The “will to improve” campus climate: a developmentalist and ethnographic perspective on diversity in higher education

• In Event: Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Proposal

Despite the rich body of ethnographies of schooling in the United States, the comparative body of higher education ethnographies remains small (Iloh & Tierney, 2014). In such studies, the college or university in question is usually a research site rather than an object of ethnographic scrutiny. In contrast, there is a far more developed body of ethnographic work outside the United States that examines how institutions experience and respond to larger political economic trends, such as the commodification of knowledge production and the rise of audit cultures (e.g., Strathern, 2000). However, in these studies the political economic analysis often overshadows rich ethnographic detail. The disconnect between these two bodies of scholarship has had significant theoretical and methodological consequences that have shaped the development of higher education ethnography, both in the US and internationally. What remains largely missing is an institutional ethnography of colleges and universities that bridges these two approaches.
This paper presents an ethnography of diversity policy and practice at a large, public research university in the United States that was conducted during the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years. This study was deeply influenced by ethnographies of international development by scholars such as James Ferguson (1994), Michael Goldman (2005), Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), and Tania Li (2007). There are striking parallels between what occurs in international development projects and in diversity programs in the United States—both embody the “will to improve” (Li, 2007) the lives of minoritized communities, often acting upon these communities rather than with them. These theorists of development offer profound insight into how such development projects can expend significant amounts of resources and energies without fulfilling the promise of development.
From September 2015 to December 2016, I examined diversity policy and practice at an institution I refer to as State University. I explored the campus’ diversity apparatus—the heterarchical network of students, staff, faculty, administrators, community members, and corporate philanthropists engaged in improving the campus’ racial climate. During this time, the campus experienced a series of highly publicized racist incidents and a backlash from student activists. Diversity workers were mobilized not only to enact policy, but to help address the emerging crisis on campus. Conflicts emerged within the apparatus between factions of diversity workers articulating different conceptions of diversity. These factions organized around competing institutional projects—attempts to transform the institution according to their own unique articulations of diversity’s meaning and significance. They advanced their projects by disarticulating and rearticulating (Hall, 1988) other groups’ language about diversity. The ultimate form diversity policy and practice took was produced in and through the uneven power relations between these groups.
This paper reconceptualizes diversity as something institutions do rather than something people are. It also advances new methodological approaches for studying higher education institutions. It does so by grounding higher education ethnography within international bodies of higher education scholarship and linking diversity to the field of international development.

Author

• Kirk R Anderson, Dickinson College, PA