One month before R. Bowen Loftin resigned as chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia, accused of not fighting racism on the flagship campus, he announced mandatory “diversity training” for faculty, staff, and students.
Some hailed the move as overdue, but others were not impressed. An emeritus professor at the university criticized the training as a “Band-Aid.” Jonathan Butler, a graduate student whose hunger strike later became a centerpiece of campus protests, said the gesture was “a good step” but “not enough.” Others called it “meaningless” and “patronizing.” The protests persisted, culminating in the resignations last week of Mr. Loftin and Timothy M. Wolfe, the system president.
Does diversity training work? That is the question many college officials face as they scramble to deal with protests of the racial climate on their campuses. Many hope that education can play a role in fighting prejudice. Yet their optimism is shaded by the fact that diversity-education programs have been around on campuses for a long time without appearing to have solved much of anything.
Workshops, seminars, and lectures about how to respect differences at diversifying institutions have been commonplace at colleges for at least two decades. In 1997 a Bryn Mawr College study estimated that 81 percent of colleges had tried holding workshops at which students discussed their experiences of racial bias.
Students seemed to like the workshops, according to a survey of administrators, but nobody had studied whether the events were changing campus attitudes or behaviors. Only recently have researchers begun to know if the workshops actually change how people think and feel.
Katerina Bezrukova, an assistant professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, worked with a team that analyzed more than 200 studies of diversity training — not just on colleges campuses but also in various workplaces — conducted over the last four decades. They found that while training programs can change how people think about racial differences, they tend not to change how people feel.
Racial attitudes have deep roots, the researchers explain. If a diversity workshop manages to sway a person intellectually, emotional biases can undo that work in short order — especially if the person returns to the same culture that created and reinforced those biases in the first place. Ms. Bezrukova and her team found no strong evidence in the research to suggest that diversity training changes people’s attitudes over the long term.
They did find, however, that training has sometimes changed people’s minds. While their biases might remain intact, people can learn new ways of thinking about things like race. That thinking can lead them to act against their instincts.
Taking It Seriously
But that has not often happened in the past. Too many organizations have relied on relatively brief seminars, workshops, or lectures whose lessons are easily ignored or forgotten, says Ms. Bezrukova. Mandatory training, in particular, has not been very effective. “People just don’t take it seriously,” she says.
Jonathan Poullard, a senior consultant with the Equity Consulting Group, agrees that prejudice on a campus cannot be solved in a single afternoon, if at all.
That’s why Mr. Poullard, a former dean of students at the University of California at Berkeley, asks for long-term commitments from his clients, who are usually student-affairs administrators and their staff.
In a typical arrangement, he meets with the clients for two days every semester for two years, beginning with individual interviews with participants about what they hope to get out of the program. Mr. Poullard says he avoids giving one-off presentations to large groups, especially if those invitations come from colleges that might be seeking only to burnish their reputations.
‘Sometimes people want to use diversity training or leadership training as a check box.’
“Sometimes people want to use diversity training or leadership training as a check box,” he says. But real change takes time and commitment.
One of the greatest challenges for trainers is persuading people that it might be necessary for them, personally, to change. Professors can be an especially tough crowd, especially if they already consider themselves to be right-thinking, empathetic teachers with the glowing evaluations to prove it.
“Most people, certainly faculty, believe that if they’re for social justice, it’s automatically integrated into whatever they do,” says Robin DiAngelo, a former education professor at Westfield State University, in Massachusetts, who consults with colleges on racial issues. “Therefore they don’t need training.”
Academics may see themselves as more-sophisticated thinkers than most people, she says, but that doesn’t mean they notice how their unconscious biases affect their interactions with students.
Erring on Side of Empathy
Students, however, do notice.
In April about 200 Emerson College students interrupted a faculty meeting to tell their professors about the various times they had felt marginalized, excluded, or discriminated against in class. Then they asked that the faculty members undergo diversity training.
Sylvia Spears, Emerson’s vice president for diversity and inclusion, was not surprised. She had heard similar stories directly from students. Some said their professors hadn’t bothered learning to pronounce their names correctly; others believed the Massachusetts college’s performing-arts program did not provide enough opportunities for students of color.
Her office already offered diversity training to Emerson faculty members, but only to professors who asked for it. Getting a critical mass to seek help posed a challenge. So before the fall semester began, Ms. Spears helped organize a diversity workshop during an existing professional-development day that all full-time faculty members were required to attend.
Jabari Asim, an associate professor of creative writing, was one of the workshop’s organizers. At the April faculty meeting, when a student had talked about how a professor’s aversion to learning the correct pronunciation of her name had made her feel invisible, Mr. Asim had felt a pang of guilt. He had done that before.
‘Most people, certainly faculty, believe that if they’re for social justice, it’s automatically integrated into whatever they do. Therefore they don’t need training.’
As a student, he had never minded much if a professor mispronounced his name. But Mr. Asim, who is black, does remember other things, like when people encountered him in an academic building and asked if he was lost. He understands how those slights can accumulate.
“I don’t want to be dismissive of whatever your perceived emotional burden is,” he says. “I’d rather err on the side of empathy.”
At the workshop, a panel of faculty members gave presentations on how to handle “difficult conversations” about race and difference that might come up, unexpectedly, in class. The professors talked about some of the scenarios in which students had said they felt discriminated against. “My co-chair and I were very worried that we’d run into a lot of resistance,” says Mr. Asim. “But we didn’t.”
The workshop went well, but it wasn’t perfect. Only full-time faculty members were required to attend; Emerson’s adjuncts, who make up half of its teaching force, were not included. The professors were told about the more-rigorous training available to those who wanted to put their teaching practices under a microscope, but nobody would be forced to go.
Emerson officials nonetheless say they see progress. Participation in voluntary diversity-education programs is up this year, says Ms. Spears, and “not everybody who applies is part of the choir.” April’s student-led intervention and this fall’s diversity workshop may not have solved any problems, she says, but that doesn’t mean they were not important steps.
If a professor leaves such a workshop and thinks, “Maybe I don’t buy all of this, but maybe I’ll consider thinking about this a little more,” Ms. Spears says, “then I’ve created an appetite for trying to do something differently.”
Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
