Are Colleges’ Diversity Efforts Putting Students in ‘Silos’?

Patrick Shanahan, Cornell Marketing Group

When the University of Connecticut wanted to help its black male students improve their graduation rate, officials decided to try something new. They created a living-learning community, set to open this fall, that is designed to help black men transition into college more successfully by grouping them among other students in the same boat and supporting them as they navigate academic and social hurdles.

Any male student can apply for one of the roughly 50 spots in the community, which is part of a larger dorm. But its name makes the purpose clear: ScHOLA²RS House, or Scholastic House of Leaders who are African American Researchers and Scholars.

Etching out spaces on campus to help students from specific backgrounds feel more welcome is nothing new. For decades predominantly white institutions have provided venues, organizations, and programs where minority students can connect with mentors and peers who understand their experiences. Many student activists implored their colleges to provide more such spaces during last fall’s protests over race.

But critics of Connecticut’s housing project and similar efforts say such diversity “silos” can be limiting, leading students who identify with particular groups to confine much of their intellectual and social life to narrow factions. One recent study suggests that membership in ethnically segregated organizations can actually increase tensions among students of different races. And some critics go further, saying these silos are nothing more than segregation in disguise.

Many student-life administrators and experts suggest that there’s room for both retreat and interaction. They stress that affinity groups and designated cultural spaces play an important role on an inclusive, dynamic campus. Still, they say it’s also crucial for colleges to create environments for diverse groups of students to have difficult conversations.

Greater student diversity on a campus doesn’t necessarily translate into more dialogue and friendship across ethnic groups, says Beverly C. Daniel Tatum, a former president of Spelman College, a historically black institution for women in Georgia, and a clinical psychologist. She’s also author of several books exploring the intersection of psychology and race.

“I think the expectation that some higher-education institutions have is that if we bring students of different populations together, they’ll just stumble across each other and figure out how to do this,” Ms. Tatum says. “But they don’t.”

Aditi Bhowmick, a senior at Cornell University, agrees. It’s possible, Ms. Bhowmick says, for a student to get through four years at Cornell without stepping too far out of his or her identity group.

“Cornell is doing great work to make sure everyone feels at home,” she says. “But I feel like there’s a lot of lost opportunity for people to interact and experience diversity.”

It’s not that students don’t interact with peers of varied backgrounds, says Patricia Y. Gurin, a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — whether in dorms, on sports teams, or within student organizations. But this informal banter rarely delves into controversial issues, Ms. Gurin says, because that could get awkward or uncomfortable. She says students need to be able to go beyond, “What did you do on Saturday night?”

Another obstacle that Ms. Bhowmick has noticed is a tension between the “default settings” of particular groups. If a gay student who’s active in the college’s LGBTQ organization wanted to join a historically white fraternity, “it’s almost seen as a betrayal,” she says.

So how can colleges create spaces for meaningful interaction among diverse groups of students?

Intergroup dialogue has become one widely used strategy for colleges to break down diversity silos in the classroom and elsewhere. Ms. Gurin and several other researchers first used the concept nearly three decades ago to structure a course at Michigan.

Under this framework, relatively equal numbers of students from two different demographic groups — based on race, gender, or some other identity characteristic — participate in a course that usually lasts a semester. The students learn how to engage in constructive conversations and how to distinguish between debate and dialogue, and then select topics to discuss as a class. The final stage involves groups of four students — two from each demographic identity — doing a project together.

Ms. Gurin has observed that many white students come into race-focused courses having always wanted to be able to discuss race but worried that they would come across as ignorant or prejudiced. Minority students, meanwhile, struggle to understand how some of their white peers don’t grasp concepts like microaggressions as easily as they do.

“They learn in a facilitated conversation that they can say things and make mistakes,” Ms. Gurin says. “We would never call it a ‘safe space,’ but there’s some assurance that they’re not going to be attacked or made foolish by their ignorance.” Most students haven’t been taught to properly listen to each other, ask questions, and build on one another’s ideas, she adds.

The Michigan course has evolved into a voluntary academic program and, more recently, an undergraduate minor. A handful of colleges have crafted intergroup-dialogue programs modeled after Michigan’s and roughly 160 institutions have participated in an annual institute, now in its 11th year, that the university holds for colleges interested in the theory.

Outside the classroom, some colleges turn to food or cultural events, such as concerts and dance performances, to bring together students who wouldn’t normally cross paths. Renee T. Alexander, associate dean of students and director of intercultural programs at Cornell, oversees a dinner series called “Breaking Bread,” where members of two or three student groups get to know each other over a meal.

Ms. Bhowmick, the Cornell senior, has helped facilitate several Breaking Bread events as part of Cornell’s intergroup-dialogue project. She recalls a recent one with Black Students United and Cornell Hillel, where the dinner featured cornbread and challah. “That’s just a dialogue you don’t see happening unless you bring those people together,” she says. By the end of another dinner, involving a diverse crowd of fraternity members, “it looked like they had been friends for years.”

One pressing question is whether such efforts are reaching the narrow-minded students who need it the most. Ms. Alexander says that’s a continuing process at Cornell. “We’ve started with the leadership — with students who tend to be progressive, change agents, difference-makers in their communities,” she says. “As we expand, the goal is to include as many people in the conversation as possible.” That will take time, she notes.

But Ms. Gurin says intergroup-dialogue courses work best when students are there by choice. “It’s about reaching those who are motivated to learn how to do this better,” she says.

Efforts like Connecticut’s affinity housing for black men also have a role to play on campus, Ms. Gurin says. “Those safe havens are crucial as well.” Connecticut officials hope the program will help black men improve their six-year graduation rate, which stood at 54 percent in 2015 (compared with 83 percent for all groups and 77 percent for all minorities). Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, disagrees. He has written several letters to Susan Herbst, Connecticut’s president, criticizing the black-male housing. “I don’t know how they can make an argument that there’s equal access and equal treatment if they treat certain students differently,” Mr. Meyers says.

Colleges that promote ethnically segregated opportunities are, in fact, structuring their institutions through a racial lens — the antithesis of inclusion, he says.

But Kathleen Wong(Lau), director of the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies at the University of Oklahoma, says people tend to oversimplify the discussion of cultural affinity groups and programs. It’s not as if students in such groups walk around campus surrounded by an impenetrable wall, she says. For minority students, she says, “your whole experience on campus is an experience of interacting with difference.” Given that context, it’s important for students “to have a safe place where people like them get it,” she says.

Ms. Tatum, the former Spelman president, says her son lived in an on-campus house geared toward African-American students during his first year at Wesleyan University. At the end of the year, Ms. Tatum held an intergroup dialogue at the house. One white student at the event said she didn’t interact with many black students because they were all hanging out with each other at the house. But Ms. Tatum pointed out that there were only 30 or so students living in the house, compared with many more black students at the university.

At times, Ms. Tatum takes issue with how the debate over diversity silos is laid out. “The question is often framed in terms of the silos that students of color are in,” she says. The conversation should be not only about how a college can support students of color, but also, “how we can help white students break out of that isolation.”