Harvard University hit a milestone in 1969, enrolling its first class containing more than 100 African-Americans, according to a 1975 report by The Harvard Crimson. Such a milestone was not celebrated by all, however, as a number of media outlets published pieces attacking the students and Harvard’s affirmative action policies. One such article appeared in a September 1973 issue of the New York Times Magazine and was written by Dr. Martin Kilson, Harvard’s first fully-tenured Black professor. In the article, titled “The Black Experience at Harvard,” Kilson observed how many Black undergraduates regularly sat together at the same tables during meals, and accused the students of self-segregation and intellectual withdrawal.
Kilson essentially attacked the Black students for rejecting racial integration. In response, one Black student activist, Bill Fletcher, noted that it was easy to photograph Black students eating together but asked, “How come the Times didn’t run photos of rich White students getting drunk at the elite WASP final clubs?” Within a year of that class graduating, a research study, conducted by sociologist Don Barfield of the Harvard Efficacy Project on behalf of Harvard College, revealed that Black students actually had a wider range of social interactions than Whites.
One of the profound ironies of that controversy is that both Kilson and his opponents still argued in terms of Black and White. At today’s multicultural universities, those demographics are ancient history. On some campuses, both Black and White students are a minority. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1999 and 2010, the number of Black students earning bachelor’s degrees increased by 53 percent, Hispanics by 87 percent, Asians by 51 percent and Whites by 27 percent. For master’s degrees, the ethnic change is even greater: Blacks, 109 percent; Hispanics, 125 percent; Asians, 81 percent; and Whites, 39 percent.
And despite years of attacks on affirmative action, the Supreme Court preserved an important mechanism for bringing “minority” students to campus, but shifted the argument from affirmative action as restorative justice to diversity as a legitimate societal need. Also, the movement toward educational diversity has not only changed who is on campus, but what can be taught, even in the Deep South. For example, Louisiana State University offers degrees in women’s and gender studies, and students can earn a degree from the University of Alabama in jazz studies. In 2012, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette started offering a minor in LGBT studies.
A new reality
In discussing the importance of diversity, Dr. Claude Steele, the recently appointed provost of UC Berkeley, declares that, “I don’t mean just any kind of diversity. I mean the kinds of diversity that are probably most critical to redressing social and economic equality concerns in society. That certainly would include racial diversity, but it also would include class and income diversity.”
