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At UVa Asians Are Now ?Diverse? (At Least For A Day), AND Chief Diversity Officer Puts Foot In Mouth

In higher education ?diverse? almost always means black, Hispanic, or Native American, but yesterday at the University of Virginia meeting of its Board of Visitors it meant Asian. ?Officials discuss Asian faculty diversity concerns,? the headline of the front page article in the Cavalier Daily today announces. ?[Interim vice provost for faculty advancement Sharon] Hostler says Asian-Americans are overrepresented in University undergraduate student population, underrepresented in faculty.?

As usual, ?representation? is a ridiculously opaque, irrelevant criterion to use for either faculty or students.

Overall, Asian-Americans are overrepresented within the University?s student population. Asian-Americans make up 11.4 percent of the undergraduate population, though they are only 4.4 percent of the United States? population....

And, interestingly, many of UVa?s Asian students are really Asian, not Asian-American:

Admissions Dean Greg Roberts cited a dramatic increase in international applications from Asia as the reason for this overrepresentation, noting that applications from Chinese students increased from 400 to 800 this year.

Does that mean we should count the population of China in determining whether Asians are ?overrepresented? at UVa? Interim vice provost for faculty advancement Sharon Hostler didn?t say.

Never mind. Let?s move on to the faculty.

The disproportionate number of Asian-Americans at the University, however, is limited to the student population, as Asian-American faculty actually are underrepresented, Hostler said.

.... She said 2007 data indicates that Asian-Americans comprise 6.5 percent of the tenure-track faculty at the University....

Now I?m really confused (and why am I confident I?m not the only one?). If Asian-Americans are 4.4% of the population, why are Asian-American tenure track professors, at 6.5%, ?underrepresented?? Representation, apparently, is one of those words like, well, like ?diverse,? whose meaning is quite malleable, depending on whose ox is being gored at the moment.

?Hostler also noted that Asian-Americans are highly underrepresented at the top levels of American higher education,? but Bill Harvey, UVa?s Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity, came forward with a ready explanation for this ?underrepresentation? that may stand as one of the most remarkable utterances ever uttered by a chief diversity officer:

Bill Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, said this discrepancy between higher and lower levels of the University faculty may be because of culture. He said Asian-Americans typically do not actively seek out leadership positions and instead may prefer to take a more supportive role. For example, Harvey said, they may appear more comfortable in roles as senior faculty members.

But the problem of Asian underrepresentation in various facets of university life is more far-reaching, or deep-seated, than can be explained by Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey?s analysis of Asian cultural aversion to seeking leadership positions.

Among the University?s Asian-American faculty, there also is a disparity between male and female Asian-American professors, Hostler noted.

?[There are] three times as many Asian-American men on the faculty as there are women,? she said, noting that women make up only 11 percent of the tenure-track professors of Asian descent.

Perhaps Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey has some evidence that being Asian and female is a double-whammy, with Asian cultural preference for playing ?supportive role[s]? magnified and reinforced by a similar female cultural predilection. Maybe at some point in the future Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey will be invited to share these views with the faculty and students in the University?s Asian Studies and Women?s Studies courses.

But wait. Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey still had more to say, namely that he is optimistic about the future of ?diversity? at UVa ... because Asians are so good at math and science.

The University?s recent emphasis on the sciences also may help attract more Asian-American faculty members, Harvey said, noting that he is optimistic about the University faculty?s future diversity

No doubt the wonderful thing about Asians from a Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity?s point of view is that they contribute to ?diversity? when you need to count them, they?re invisible when you don?t, and you never need to give them preferences because they?re almost always ?overrepresented.?

Readers with good memories will recall that this is not the first time we have encountered some of the strange ideas of Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey. Here, for example, he expressed his devotion to race-exclusive programs and his dismay at their elimination, a rather odd notion of ?equity.? And here he explained what he means by ?diversity?: ?What we want this institution to do is to mirror society.? UVa, of course, doesn?t. Thus Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey?s lamented

that Latinos and Hispanics currently comprise approximately three percent of the University undergraduate population, while Latinos and Hispanics make up approximately seven percent of the Commonwealth's population.

His proposed solution to this problem, I think, was quite odd: because Hispanics at UVa do not ?mirror? their percentage of the Virginia population, they should be rounded up and brought in from other states!

Harvey said as one-third of University students are not from the Commonwealth, the University should actively recruit students from states with large Latino/Hispanic communities.

Well, good help is hard to find, especially at salaries strapped public universities are forced to pay. As I noted here, according to data on faculty salaries reported in the Cavalier Daily, Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity Harvey?s salary in 2007 (no doubt higher now) was a paltry $315,000. If the University truly valued ?diversity,? you?d think it would pay its Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity something closer to what it has just agreed to pay its new basketball coach: ?a five-year contract worth $1.7 million per year ... [plus] a $500,000 signing bonus, plus an additional $500,000 if he is still the coach after five years.?

Since the salary of the new coach, Tony Bennett, formerly of Washington State, who is not ?diverse,? is over twice as high as that of the departing coach, who is ?diverse,? I wonder if any discrimination complaints will reach the offices of the Vice President and Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity or the Interim Vice Provost For Faculty Advancement.

Full post as published by Discriminations on April 04, 2009 (boomark / email).