The Art of Diversity
Dr. Arthur E. Levine is in a pretty enviable position.
As president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, he sits at the helm of a Harlem, N.Y.-based institution steeped in its legacy of inclusion. Back in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Southern states burdened with the shackles of segregation readily paid for Black teachers to go out of state to get advanced credentials rather than integrate graduate programs at their
traditionally White schools. Teachers College welcomed these teachers and administrators with open arms.
As a result, a generation of Black Ivy league-trained leaders were made available to the Black public schools in the South. Black students were exposed to some great educators, and the college gained a reputation as a haven for Blacks and other minorities.
Today, the challenges are very different. Things are not seen in Black and White terms. Southern schools are desegregated. The vexing issue not only at Columbia but also throughout the nation, is achieving substantive diversity.
Levine has taken on the task of encouraging not only the Teachers College, but also the entire higher education community into fulfilling diversity’s unfinished agenda and its unrealized promise with his recent call for a higher education diversity task force.
BI Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Frank L. Matthews recently spoke with Levine about diversity, school vouchers, recruiting new teachers and his latest published work, Diversity on Campus.
BI: You are seen as a throwback to the earlier liberal progressive agenda. You even support affirmative action. Do you take a lot of heat on this issue?
AL: No. Not in the Jewish community and not in the academic community.
BI: So you would agree that the Black-Jewish rift over affirmative action has been blown out of proportion?
AL: I think that’s true. There have been some very visible people who were Jewish who have opposed affirmative action. But in the same way, Ward Connerly is not typical of Blacks in America.
BI: Would you say that there is a major difference between procedural diversity and substantive diversity? How would you delineate the difference?
AL: I think there is a significant difference between the two. I don’t know many universities that don’t go through the procedures, long and elaborate procedures. But if one looks at the composition of the professoriate, senior administrative positions on most campuses don’t reflect having gone through much of a procedure. They still look predominately White and male.
