In the last decade, the increasing social and ethnic heterogeneity of the nation’s college campuses has captured the attention of media pundits, higher-education administrators, and many faculty members. Unfortunately, the troublesome aspects of this development have dominated most of the public debate.
One major issue that has absorbed the media is that many students’ social lives are segmented in ways that reaffirm their ethnic, racial, and cultural identities. This segmentation, now routinely referred to as “Balkanization,” causes surprise, chagrin, and even some derision. It is characterized as an unseemly reversion to “tribalism” that gets in the way of the search for common ground.
There is something both old and new here. Although typically treated as a new and alarming development, such segmentation is quite an old phenomenon and has been replayed throughout the history of higher education in America. Social historians who study U.S. colleges and universities know that the Hillel and Newman foundations played similar important roles for Jewish and Catholic students, respectively, for much of this century. With the assistance of such organizations, parties, dances, recreation, study groups, and sometimes residences were routinely “self-segregated,” often in response to active discrimination against Jews and Catholics elsewhere on campus.
Today’s critics are suffering from a selective cultural amnesia when they portray African-American theme houses and Chinese student associations as newly created enclaves that destroy the search for common ground. Even into the last decade, the most prestigious fraternities at Yale, Michigan, Harvard, and Berkeley had never admitted a Jew, much less an African American or an Asian. The all-Jewish fraternity was common as late as the 1960’s, and when a Chinese American, Sherman Wu, pledged a fraternity at Northwestern in 1956, it was such a sensation that it made national news and generated a folk song. Over the years, some mild hand wringing occurred about such discrimination, but no national campaign was launched against the “self-segregation” of the all-white, all-Anglo fraternities.
Yet, despite this long tradition, I believe something new is occurring on campuses that may help explain the hysterical response that we have been hearing. The new development is a demographic shift that the long-dominant white majority sees as threatening its cultural hegemony.
At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, the undergraduate student body has been rapidly and dramatically transformed. In 1960, more than 90 per cent of the students were white. In 1980, the figure was about 66 per cent. Today, it is about 45 per cent. The freshman class this fall signals an even more striking change for those who still think of Berkeley in 1960’s terms. For the first time in history, whites do not make up the largest proportion of the incoming class; instead, it is Asian Americans, who account for about 35 per cent. Only 30 per cent of the class are Americans of European ancestry. In addition, nearly 20 per cent of the class are Chicanos/Latinos, and nearly 8 per cent African Americans. If this pattern holds, well over 60 per cent of Berkeley students will be “of color” within the next five years.
Although it will not be quite as dramatic in some other regions of the country, this coloring of the campus landscape reflects a vital and constantly unfolding development in American social life. Although symbolized by dramatic figures such as those at Berkeley, the ramifications go far beyond the percentages of different ethnic and racial groups admitted to college campuses. The ramifications of demographic change certainly tug at the curriculum and challenge the borders of faculty turf and expertise. But the fundamental issues tapped by this change go to the heart of American identity and culture.
Bubbling just beneath the surface of all the national attention devoted to “political correctness” and “quotas” is a complicated question that, stated most simply, is: “What does it mean to be an American?” And the related question is, “How does one become an American?”
The controversy over diversity at Berkeley, much like the battle over the social-studies curriculum in New York State, is a struggle over who gets to define the idea of America. Are we essentially a nation with a common -- or at least dominant -- culture to which immigrants and “minorities” must adapt? Or is this a land in which ethnicity and difference are an accepted part of the whole; a land in which we affirm the richness of our differences and simultaneously try to forge agreement about basic values to guide public and social policy?
Critics of the current, visible wave of segmentation argue that “Balkanization” threatens the ties that bind civil society. But civil society in a nation of immigrants is forever in flux, and the basic issue always has been which group has the power to define what the values and structures of that common society will be. We should learn something from our history.
Being an American is different from being French or Japanese or almost any other nationality because, except for Native Americans, there actually is no such thing as an American without a hyphen. We are a nation of immigrants. Generations of immigrants have struggled to balance both sides of the hyphen, to carry on some aspects of the culture of the old country while adopting the norms and customs of the new. Today, many of their descendants continue to find comfort in an identification with the old country, however tenuous it may be. In a diverse nation, such identification can provide a sense of belonging to a recognizable collectivity. It helps give a sense of belonging -- of being one with others like oneself -- that helps to overcome the isolation of modern life, while paradoxically also allowing a sense of uniqueness.
This is the same phenomenon we see being reenacted on campuses all over the country today, the difference being that the actors are no longer all white.
At a place like Berkeley, there is no longer a single racial or ethnic group with an overwhelming numerical and political majority. Pluralism is the reality, with no one group a dominant force. This is completely new; we are grappling with a phenomenon that is both puzzling and alarming, fraught with tensions and hostilities, and yet simultaneously brimming with potential and crackling with new energy. Consequently, we swing between hope and concern, optimism and pessimism about the prospects for social life among peoples from differing racial and cultural groups. Are members of particular groups isolated or interacting, segregating or integrating, fighting or harmonizing? Who is getting ahead or falling behind?
It may well be that we have too narrowly conceived the options as either/or. It may be that as a nation we have cast the problem incompletely and thus incorrectly by posing the matter as either one of assimilation to a single, dominant culture where differences merge and melt away -- or one of hardened, isolated, and self-segregated groups retreating into ethnic and racial enclaves, defeating the very purpose of trying to achieve diversity.
The findings from a two-year study of student life on the Berkeley campus in which I participated strongly suggest that these are not the only two alternatives before us. Other avenues are possible. In that research, we discovered an emerging vision of one of these options, a “third experience” of diversity. In this “third experience,” the whole is greater than the sum of the various parts. In it, for example, collective problem solving by individuals from different backgrounds produces superior results precisely because of the synergy that develops from different approaches being brought to bear on the same problem.
At the public level, we see the possibility of people with strong ethnic and racial identities (including ethnically homogeneous affiliations and friendships) also being able to participate effectively in heterogeneous educational or work settings. These public spheres are enriched precisely because people bring to them the strengths of different cultural and ethnic identities forged out of their unique experiences and “separateness.”
In the private arena, individuals with strong ethnic and racial identities also can form friendships that cross racial lines, for example, as students meet each other as equals in the dorms, classrooms, and quads. Although only a small proportion of students currently achieve this, students from different backgrounds can come to see one another as resources by recognizing different, yet complementary, competencies.
One of my favorite examples at Berkeley is an advanced student in computer sciences, an African American, who is acting as a mentor to two first-generation, Asian emigres. He is teaching them computer technology and such nuances of American culture as the unique role of charitable organizations. The Asian students, in turn, are teaching him about subjects ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to the symbolic importance of gift giving among Koreans. While this kind of learning has always occurred when there is contact between people from different cultures, the potential scale of this contact among “equals” at places like Berkeley is quite new -- and holds out the promise of significant changes in social interaction over the long term.
Some of our students, no less than some of our leading pundits, such as George Will and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., see “self-segregation” as an assault upon their idea of a common community. But other students understand that people living among their ethnic or racial peers are trying to forge an identity and support group to help them in a difficult and often alien world.
The all-black dining table in the dormitory or the all-Asian dance is visually striking, it is true, and stands in sharp relief against student life in earlier periods, when the social segregation among white ethnic students was much less obvious. We should not forget the invidious distinctions made in earlier periods, however. When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I learned about the virulence of anti-Semitism from Christians and about vicious anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiment from the Anglo upper crust in Evanston. But those distinctions did not reach Time and Newsweek or the national television networks, and columnists did not talk about the “Balkanization” of our college campuses. Race somehow matters more.
Wholesale condemnation of self-segregation is too simple and simple-minded. Just as Jewish students have found Hillel and a common ethnic/cultural identity the basis for self-affirmation, so too do today’s ethnic and racial “minorities” often need to draw upon the social, cultural, and moral resources of their respective communities.
We must also remember that the European ancestry of the Jewish and Catholic students segregated into enclaves in the earlier part of the century was rather better reflected in the existing curriculum than are the ancestries of today’s Asian, Latino, or African-American students. While the earlier “out” groups were generally content to receive the established curriculum, today’s students are likely to challenge both the curriculum and the pedagogy used to deliver it.
What ultimately bothers today’s critics most is not the racial or ethnic segregation of students’ social lives, but the challenges that the growing numbers of Asian, Latino, and African-American students pose to the faculty once they find their ancestors’ histories and contributions largely ignored in the classroom. That is what really rankles the critics and explains the depth of their anxiety; they recognize that the challenges to the curriculum represent a real and powerful confrontation over who answers, “What does it mean to be an American?”
Troy Duster is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley.