Earlier this week approximately 100 students at Connecticut’s Achievement First Amistad Charter High School staged a protest to demand more teachers of color in their classrooms.
“This started because our school doesn’t have a lot of diversity,” [junior Diva] Carter said. “Our school has a bunch of Hispanics and blacks and minorities, and we’re being controlled by white teachers.”
“We just want lots of diversity; we want our (incoming) principal to hire as many minorities as he can so we can connect with them,” Carter continued. “The only minorities in our school are deans, people that are controlling behavior issues. We want minorities in the classroom so we can connect with them.”
Student Messiah Gordon read a statement:
“Growing up without a father figure, I always looked to find one inside the classroom. Unfortunately, not to sound rude, a Caucasian male would never be able to teach me how to live in a society that still looks down at the color of my skin.”
Assistant Superintendent Jeff Sudmyer responded by saying the school has a “sustained commitment to recruiting diverse staff.”
But what’s of more value — quality or quantity? Just how easy/difficult is it to comply with the myriad diversity demands at high schools and colleges around the country?
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory, offers some insight:
Progressives at Tier 1 research universities and top liberal arts colleges sit at the summit of the higher ed hierarchy, where their eminence rests upon high standards of academic work. But they are fervently committed to hiring and retaining more persons of color. They have attempted affirmative action of the official and unofficial kind for a long time, but gains in the percentage of professors of color in elite departments have been disappointing. If you listen to them, you can hear a rising dismay in their voices. They want so much to have more non-white colleagues, but the years pass and nothing seems to change.
MORE: Colleges will only respect intellectual diversity when it’s profitable for them
This is a case of bad faith. People are in bad faith when they think and act in way that deny the reality of what they otherwise enjoy. The behavior is to demand more non-white hiring and promotion and retention. The reality is a combination of the meritocratic system of selective schools plus the limited pool of minority candidates. The number of African American and Hispanic PhDs falls well below the proportions those groups constitution of the general population. And in the humanities, Asian Americans, too, are underrepresented.
This means that superior institutions must compete vigorously for faculty of color who have the qualifications that put them into the ranks of high-achievers. Inevitably, they must lower the bar for them, setting up a showdown between a top school’s prestige and its “inclusivity.”
Bauerlein describes the case of Dartmouth’s (Asian-American) Aimee Bahng, whose denial of tenure led to “campus unrest.” Although her (English) department tenure committee had unanimously recommended her promotion, those higher up said “no.”
This was because Bahng’s curriculum vitae “displays a research record that doesn’t come close to meeting Dartmouth’s tenure standards.”
MORE: Campus diversity efforts do more harm than good
“All English departments at major institutions want to see a book in hand and several research articles. But all Bahng has is a book ‘forthcoming’ from Duke University Press in early 2017,” Bauerlein writes.
“The situation is clear. The department was willing to lower Dartmouth standards in order to meet identity needs.”
Regarding Amistad High, parent Alicia Jones complains that the school has “no black teachers, not in English (or) chemistry or anywhere.” Despite this sad diversity factoid, the school is ranked third-best in the state of Connecticut.
How did it manage to do that — with a mostly white teaching staff?
MORE: Universities are missing the point by emphasizing ‘diversity’
Read more about Amistad and Bauerlein’s full article.
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
IMAGE: Ron Mader/Flickr
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.