Colleges are still uncovering relics of inequality.
In May, Williams College eliminated its swim test, making it the latest highly selective institution to drop a decades-old tradition ill-suited to a diverse campus.
For years, undergraduates were required to pass a swim test or take a beginning swimming class to graduate.
That requirement made some students feel punished or shamed for not knowing how to swim, D. Clinton Williams, director of the college’s Pathways for Inclusive Excellence and chairman of the Diversity Advisory Research Team, told our Adrienne Lu.
Swim tests are a vestige of America’s tortured history of racial inequity. Williams’s Diversity Advisory Research Team studied qualitative and quantitative data and found that from 2013 to 2019, 81 percent of students who enrolled in the beginning swim class were American students of color. Sixteen percent were international students, and 57 percent were first-generation college students. Only 3 percent were white American students.
Those figures align with national statistics. Jeff Wiltse, a professor of history at the University of Montana and a scholar of the history of swimming pools in the U.S, said that Black Americans are half as likely to know how to swim as white Americans, and that past discrimination at public swimming pools is a big part of the reason for the disparity.
While Williams ditched its swim-test graduation requirement, colleges like Columbia, Cornell, MIT, and Swarthmore still have them in place.
Best practices to advance racial equity are still up for debate.
Many colleges want to advance racial equity, but it remains difficult to identify the best way to achieve that goal.
If you’ve participated in a college-diversity training program, this may be unwelcome news: According to research from two sociology professors, the programs don’t effectively improve diversity, and sometimes their work can backfire, creating more divisions.
In their research for their book, the sociologists Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University studied federal work-force data from more than 800 companies that have employed eight-million workers overs 30 years and found that most anti-bias training for individual employees fails to increase diversity in management. The training can also activate biases, sometimes prompting employees to become resentful or even angry.
Diversity training with a positive spin, emphasizing that employees and managers can improve workplace inclusion, tends to be more successful at raising the number of minority employees in management, the researchers found.
Meanwhile, “white accountability groups” have emerged as a way for campus community members to advance racial equity among themselves, but the groups have been met with criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. The groups work as safe spaces for white peers to learn about and discuss topics that can seem daunting in mixed-race groups. While the groups are generally open to everyone, they are also a place where a person of color doesn’t have to do the additional work of teaching about racial issues.
Some conservative opponents have criticized the groups, saying they’re a way for white people to be shamed or blamed for racist beliefs that they may not actually hold. On the left, some question how much a group of white people talking among themselves could do to advance racial equity.
At the University of North Texas, a co-founder of a white accountability group said she initially started it to help herself and other white people become better allies to people of color. To ward off potential critics, leaders there emphasize that it’s a voluntary group for employees with “privilege” to learn how to improve conditions for less-privileged colleagues.
Depicting diversity is a sticky issue.
In June, a student journalist at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo noted that banners across campus featured images of students from diverse backgrounds, like a Black student and a woman wearing a head scarf.
He wrote that while a quarter of the banners featured Black students, that group made up just 0.8 of a percent of Cal Poly’s student body.
Using images to exaggerate the diversity of a student body is not new. And this is one example of how colleges market themselves as inclusive and diverse places while the reality on campus may be different.
A research paper from 2013 analyzed more than 10,000 photographs from 165 four-year colleges’ admissions brochures and found that it’s a near-universal practice to present misleading depictions of racial diversity in brochures.
The study also found that Black students were the most overrepresented racial group in admissions brochures, usually by nearly twice their actual numbers on campuses.
Your turn.
We shared what we learned from our most-read editions of this newsletter in 2022. Now we want to know: What did you learn about diversity and equity this year? Email me about your findings, big and small: fernanda@chronicle.com.
