for minority students at these large white institutions. This “critical mass” approach with highly successful performance outcomes at the high school level can been seen in high school magnet programs. Very bright Black students in predominantly white high schools left without mentoring and support perform poorly when compared with their counterparts and experience the feeling of isolation. Again, there are exceptions, but this has been my clinical observations. These observations do require research, of course, but I do think that we are on to something here with respect to the concept of “the importance of critical mass” in the education of bright, Black students.

Cynthia, at 1:45 pm EDT on June 9, 2006