This post is another one where I try to make sense of a bunch things I've been reading and viewing. Let me start with this piece from the New-Gazette, which tickled my funny bone but in an odd way: UI adds diversity, equity, inclusion statement to faculty-promotion process. Indeed in this post I want to give my thinking on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion even though, in case it's not fully evident, as a long-time retiree I now operate totally outside the conversations that are happening on campus. This ignorance about what is going on might disqualify me, in advance, from rendering an intelligent opinion on these matters. If so, the benefit to the post will be for me only, to get the thoughts out of my system. Otherwise, since very few people read my blog these days, it will mostly be no harm - no foul.
But there may be reasons why someone outside the campus conversation, yet with some knowledge of campus history, might offer up something useful. Part of this, for me, is that going back 25 years or so I had the job of encouraging diffusion of educational technology on campus and taking the metaphor of diffusion of innovation, there might be some parallels to be drawn between the ed tech effort then and the diversity, equity, and inclusion effort now. Then, too, I tend to be very idealistic in my thinking now, where 25 years ago I was much more low to the ground and focused on what was do-able. It might be useful to consider what pushing beyond the envelope would be like. Also, I have some indirect experience with the subject matter as the mentor and ghostwriter for a human rights organization in Uganda called Universal Love Alliance, which has as part of its mission to make Uganda a more inclusive society. That experience might be relevant to the current topic. Then too, I will air what might be considered "dirty laundry" about the campus that I think is relevant. Conceivably that would be useful if the need to make the public discussion of these issues positive and upbeat, such as in the 2022 Conversation with Senior Leadership, sweeps those parts that are dirty laundry to the side and perhaps ignores them entirely. I do think these less discussed issues should get an airing now, even if doing so ruffles some feathers.
Let me also mention this post from about a year and a half ago: Repricing - in Higher Education and in the Economy as a Whole, which was about reducing the excessive income inequality in society. As an economist, I view extreme income inequality as the fundamental social ill that is undermining our country. The post is in the idealistic vein mentioned above. One lesson from it, which I think is worth keeping in mind here, is that the changes have to happen across higher education if they are to work. One campus operating alone while trying to implement these changes will be shooting itself in the foot. (If you do make an attempt to read that post, note that it got very long and probably reads more like a white paper than a blog post. So I made a Google Docs version, which might be easier to get through. Also note that the pandemic was well underway at the time of the post but vaccines had yet to appear. Consequently, some statements about the then current labor market are no longer correct today.) I'm on less terra firma writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but my goal in this post is to provide a similar analysis to what I gave in the Repricing piece.
Let me get to the punchline and then return to the discussion. With income inequality it is useful to refer to the haves and the have-nots. Those labels may continue to be useful when discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion. It seems to me that the bulk of the campus efforts to date have been about making the university affordable for the have-nots. While this obviously matters, there has been little to no discussion about raising awareness among the the haves and quite possibly providing a solution where they have less. That's what we'll be considering here.
Returning to the discussion, consider these conundrums. The U of I is highly selective regarding undergraduate admissions and some colleges within the U of I are more selective than others. How does one reconcile selectivity with inclusion? Further, some colleges have college-specific surcharges while others do not. If instructional quality is positively correlated with the surcharges, as one might expect it should be, how does one reconcile the presence of these surcharges with equity? Then, bringing this a bit lower to the ground, we have the fairly recent, pre-pandemic experience of having a large number of Chinese students on campus, as described in this piece from Inside Higher Ed. And I know from an informal discussion group I had with three such students in spring 2015 who took a course from me the prior semester that many of these Chinese students came to the U.S. at least in part for cultural reasons, hoping for intensive interactions with American students so they could learn about the American way of life. But the reality was that outside of classroom the vast majority of their interactions were with other Chinese students. How does one reconcile this experience with diversity?
On the first of these conundrums, I wrote a post almost two years ago called Rethinking Elitism in Public Education that describes a hypothetical solution. I'm not holding my breath on having the ideas there see the light of day, for it seems that the pressing issue for campus leadership is finding new sources of revenue and sustaining elitism appears to be a necessary precondition for that. On the surcharges, one can imagine providing data on expenditure per student by major, with separate results for freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. This would tie into the transfer pricing that is used by which tuition revenue gets allocated to academic departments. I am not current on this, but I believe there was an adjustment in those formulas not that long ago, with a much greater share of tuition revenue being transferred out of the Provost's office into the colleges. But I also believe that Deans retained discretion on how tuition income would then be allocated to the individual departments. LAS is a monster in size, compared to the other colleges, and for this purpose perhaps it should be broken up into three units - STEM, Social Sciences, and Humanities. This would highlight the problem of the decline of the Humanities major, with the size of Humanities departments determined by historical enrollment patterns, not just the recent past. So there is an imbalance here. How it is addressed matters. On the diversity issues and students getting outside their comfort zone in interacting with other students, I would hate for the answer to be that student out-of-class time must be programmed to ensure such interactions. I think students need plenty of their own time for reflection, socializing, and doing schoolwork. But I don't see another real solution to the issue. I will note that the informal discussion group I had was advertised to the entire class near the end of the semester. None of the other students in the class indicated an interest in it. It's a very small sample to generalize from, but I doubt getting faculty more directly involved in some way to generate these type of interactions will produce the requisite diversity. (I have tried recruiting for such a discussion group in previous years and in subsequent years as well. This was the only time where I got more than one student to participate.)
Let me briefly take up the new requirement for assistant professors who are up for promotion and tenure, to produce a statement about their own activities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. My immediate reaction was about what we know and what we don't know regarding the mental health of assistant professors in this situation. The campus has made a point of talking about the mental health of undergraduates; indeed all of higher ed is talking about this. It was a very big issue even before the pandemic. It's certainly a larger issue now. And in this recent opinion piece by Charles Blow, he characterized all of America as having PTSD, perhaps a reasonable first pass at describing the mental outlook of most folks. Assistant professors who are up for tenure are understood to be under a lot of stress as a consequence, apart from the pandemic. Does adding this additional requirement for the promotion package make sense under the circumstances?
Pushing this further in my own thinking, I wondered if there are plans underway to have similar requirements for specialized faculty (who teach but are not on the tenure track) as well as for graduate student teaching assistants. Both the specialized faculty and the graduates students have union representation. I can envision a discussion between the union representatives and the campus on this matter along the following lines: "We'd be happy to help with the diversity, equity, and inclusion effort as long as you increase our pay for doing this additional work." Is that in the cards? Conversely, will highly individualized acts of this sort actually be effective or will this prove to be an albatross that in aggregate does very little of real benefit?
Getting back to the mental health issues that many students face, this was addressed by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Danita Young Brown in the campus leadership video linked above. She mentioned that the campus is trying to hire 5 new mental health counselors to be in place for the start of the fall semester. Students have requested greater access to such counselors, so this seems a sensible move. Yet I wonder why the campus doesn't consider the problem in fundamentally other ways as well. (Elsewhere I've characterized this as treating the symptoms but not the cause.) In particular, do we know whether certain campus programs or the behavior of other students contributes to student mental health issues? If we don't know, are we doing some inquiry to find out? And if we do know, are we taking steps to make the environment less toxic? In any event, why aren't we talking more about this?
Now I'll speculate a little to show what I have in mind. In 2017 an internal memo to Google, since known as Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, became publicly available and, indeed, went viral. The memo was written by James Damore who did his undergraduate work at the U of I, I believe in quantitative biology. The publicity around that memo created an interest in the brogrammer culture, which many women in the tech world find alienating. At the same time that Damore was an undergraduate on campus, I taught a CHP class on Designing for Effective Change. There was a student in ACM (a woman) who described the in-your-face style of the interactions that the students had - I thought of it as trash talking between geeks. Was that sort of behavior encouraged explicitly or condoned by faculty and staff in computing disciplines? Were there any steps taken to limit the behavior? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think they are the sort of questions that should be asked and answered.
In fall 2017 and again in fall 2019 I taught an upper level economics class as a retiree. The class was on The Economics of Organizations. Because I had students do weekly blogging to connect their experiences to course topics, I learned a little bit about them and their history on campus. A bit less than a third of the clas had transferred out of the College of Engineering. Essentially all these students were either women or minority students. I believe that most if not all of them wanted to be in the College of Business, but they didn't have a good enough GPA to achieve that. Majoring in Economics was the next best option and several of these students also did the Business Minor. These students were somewhat emotionally damaged by the process, as became painfully evident to me on more than one occasion. Again I must bring up the caveat that this is a small sample from which to draw a conclusion. Yet it is suggestive and it seems possible to get more data to determine whether this is a correct or misleading picture.
Engineering education has a reputation for being brutal to the students, going back at least since I was an undergraduate in the mid 1970s and likely well before that. But this brutal approach is deleterious to student mental health, including those students who do get through, and it clearly is not inclusive. When I first took over the SCALE project, I did a study on retention rates at the course level (final course enrollment divided by 10-day course enrollment). This was background on learning whether online course components could improve retention. What I found is that in most courses the retention rate was so high already that online couldn't improve it. Engineering courses were different. They had a much lower retention rate. Soon thereafter I became aware that Engineering deliberately pursued a "weed out" policy. Some years later the U of I started to admit many more students from community colleges. The business model for Engineering adjusted to include admitting many community college students to fill the seats left vacant by those other students who had transferred out.
Is the brutal approach that features a weed out process necessary for engineering education? If at Illinois we tried a more accommodating approach (most likely against the preferences of the majority of College of Engineering faculty) would we start to lose students to other top engineering schools and possibly lose some faculty as well? If so, we could only do this if those other schools also did it. Is that possible? I don't know. This framing of the issues shows the dilemma we face.
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But I don't mean to single out Engineering. I think the issue is much broader, though measuring the deficiencies of the education may be a harder task. According to a former student who emailed me recently,
"Amongst my generation, education is transactional, perhaps as a byproduct of the cost of a degree."
This transactional approach might show up in how focused students seem to be about their GPA, which motivates how they go about school, and how little they seem to care about innate interest in the subject matter or, for that matter, in a deep level of self-understanding. It is surely exacerbated by carrying a large amount of student loan debt, but is likely also there for many students from financially comfortable families, where the parents pay the student's tuition, room and board, and give additional funds for the student's recreational use. College has become a way for such parents to fulfill the bequest motive, well before their own end of life. As such, the students have been groomed for this from quite an early age, perhaps as far back as primary school. That so conditions their approach - to college and to life.
An alternative approach wss given by Harry Boyte, who gave a lecture about this on campus back in March 2016. I refer to Boyte's approach as the good citizenship model of education.
Boyte argues that college education should be primarily about making
students good citizens. Such citizenship is exercised mainly not at the
ballot box but rather at the place of work. Good citizens do whatever
is necessary to make the workplace highly functional and socially
responsible. Good citizens have agency, an expression Boyte used
over and over again. This means they can size up the situation to see
what is required to make matters better. Then they can act in a way
that does improve things.
One might reasonably conjecture that if students were good citizens in this way, and faculty and staff were also good citizens, then diversity, equity, and inclusion would emerge de facto on campus. I want to complicate this picture some because I believe that members of the campus community would resist a characterization that they are not good citizens though some students, in particular, would own up to the lack of their own agency. The complication is this. Most people will draw a circle of those others where they'd want to act as good citizens. With respect to people outside the circle, however, they will act selfishly. The issue then is not whether the person is a good citizen, it is how large a circle the person draws and how large a circle we outsiders think the person should draw. Then, to complicate matters further, it may be that there are several circles nested within each other, with the strongest form of good citizenship applying to the innermost circle only and the intensity of good citizenship weakening as one moves to the outer circles. After all, the campus is huge and one can become completely overwhelmed by serving on too many committees, reading the papers of too many colleagues and/or students, and hosting too many visitors. So there is an earnest question about what is the right size for the innermost circle and whether the outer circles are sufficient to support diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus.
Nevertheless, it may be that for many good citizenship does not offer an appropriate framing for how they go about things. So, one wonders whether such people can be educated to become good citizens and, if so, what effective education of this sort looks like. It is here that my relationship with ULA may be useful and, in particular, this document called Universal Love Alliance and Dialogue. It is a comparatively short document (at least by my standards) and I think is well worth the read. I encourage the campus to develop some expertise in dialogue facilitation and then experiment with small numbers of students who go through a training workshop that features dialogue. I want to note that ULA has conducted successful workshops of this sort with faith leaders who beforehand where homophobic. These faith leaders are brought together in a cloistered setting, for their own safety and the workshops are typically multi-day affairs. So this is much more in the vein of adult education than it is typical undergraduate education and surely some reasons for the effectiveness of the training are the intensity of the effort and the cathartic nature of the experience.
Whether it is possible to do something similar on campus, I don't know. I should also note that facilitated dialogue with students, where the facilitators are either faculty or staff members, may face the barrier that the facilitators don't really understand the prior student mindset. In contrast, Turinawe Samson, who is the Executive Director of ULA, trained to be a Pentecostal minister and did such work until he was kicked out of the church as a dangerous person. His background enables him to empathize completely with the faith leaders who attend the ULA workshops. Perhaps, ultimately, the campus will develop training for student facilitators, so they can be the ones who provide the workshop training. But even then, will students from households that are comfortable financially have the right sort of empathy for other students who come from households of modest means? If not, what can be done to transcend these differences in family background?
We learned in the campus leadership video from Sean Garrick, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that there already is a small grant program in place to encourage individual efforts in this domain from students, faculty, and staff. I believe the grants are $1,000 a piece for one year, but I may be a bit off on that detail. I found this encouraging as grant programs are inherently opt in so unlike the new requirements to be put in place for assistant professors on the tenure track. Early on, I believe opt in is the way to go as it will attract the innovators and early adopters to experiment with approaches. Subsequently, as the effort scales up, some coercion may be necessary for the majority adopters to embrace the ideas.
Yet I thought the campus grants that Vice Chancellor Garrick mentioned very modest in size, quite possibly insufficient to jump start the effort. My thought is that a campus effort of this sort will require much more funding as well as a plan to scale up from the experimental stage, if the work done at that stage proves successful. And the need for such funding suggests a like need for grants from foundations or wealthy individuals. But many, if not most, of the other major universities are likewise making their own efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion. They too will be competing for such grants. How then can the U of I obtain its fair share of this soft money?
A sober analysis needs to be done about whether the U of I has a real and durable advantage over peers, which should then be made overt to potential funders. Back in the mid 1990s the U of I did have such an advantage, having previously been home to the Plato Project, which meant there was already a lot of embedded knowledge on effective use of educational technology. For many on campus, the goal was to enable Plato-like functionality over the Web; the applications CyberProf and Mallard were conceived this way. The campus was also clear innovative in IT with Mosaic, the first graphical browser, coming out of NCSA and Eudora, a then state of the art email program coming out of the campus computing organization.
These advantages notwithstanding, Burks Oakley, who secured the initial SCALE grant felt a need to over promise to the Sloan Foundation what would be delivered, by claiming that ALN (what we called online learning at the time) would lower the cost of instruction. The SCALE evaluation wasn't finding this, however. One of the reasons I was brought in to run SCALE was to make some headway on this promise. I bring up this little bit of history because the incentive to over promise to potential grant funders is large, as a way to secure the funds, though there will be a reckoning down the road.
When I eventually took over for Burks in running SCALE, there were three separate programs that funded ed tech activity on campus. One was through the campus Ed Tech Board, which gave out grants of roughly $6,000 per grantee for one year, with a total funding of about $200,000 per year. This was funded by campus. SCALE had its own grant program. The average size of the a grant was about $20,000 per year. Just as important from my point of view is that as the person running SCALE I would get preliminary proposals from faculty and on the basis of this understand where they were coming from and possibly negotiate in a friendly way to a modified proposal that would get the approval of our review committee. Indeed, in this manner I could shape much of the important ed tech activity on campus. Eventually, when we did The SCALE Efficiency Projects to meet Sloan's concern about ed tech reducing the cost of instruction, I believe I was the first mover in shaping what the internal grants would be like, so had even more control of the process. SCALE was generously funded with $2.1M from the Sloan Foundation and $700K of matching funds from the Swanlund Gift Fund, I believe the first campus use of that particular gift. Apart from being an internal grant provider, SCALE was also a back end supporter of ed tech. For the life of me I now can't remember the division in funding for grants versus for back end support and administrative overhead. But I'm sure that SCALE allocated a great deal more money to grants than did the ETB.
The third source of funds was at the University level, in a program called ALTHE which was then under the leadership of Sylvia Manning, Vice President for Academic Affairs. Burks had been a faculty fellow in Sylvia's office the year before I came into SCALE and eventually Burks made the jump from the campus to the university. Though the ALTHE program was really intended for the Chicago and Springfield campuses, to get them up to speed with ed tech so they could develop online programs, the plurality of the considerable funding went to Urbana, as that was where most of the then current innovative activity was happening. The overall impact of these three programs on faculty at the Urbana campus was to give a feel of the Wild West, which the early days of the Internet contributed to. Within the administration, it was evident there was a rivalry between the campus and the university and the lack of coordination between the two produced substantial tension.
I was heads down with my economics research before SCALE, so have no sense whether these same politics existed when President Ikenberry was running things. But the politics persisted even after President Stukel, Ikenberry's successor, stepped down. The underlying problem, as I see it from my perch, is that the position of University President sounds like the top banana of the whole thing. Yet the reality is that the Chancellor of the Urbana campus holds more real power. So the President is apt to be "creative" in order to transfer some of that power to his office. I would hope that this is no longer an issue. But I'm afraid it still might be.
The last two years that the ETB had a grant program, 1999 and 2000, the grants were targeted at majority faculty who would attend a 3-day summer workshop run by the then new Center for Educational Technologies and the faculty would receive a stipend after the workshop concluded to help them get started with their own ed tech projects. CET was the successor to SCALE (they overlapped for one year) and I became the Director of CET. This approach with workshops made sense to me as a way to move along the diffusion curve. But CET was horribly underfunded from the get go. SCALE funds bolstered it during that first year. After that there was a big hole in the budget. To fill that hole, the ETB grant funds were transferred to CET and became part of its core budget.
I will also note that there was a change in campus leadership at the Provost level around then. Sloan had somewhat shifted its orientation and wanted to focus on totally online programs. While Sloan gave SCALE a renewal grant in 1998, based on the success of the SCALE Efficiency Projects, they indicated they wouldn't be giving SCALE a second renewal, even though they were happy with our work, because for the most part we weren't supporting totally online courses. However, they did arrange for the Mellon Foundation to take over the SCALE grant and Mellon was very interested in doing so. Yet this required getting a campus match to the grant. The new Provost wasn't convinced that was a good idea and didn't offer up the funds. In retrospect, we should have used the ETB funds for the campus match and then continue to do those ETB summer workshops in the years of Mellon funding. Alas, that's not how it played out.
Then too, many instructors who hadn't attended any of the workshops wanted to start using a course management system for the online component to their classes. This was overwhelmingly a dull use of the technology, mainly file sharing and not much more. But it occurred with large numbers of instructors and it began to seem that CET's core mission was to enable this use. In so doing we went from an organization that encouraged interesting adaptations of the technology to the particular course needs and instructor viewpoint and instead became a technology services provider. This drama took a long time in playing out. CET was eventually merged with the larger IT organization to form CITES, and the drama continued in those years as well. So the back end of the ed tech services were provided in a more technically proficient manner, but I thought we lost our true raison d'être in the process.
I've belabored this history of SCALE, CET, and my involvement with campus ed tech, because I think there are lessons from that experience that are relevant to the current effort with diversity, equity, and inclusion. In particular, there needs to be a plan in place for moving down the entire diffusion curve, including whether the effort can be sustained when there is a change in campus leadership. There also has to be a realistic assessment of the revenues that can be brought to the effort after the novelty has worn off and whether there still will be campus commitment to the effort at that time. This is a challenge. What seems super important now may get lost in the shuffle a decade from now, with the agenda not yet complete, because some other bright new shiny object has come along to capture the attention of campus leadership.
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In the back of my head I'm asking myself, what would it take to get a grant from MacKenzie Scott to support the effort, funding that would be large enough to sustain the entire diffusion curve. Let me get back to that.
My sense of things is that if we are to think big about diversity, equity, and inclusion we need to involve a large aggregate, such as the Big Ten Universities. Then we need to have a major prior accomplishment for the Big Ten Academic Alliance to lay claim to, to create enough positive press that donors would be interested in funding further efforts in other areas
My candidate for hitting a home run among the public university members of the Big Ten (sorry Northwestern) is to do away with the current system of in-state and out-of-state tuition, which made sense when states were funding the lion's share of the education cost, and replace it with a common Big Ten tuition that any student from a state that has a Big Ten university would pay to attend any public Big Ten university. The Big Ten tuition rate would be higher than the current in-state rate but lower than the the current out-of-state rate. Let's leave its precise determination for now and consider the benefits from moving to this new arrangement.
Under the current arrangement, there is not a good substitute for the in-state flagship school, which offers both a good tuition rate and a high quality education. The exceptions are in Indiana and Michigan, where there are two such universities in each of these states that might be thought of as substitutes for each other, but with some specialization in offerings and the division of clientele served between the two. Elsewhere it is rather expensive to go out of state and one would likely not do so unless the student was rejected by the in-state flagship university or the student wants to enroll in a highly specialized program that doesn't exist at the in-state school or the student gets into an elite "honors program" at the out-of-state school, but does not get into the equivalent at the in-state school. Having a fixed Big Ten tuition rate would lessen the risk across these outcomes, though admittedly cost more to attend the in-state school than it would have previously cost. Alternatively, while many families do receive the benefit of in-state tuition, some families do not. The uniform Big Ten tuition would be a fairer approach.
And from the perspective of Big Ten members, there would be other benefits. Campuses through negotiation could specialize somewhat and move away from the comprehensive approach. Campuses would be encouraged to compute the marginal cost per student in program x as well as the average cost per student. If the in-state tuition is below the marginal cost, the campus has no financial incentive to admit the student. But, as far as I know, in-state tuition rates are now a political animal and are set by the Board of Trustees, in reference to historical tuition rates as well as tuition rates at certain peer institutions that are use for comparison. It really would be better to get tuition rates more closely tied to the cost of the education.
I'm not saying this wouldn't be a very heavy lift. What I am saying is that this would be seen as a major accomplishment, if it could be done. That would set the groundwork for other ambitious projects in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space that are funded with large grant support. Perhaps with this major accomplishment in hand, Mackenzie Scott would then be interested in funding the Big Ten effort in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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I want to make one more point and then close. When I first started as a SCALE faculty member, the year before I began to run SCALE, the approach I took in teaching my class was completely determined by imitating others who had done this stuff before me and then trying to fit that to the subject matter of my course. I was willing to experiment with the implementation to see if it was effective, but at the time I didn't have the wherewithal to come up with an implementation that was totally of my own design. In other words, the most effective pedagogy, especially early on, is monkey see - monkey do.
There is learning by doing and confidence is gained when at least some of the experiments seem to pay off. Then one might try things that are more off the beaten path. Eventually I did that sort of thing, for example with Excelets. (Scott Sinex is the one who spread the concept so that it has real use, mainly outside of economics.) And likewise for using student blogging in teaching economics, which given the subject matter is quite an unusual practice. However, I was already quite far along with ed tech when I started to experiment with student blogs.
There is a common mistake made that instructors are the pedagogy experts, so they know up front how to introduce diversity, equity, and inclusion ideas into their own courses. I think that is quite wrong. Most will be clueless about how to do this, even if they care a great deal about teaching and want to encourage all students regardless of their background. They need to learn from the lessons of the innovators and early adopters, who do have a clue about what to try in their classrooms.
As the innovators and early adopters have full-time jobs already, there needs to be an organization that partners with these first movers, learns from them and then provides ideas about where to start with majority faculty. This is how the mechanism should work.
I hope we get there, but it doesn't seem that we're there yet. There are risks in moving too fast, especially about not anticipating entrenched resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. This piece in the Chronicle illustrates the pain that might be created when the potential resistance hasn't been assessed at all. But there are also risks in ignoring real problems that need to be address but instead letting them fester, as this other Chronicle essay illustrates. There will be Monday morning quarterbacks who don't see the full picture but think they know better about how to implement. In the SCALE days I didn't face much of that. Later, when we first tried to implement an enterprise LMS, that was all I was hearing. What I'm trying to say is that this won't be easy to get done. I hope we can persist and do just that.
