Diversity as Development: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Difference in Higher Education

• In Event: Destabilizing the Ideal Neoliberal Subject: An Examination of Educational Institutions, White Supremacy, and Meritocracy

Abstract

In higher education scholarship, the term “development” is used primarily in reference to psychological theories about the changes experienced by emerging adults in post-secondary education (Patton, Renn, Guido-DiBrito, & Quaye, 2016). In relation to diversity, this usually pertains to how college students form a sense of identity and/or ability to relate across social differences (e.g., Hurtado, 2005). In contrast to the dominant framing of development in higher education scholarship, this paper draws on theories advanced by anthropologists of international development to reexamine diversity policies, practices, and discourses. Drawing on a 16-month institutional ethnography of diversity policy and practice at a large, public research university, I examine how official diversity policy crafted by majoritarian administrators and faculty reflected the logics of neoliberal governmentality—what Tania Li (2007) calls “the will to improve” minoritized populations. Utilizing extended participant observation with students, staff, faculty, administrators and community members; interviews with more than eighty individuals involved in diversity policy and practice; and extensive artifact analysis of the press releases, emails, blog and social media posts, and print materials generated by the university, I describe how those who had the most power to shape the university’s policy drew on a de-racializing and de-politicizing discourse that positioned minoritized students as targets of “best practices” designed to reshape them into ideal students. Similar to findings by Li (2007) and James Ferguson (1994), these seemingly well-intentioned interventions designed to improve the life outcomes of minoritized students simultaneously reinforced their position as both Other and Object.

Drawing on this ethnographic data, I argue that diversity practices mirror development practices that render minoritized populations objects of rather than co-constructors of interventions designed to “improve” their behavior and life outcomes. Seen through this lens, it is far easier to understand how the vast amount of institutional resources spent on diversity initiatives did not disrupt the underlying inequities between majoritarian and minoritized members of the campus community. This paper is keeping with this year’s conference theme by examining the role that educational leaders and scholars play in reinscribing unequal social relations on campus. It does so by reimagining the challenge of diversity in higher education by using theory generated in the field of the anthropology of international development. This approach illuminates why, despite the deep investment of time, money, and institutional attention to issues of diversity, many (if not most) institutions find racial tensions (re)flaring even as outcomes gaps are closing. It also challenges dominant paradigms in the field around how to best support “underrepresented” students by reframing the problem around institutional relations rather than individual choices and outcomes.

Author

• Kirk Anderson, Dickinson College