The Impact of Hopwood on Graduate Education--Curse AND Blessing?
*Richard
A. Cherwitz
Stefanie Sanford
Austin
American-Statesman
Published: May 24, 1999
Hopwood: Hard to imagine one event capable of triggering more volatile emotions and venomous reactions. Sadly, this ruling--rendered by a judicial panel distant from the realities of the modern campus--has become shorthand for "The University of Texas lacks commitment to diversity." What an ironic rhetorical fate for a university with a strong progressive tradition. Reverberations came from the right and the left, leading to protests, shouting matches, frustration and misunderstanding. But more important, this shorthand implied a dangerous fiction -- that, in the days before Hopwood, UT had "solved the problem" of how to attain diversity.
Hopwood was a curse. Could it also be a blessing?
First the curse. While Hopwood had very distinct effects in different departments, depending on size and selectivity, one thing is clear: As UT and Hopwood became a national media spectacle, minority graduate applications plummeted. Potential applicants read the media hype and lost interest in Texas. African American and Hispanic applications to UT's Graduate School (which does not include Law) declined by 38% and 22% in the year following Hopwood and new minority enrollments dropped by double-digit percentages. Although application and enrollment numbers declined, the percentage of minority applicants who were admitted did not. The characterization that UT suddenly became disinterested in diversity after Hopwood is patently false. That claim itself may have undermined diversity by driving away potential applicants and by discouraging admitted students from enrolling.
How can Hopwood be a blessing? Prior to Hopwood many thought UT's approach to diversity, which focussed primarily on numbers and races, was sufficient. It was narrow, perhaps missing the larger point of diversity. And even before Hopwood, fewer than 10% of applicants to UT's Graduate School were African American and Hispanic. Hopwood caused faculty and administrators to rethink diversity. The obvious and necessary first step was to appeal the Hopwood ruling. Experience in Law and other fields suggests that attaining diversity requires consideration of race as one among many factors; demanding that universities ignore one characteristic is as worrisome as demanding that universities consider only one characteristic. But changing the admissions process cannot be the sole solution. Hopwood compelled UT to be proactive--to ask not just how the process of admissions might be modified to increase minority enrollment, but how the University might be improved to attract the best and brightest of all races and backgrounds.
Hence, in the past two years UT implemented cutting-edge academic programs that resonate with the needs of society and respond to the interests of a heterogeneous population. We also continue to develop innovative learning opportunities, recruit a world class faculty, and cultivate a humane intellectual environment. But it takes more than these local improvements to attract diverse, high quality graduate students. It also requires competitive graduate student funding. Unfortunately, UT lags well behind top tier universities in graduate student support. Let us not be fooled into believing that the answer to diversity is merely to adjust the admissions process, or that we can increase diversity without additional capital.
One lesson that Hopwood reinforced is the enormous intellectual benefits to diversity. A vibrant educational community involves the interaction of people from different social and ethnic backgrounds, experiences, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and geographic and intellectual perspectives. In this environment, students learn from each other just as they learn from faculty. A student community with intelligent, curious and academically motivated people from all walks of life makes graduate education a more enriching enterprise for all.
Diversity, then, is not an end in itself, but a powerful and essential part of learning. In promoting this kind of cross-pollination of cultures, UT has undertaken groundbreaking efforts in interdisciplinary education through "doctoral portfolio programs" (e.g., Mexican-American Studies, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies), which enable students to gain breadth of knowledge across an issue and depth of knowledge in their discipline. Students and faculty from disparate fields work together on cross-cutting political issues. What a marvelous example of using diversity as an educational resource, and creating new vehicles for learning that help attract diverse students and faculty.
Diversity on campus is too important to think about exclusively in political terms. For universities the stakes are higher. Diversity makes graduate education better. UT's mission--to produce intellectually rigorous scholars, professionally astute citizens, and future leaders across the globe--is accomplished only when the faces of the world are represented on campus. H. L. Mencken noted that, for every human problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. The shorthand of Hopwood and remedies focussing only on the admissions process are precisely that sort of simple solution. UT graduate students deserve--and are receiving--much better.