For many years advocates of affirmative action in higher education have approvingly used the terms diversity and pluralism to mean the same thing. The distinction between the terms, however, is worthy of a discussion in itself for it leads to some new ways of looking at the issue.
Organizational diversity as a goal of affirmative action suggests representation of racial, ethnic, or other selected groups proportional to such groups' numbers in the population as a whole. It is based on group representation with no particular regard for the beliefs and associations of the individuals who make up the groups. One is defined by one's group.
Pluralism is more about individuals and the number of different beliefs and associations each individual holds. Pluralism has a long and honorable history in American political thought. Many historians and political theorists attribute the success of the nation in part to pluralism's effect on conflict resolution. Tocqueville remarked about Americans' propensity to form associations for an unusual number of social and economic purposes. How seriously could a person take intergroup conflict when one's purported enemies in a certain group were one's fellow members in another?
Because the terms have different meanings, diversity and pluralism should not be used as synonyms in questions of affirmative action in higher education. Rather, their differences should be explored as each would be used to bring about solutions to the problems of underrepresentation of minorities in both student admissions and faculty hiring.
Diversity as a goal in itself is troublesome because it conjures quotas and finds little favor with courts that apply the rule of strictest scrutiny to racial and ethnic classifications. But colleges want diversity because their purpose is to seek truth, and a diverse body of students and faculty presumably uncovers more truths than a more narrowly comprised one. Colleges seem now to say to the courts, give us diversity and we will give you truth.
Approaching the problem of minority underrepresentation through pluralism seeks truth first with diversity being the result, rather than the precondition. It challenges the idea that diversity for the sake of diversity leads to truth, because a diversity based on the stereotyping of individuals by their racial or ethnic group membership has more to do with the skin than with the mind.
Breaking such stereotypes and challenging conventional wisdoms, rather than clinging to them, likely leads to more truths. Hegel said that the discovery of truth proceeds by challenging a thesis with an antithesis, resulting in a synthesis. J. S. Mill said that truth is uncovered by allowing error to be expressed in the marketplace of ideas. Going against stereotypes and conventional wisdoms in the selection of students and faculty is likely to result in more truths than going with them will.
Pluralism by its nature is confounding to the conventional wisdom and thus to be valued in academe. A student who is Catholic and a member of Planned Parenthood, a Black who is a Young Republican, and a Jew who wants to be a hog farmer are not only violations of stereotypes but carry with them the seeds of group conflict resolution. They are also representatives of reality, because there are far more of us who do not fit stereotypes that those of us who do. And it is the discovery of this reality that is a precondition of finding truth.
Pluralism as the guiding method of overcoming underrepresentation of minorities will not run afoul of the courts. If colleges choose students and faculty on the basis of pluralism, they are by definition not choosing on the basis of race or ethnicity. Using pluralism as the guiding motivation rather than diversity, a Hispanic student would be chosen because he is an inner-city 4-H member, not because he is Hispanic.
Using pluralism rather than diversity as a rationale for selection of students and faculty is not a ruse to get around the Constitution. It is profoundly different. It puts a premium on an individual's beliefs, associations, and accomplishments, not on preferences based on stereotypes of racial or ethnic shortcomings for which adjustments must be made. It takes away the suspicion that a person would not be in college were it not for his group preference. It is consistent with Bakke, in which case the Supreme Court said that race may be used as one of several factors in college selections, although not as a preference in itself.
In fact, the Bakke decision is grounded in pluralism, not diversity. Justice Powell used the term "genuine diversity" to describe pluralism and to distinguish it from a diversity based on group identifiers. This "Bakkean diversity" or "individualistic diversity" means treating race as a "plus" in combination with other individual characteristics, not as a minus for which the government must make adjustments to compensate.
Resolution of the issues surrounding the use of affirmative action in higher education will require the identification of common ground among the opposing sides. Moving away from diversity toward pluralism would achieve that. It would still have the same goal, providing for more opportunity for underrepresented minorities. Yet it would provide conservatives (and liberals who never felt comfortable with the "group rights" movement) a victory over political correctness and the notion that we as individuals can never go beyond our group identifiers.
Pluralism is a common ground tying a long American tradition to a contemporary problem and giving commonly understood meaning to the M.L. King hope that all people would someday be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The United States has a federal form of government in which citizens consent to two different governments, state and federal, to exercise powers over individuals directly. Neither government receives its powers from the other; both are based upon a common source, the Constitution. Federalism provides inherent checks and balances between the two governments. The excesses of one can be, and often are, corrected by the other.
In matters of race relations in the United States, we often think of the federal government as the check against racist policies that have existed from time to time among the states. It has not always been so, may not be so in the present, and will not necessarily be so in the future.
To the many people who have seen the 1997 motion picture Amistad, the failures of the federal government in matters of race are no surprise. In the Amistad case, President Van Buren used the federal government's powers to protect those with interests in black slavery. Nor should we forget that it was the Second Morrill Act, sponsored by U.S. Senator J. S. Morrill, that in 1890 codified in federal statute the separate-but-equal racial doctrine six years before the infamous Plessy case found the Louisiana version of it constitutional.
In our own time, the federal government's record is spotty, equivocal, and confusing. Ever since the shining moment of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, when racism seemed to be thoroughly routed, the federal government has slipped back to a position that racism is acceptable if it is good racism that is used to counter bad racism, as if it were clear which were which. It is as if the federal government is reading from Justice Blackmun's dissenting opinion in Bakke ("to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race") rather than Justice Powell's prevailing opinion that the use of race alone is unconstitutional in government programs.
For the future, those who want to find constitutional measures to advance the cause of remedying minority underrepresentation in higher education may be well advised to give up the difficult argument that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires unequal treatment of race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Why indeed should the Fourteenth Amendment be argued when the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment are available for the purpose without any tortured reasoning? Already it has been argued successfully that the First Amendment's freedom of speech gives higher education institutions considerable latitude in whom they choose to hire and to admit.
What has not been adequately explored is the Tenth Amendment's application. The Tenth Amendment, Justice Cardozo once observed, is a truism, for it restates the obvious in the Constitution, that the United States has a federal government and the Constitution distributes powers among the national and state governments. These principles of federalism, however, have recently been reinvigorated by the high court in the 1997 Printz case. The court's majority now suggests there may be new limits beyond which the national government may not go in the exercise of its powers when confronted with the powers of the states, reversing a decades-long drift away from federalism.
State universities are the agents of states and exercise the powers over admission and hiring that are at issue. States have unquestioned powers over the education and welfare of their citizens, and great interest in which citizens are afforded what kind of higher education. States have an interest beyond that of the federal government in higher education, to which the federal government might be wise to defer as a matter of policy as well as potentially of law.
For example, states are responsible for the health of their citizens, more so than the federal government, and create medical and nursing schools to supply the needed medical workforce to serve their citizens. The state's taxpayers have a fundamental interest in seeing that the students selected to study at such state subsidized schools are the kinds of students who will stay in the state and practice in communities where they are needed. If the state determines that race or ethnicity is positively associated with practice in medically underserved communities, and weighs this factor as a plus in its student selection process equal to, or even above, entrance test score weights, does the federal government have a more compelling interest in declaring this use of race a violation of equal protection than the state has in providing for the health and welfare of its citizens? The Printz case may suggest that the answer henceforth is no, and as a matter of policy it may be wise to defer to the states . Simply because some states were once the bastions of racism does not mean that states in the present and future cannot properly use race in combination with other factors in their policies.
The upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act will be a tempting legislative vehicle for members of Congress to take sides in the present struggle over diversity in higher education. Amendments likely will be offered to prohibit race from being any factor whatsoever in admissions or hiring at any institution that participates in federally funded programs. Countering such amendments, however, could be amendments that prohibit race alone from being a factor in admissions or hiring, but deferring to the states (or in the case of private colleges and universities, to their boards) as to which other factors may be used in combination with race, so long as the race component is not based on assumed shortcomings in one's ancestral history, genes, or other group characteristics.
To some, it would be an irony that those who have always favored "states rights" now will look to an act of Congress to undo those rights, and that those who have always looked to the federal government for protection in matters of race now may look to the states for that protection. But others who are more familiar with the checkered history of both levels of government on matters of race will find less irony and merely more cases defying conventional wisdom.
Legislative strategy and irony aside, what makes sense from a public policy standpoint? Once again, the meaning of the term diversity comes into question. Deferring more to the states will create more diversity of public policy, as some states may use race combination factors differently than others, and some not at all. But such diversity is not bad; it may be better than a diversity of admissions and hiring based on racial group memberships that provokes suspicion and resentment. It may be better than states falling like dominoes to state initiatives and referendums to stop federal executive affirmative action efforts based solely on group characteristics of race.
What the country could now use is a consolidation of the great advances made by African-Americans and Hispanics into the middle class culture of the United States, and further advances supported by a public policy that rules out race alone as a preference, but allows for a proliferation of Baakean diversity. This would encourage states on their own to use race constitutionally in their admissions and hiring decisions which, based on the current records and intentions of most states and their universities, would encourage greater racial and ethnic diversity for sound reasons.