Students are regularly urged to be inclusive, aware of and sensitive to other cultures. But when one student group in California managed to make diversity a priority, it was undermined by a state ballot initiative that depleted the necessary campus diversity from which the group had drawn.
In 2006 I started visiting the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at “California University” to study how students dealt with race in a religious environment. Most evangelical-Christian fellowships at CU were almost all white or all Asian-American in composition, but InterVarsity was more diverse. The group held some innovative programming around race, such as a forum called “Race Matters,” where students talked about race-related issues. Sermons at weekly large-group meetings specifically refuted colorblindness and challenged students to reach out cross-culturally. In interviews, students frequently mentioned that InterVarsity was the most diverse place they had ever worshiped. About 90 percent of American churches are racially homogeneous, so InterVarsity’s diversity was unusual.
From the 1940s to the early 1990s, InterVarsity existed at CU as a predominantly white group that made little to no reference to race. In the early 1990s, spurred by the nearby Los Angeles riots and concerns raised by its few students of color, leaders committed to rebuilding the group’s organizational culture to take on issues of race and racial reconciliation (a Christian framing of positive race relations). By the late 1990s, InterVarsity was a racially heterogeneous group.
While InterVarsity’s changes were mostly internally driven, the group’s demographic transformation would have been impossible without the racial diversity of CU in the early and mid-1990s. There were black, Asian-American, and Latino students who were drawn to InterVarsity’s zeal for racial reconciliation. During that period, InterVarsity was a college educator’s dream: students taking on race outside of the classroom and on their own initiative.
Later, when I was conducting fieldwork in 2007, I started to hear comments from older students along the lines of “we’re diverse, but not as diverse as we used to be.” I realized that after keeping its focus on diversity for more than a decade, InterVarsity had slipped a little in that regard. The result was homophily, wherein like attracts like.
In this case, InterVarsity’s sizable Asian-American presence had begun to snowball. The group’s organizational culture became more Asian-American friendly and less welcoming to African-American students. It wasn’t that InterVarsity became overtly unwelcoming to black students but that the group’s commitment to reaching out cross-culturally had lagged. As a mostly white and Asian-American group, it was still considered “diverse” compared with the other campus fellowships at CU. Still, it had changed. For instance, participation in InterVarsity by African-Americans had fallen from 16.9 percent in 2002 to 2.3 percent in 2007.
That dynamic may look like a failure by InterVarsity. As a student put it, “we dropped the ball on race.” However, as a researcher, I saw the interplay between InterVarsity’s organizational culture and the structural demography of CU. A decade after the 1996 passage of Prop 209, which amended the state Constitution to prohibit government institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, CU was having an admissions crisis with black students. They constituted less than 2 percent of the incoming first-year class in 2006. The campus climate was becoming such that black students were less likely to want to spend extra time with peers of different races after spending the entire day as the only black student in their classes. They were less likely to want to join a group like InterVarsity, not just because of its less-inclusive culture but because of the day-to-day strain they experienced at CU. The campus’s black-student population was never particularly large even before Prop 209, 7 to 8 percent tops, but now it was at an all-time low.
The demographic availability of Asian-Americans at CU, by contrast, remained high, at almost 40 percent. There were plenty of Asian-American students who were attracted to InterVarsity’s multiethnic yet Asian-American-friendly culture. Demography is not destiny, but once InterVarsity lessened its focus on racial reconciliation, the door was open for Asian-American growth.
Over time, InterVarsity recommitted to racial reconciliation, but the deck was stacked against it. It was limited by the demographic constraints. As Peter M. Blau and Joseph E. Schwartz remark in their book Crosscutting Social Circles (Transaction Publishers, 1997), “patterns of social relations in a community are affected by the social environment because the other people in their environment determine the options people have in establishing social relations. ... We are obviously not free to become friends if there are no opportunities for such friendships in our surroundings.”
What types of friendship groups and student communities are possible in a student body where black-student enrollment is low? We often see friendship as a matter of freedom and preference, but structural inequality limits our opportunities for friendship, not to mention the relative equal status that is crucial for interracial contact.
InterVarsity is an illuminating case that shows how drops in racial diversity do not just hurt ignorant students who desperately need meaningful interracial engagement. Low racial diversity also hurts the ability of well-meaning students to live according to their values and goals around improving race relations. Racial diversity in a student body is essential to support student subcultures that foster the educational and civic benefits of diversity.
Affirmative action is no panacea, but the amicus briefs filed by the State of California and the chancellors of the University of California system in Fisher v. Texas make it clear that the UC system has not been able to recoup sufficient racial diversity in the wake of Prop 209. The black-student presence was never particularly large at CU, but now it is minuscule. The InterVarsity story shows how macrolevel declines in campus diversity have sizable implications for the everyday lives of students and the communities they nurture during college.
