As campus protests and their demands increase, college presidents often give in, likely doing more harm than good. However, that easy way out is more likely to hurt those students who issue demands, as Professors Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim explained in The Wall Street Journal.
Students have argued for hiring more minority faculty and admitting more minority students, microaggression training, and funding for ethnic centers. But “the existing research literature suggests that such reforms will fail to achieve their stated aims of reducing discrimination and inequality,” and would particularly harm black students.
Diversity demands further the basic psychology principle of an “us” versus “them” mentality, and classical studies have found that discrimination increased against those of different groups. If students were to see commonalities with their threat or challenge, they could take a “one for all, all for one” perspective. Otherwise, they “readily shift into zero-sum thinking and hostility.” Solidarity could create longer-lasting change than a “divide and conquer” approach.
The results are similar with funding for ethnic centers and organizations. Membership “actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.”
In order to accept more minority students or hire more faculty, schools would have to reach into weaker pools of candidates. “This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus,” the professors noted.
Students have called for self-segregation. But that, along with “fewer cross-race friendships,” could cause “even stronger feelings of alienation among black students.” And yet students still continue to call for their own housing and space, under the guise that it will make them feel better when it further promotes alienation.
Microaggressions and sensitivity training are also problematic.
“As the threshold for what counts as an offense falls ever lower, cross-racial interactions become more dangerous, and conflict increases,” they wrote. That “faculty and students of all races [could] grow more anxious and guarded whenever students from other backgrounds were present” is also a concern raised when it comes to reporting bias.
Reducing prejudice and improving race relations can be done through common goals, cooperation, and equal status. Campuses are unlikely to see these benefits, though, when “increasing the number of black students and professors” is “accompanied by microaggression training and other measures that magnify racial consciousness and conflict.”
There is another answer for college presidents.
“The essential first step is to take the long view and seek hard evidence about what will work, rather than spending vast sums of money to respond to the political pressures of the moment,” Haidt and Jussim wrote.
The analysis concluded with the call for “a bold college president to propose a different approach, one based on the available evidence about what works and what doesn’t” as “the best way to create a university community in which everyone feels welcome.”
Haidt and Jussim take an analytical approach, backing up their arguments with studies and examples. As college presidents and faculty are shouted down and cursed out, including at Yale, the easy way out may seem like the obvious answer. Improving race relations on college campus may turn into a brave and bold endeavor.
