Access: A matter of justice

Academe, Jul/Aug 1998 by Burgan, Mary

ONE OF THE BARRIers to ensuring access to our institutions by "minorities" is that the memory of the "bad old days" has faded, and with it the passion for fairness. Young women, for example, believe that the sexual constraintsinner as well as outer-of bygone times must have been exaggerated, and so they flock to see Titanic with the delusion that the overwrought film actually tells the truth about what a rebellious young woman could do to proclaim her independence in 1912. They don't want to hear about the real constraints for women before affirmative action, now that so many of them feel free. And in the quandary of dealing with a multiplicity of claims, women's studies has now faded into "gender studies," and African American and Hispanic studies have been merged into "ethnic studies" on many campuses. Could it be that an overemphasis on identity politics, suggesting that every group is victimized by some kind of prejudice, has fed the notion that no one group deserves educational reparation?

In any case, recent efforts to argue for access tend to tiptoe by the issue of social justice. Thus a recent report by the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities, called Returning to Our Roots: Student Access, comments that "if appeals to fairness are insufficient, Americans need to know that access must be broadened because the practical economic need for diversity on our campuses is too compelling to ignore." Our most ardent efforts to make the case for access, then, tend to steer clear of righteousness, admitting that our social policies must be justified by economic realism to be effective.

Although I am always uneasy with preaching and blaming, I confess that I miss the missionary zeal that affirmative programs once embodied. I worry that some of our theorizing about race, class, and gender has replaced the kind of outreach that used to include study centers, cultural exhibitions, and conferences that could turn emotional and raucous. I worry that a silence has descended, even as we try to devise ways to do the right thing by those who have been denied access. Those who know about undergraduates tell us that students on our campuses are "more willing to tell us intimate details of their sex lives than to discuss diversity on campus," as Arthur Levine and Jeanette S. Cureton write in the May/June 1998 issue of Change. In all, many of our campuses seem eerily quiet about affirmative action.

The universal solvent in these days of quiet response is "mentoring," but however laudable and necessary that activity is, it tends to depend on personal and private interactions. We need a fuller program for access: we faculty must take up the challenge of going public again. I do not advocate a return to rhetorical overkill, and I certainly don't believe that each faculty member must, or can, become an honorary member of another race or gender. But my own experience tells me that white faculty members could become much more involved in making access a lived reality. For one thing, they can show up at the cultural events of minority students-at the Delta sorority step show, the Martin Luther King Day memorial, or the campus performance of the Soul Review. They will find their black colleagues there, for sure. They can make an effort to learn enough of that other American language, Spanish, to meet their students halfway. Perhaps their enrollment in a Hispanic colleague's class could be the beginning of a friendship. We need to find collective, public ways to support our minority colleagues and students, because without that support they may wonder whether we want them on campus at all. We should also be suspicious about the economic argument which paints a picture of minority education as skill training; it may hide an assumption that minority students can't be expected to want anything else. And, finally, we have to find ways to let our privileged students know how lucky they are-that the structures of their good fortune require them to reach out rather than to take refuge in a sullen defense of their rights.

Mary Burgan is AAUP general secretary.