Widespread reports that the University of Wisconsin-Madison has plans to dole out grades based on skin color in some sort of racial equality quest were denied Monday by Patrick Sims, the school’s chief diversity officer and interim vice provost for diversity and climate. (Yes, apparently that’s his real title.)
“Regrettably, (emeritus UW-Madison Professor Lee) Hansen’s assertion that the campus’ most recent strategic diversity framework embraces a quota system for apportioning grades by race, is a gross misrepresentation of our current efforts,” Sims starts out in a fairly straightforward manner.
But then Sims delves into muddy academic-ese as he writes further about this “diversity framework”:
The concept of Inclusive Excellence allows institutions to engage diversity from a vantage point of alignment with campus quality efforts, underscoring the educational benefits of diversity for all students, while emphasizing it as a central value of the institution. These laudable goals serve as the backbone for how institutions like UW-Madison, which have a long and rich tradition of academic rigor and excellence, can make excellence more inclusive, hence the term Inclusive Excellence. …
This proportional and equitable distribution of grades arises (without intervention at the time of grading) by fostering living and learning spaces that are inclusive of historically marginalized students so that they can do their best learning and earn better grades; not through the “redistribution” of artificially-enhanced grades.
Only at a modern university could a feel-good oxymoron such as “Inclusive Excellence” make its way into policy decisions.
Writing on the controversy, University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse rightly notes Sims’ “bureaucratese is unlikely to stanch the rumors unless it convinces you that the whole plan is nothing but an incantation that sounds good to the people who like the sound of bureaucratese.”
“I suspect that those who jumped to assume that there would be grade discrimination will say that they don’t believe that inclusive ‘living and learning spaces’ will achieve the goals,” she adds. “But that doesn’t mean those who wrote and adopted the plan will resort to cheating.”
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