How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

2016/05/16 Leave a comment

Frank Bruni on the efforts by USA elite colleges to broaden socioeconomic diversity of their student populations:

The socioeconomic diversity at elite colleges is hardly the most vital concern about higher education. These colleges serve a small fraction of the country’s students.

But that diversity is important nonetheless. It’s a mirror of our values — in particular, of how well we own up to stacked decks and how willing we are to make adjustments.

Amherst is an exemplar of such adjustments. It’s tweaking campus operations to recognize that some less affluent students stick around during breaks. It’s marshaling extra resources so students from low-income families can take on the sorts of unpaid internships and research opportunities that other students do.

I mentioned community colleges before: About 10 years ago, Amherst took just seven transfers from those schools. It has taken 34 in each of the last two years.

The college’s president told me that one of her current passions is to admit more military veterans, who bring to the campus abilities, experiences and outlooks that other students don’t possess.

She wasn’t talking about doing them a kindness. She wasn’t outlining a social experiment or anything gimmicky. She was embracing the reality that real learning and a real preparation for citizenship demand the intersection of different life stories and different sensibilities. Colleges should be making that happen.

Source: How and Why You Diversify Colleges – The New York Times

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Canadian universities fail to meet diversity hiring targets

2016/05/10 Leave a comment

Another program likely to be examined in the context of  the diversity and inclusion agenda, as Minister Duncan has indicated:

The Canada Research Chairs program – one of the country’s premier tools to attract and retain top academic talent – has failed to meet its own targets for the hiring of women, visible minorities, people with disabilities and indigenous Canadians, and the federal program’s steering committee says it is urging universities to meet their equity goals.

In a letter sent to university presidents last month, the head of the committee said its members are concerned about the “very slow progress” that has been made on diversity among the 1,880 regular chairs.

“We are calling on you and your colleagues to sustain and intensify your efforts, in order to address, as soon as possible, the under-representation of individuals from the four designated groups within the program,” wrote Ted Hewitt, president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, one of three agencies with representatives on the committee.

Federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan, who had a long career in academia before entering politics, says she ordered a review of the program and is taking the equity issue “enormously seriously.”

“I have spent the last 25 years of my life fighting so that young women wouldn’t face the same challenges I did,” she said.

Targets are set based on an estimate of how many people that belong to each group are in the pool of eligible academics. For women, the target was 30.6 per cent, but only 28.9 per cent of research chairs were female; the number of chairs who identified as being a member of a visible minority was 13.1 per cent, against a target of 15 per cent; indigenous scholars made up 0.95 per cent of the program, compared with a goal of 1 per cent; and persons with disabilities had only 0.59 per cent representation, although the target was 4 per cent.

Universities’ compliance varies widely across the country, and can differ slightly from year to year as scholars move among institutions. Of the top 15 research universities in Canada, most met two of four targets, with the University of British Columbia and Queen’s University meeting three. The University of Calgary and the University of Ottawa met none of their four targets.

Dalhousie and the University of Montreal could not provide figures upon request. All schools said the designations are self-reported and, for that reason, identification among the equity categories may not be complete.

Source: Canadian universities fail to meet diversity hiring targets – The Globe and Mail

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Muslim theology faculties develop an ‘Islam for Germany’ | Religion News Service

2016/04/29 Leave a comment

Placing Islam in the Western tradition of critical scholarship:

While Germany’s politicians are loudly debating whether Islam is compatible with democracy, five of its state universities are quietly developing pioneering new Islamic theology faculties to try to ensure that it is.

The five universities — in Muenster, Osnabrueck, Frankfurt, Tubingen and Erlangen-Nuremberg — recently passed their first official evaluations by Muslim and Christian experts and were granted 20 million euros (or $22 million) to continue for another five years.

The programs now have a total of over 1,800 students and plan to grow. The largest program, in Muenster, has 700 students in its three-year bachelor’s program and received more than double that number of applicants this academic year alone.

Their example has been such a success that Berlin decided to introduce Islamic theology at one of its universities, even though it will not get federal funds for it.

The practical approach these faculties have taken towards training Muslim religion teachers, conducting research into Islam and fostering interfaith dialogue contrasts sharply with the increasingly shrill declarations coming from Germany’s far-right, especially the Alternative for Germany party.

The party will hold a convention April 29-30 to agree on its new platform. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch, said Islam violates Germany’s democratic constitution and its public symbols such as minarets, muezzins (people who call Muslims to prayer) and full-face veils should be banned.

Johanna Wanka, Germany’s federal minister for education and research, struck a different tone in January when she approved the renewed funding for the five theology centers.

“With these centers, the Muslim faith has found a home in Germany’s academic and theological debates,” she said. “This is an important contribution to interreligious dialogue.”

German state schools have religious education classes that students attend according to their beliefs. Instruction in the majority Protestant and Catholic faiths are available countrywide and a few areas also offer Jewish education.

With the growing number of Muslims in Germany, four states have introduced regular Islamic education for their Muslim public school students. The courses need university-trained teachers, so some universities had to start offering academic programs in Islam.

The faculties teach standard courses on the Quran, Islamic law and classic Muslim philosophy, as well as Arabic and pedagogy.

Marrying traditional Islamic learning with German academic standards has not been easy.

Muslim associations like DITIB, the local arm of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Department that runs mosques and employs imams around Germany, have a say in hiring professors. They have rejected or opposed some candidates they thought were too liberal.

But the universities insisted Islam had to be subject to the same critical approach as any other subject and academics must be able to do research and publish freely.

Conservative guardians of Muslim tradition have some reason to be wary.

German theologians developed the historical-critical method of biblical scholarship in the 18th and 19th centuries, an approach most Islamic scholars have resisted because they view such analytical methods as undermining the faith.

If Islamic theology faculties followed this example, some conservatives worried, they could become hotbeds of heresy spreading a reformist Islam unfit to teach to young Muslims.

In Muenster, Muslim groups led a bitter campaign against the faculty’s director Mouhanad Khorchide, who received several death threats and was given police protection. But the university stood by him and the criticism eventually ebbed.

The Lebanese-born son of Palestinian refugees, Khorchide, 44, has irritated conservative Muslims with popular books such as “Islam Is Mercy” and “God Believes in People,” and appearances on German talk shows where he is treated like the new spokesman for Islam.

He speaks out clearly against the ultra-conservative Salafi Muslims, who have a tiny but growing following among young German Muslims, and call for Shariah to be the law of the land.

“It is not the job of religions, including Islam, to pass laws,” Khorchide said. “The real concern of Islam is that people perfect themselves, both as individuals and as a society, in order to reach the community of God.”

Source: Muslim theology faculties develop an ‘Islam for Germany’ | Religion News Service

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U of T to track race-based data of its students

2016/02/23 Leave a comment

Ontario EducationAlways good to have better data to identify patterns of behaviour and ask whether additional measures are required.

We do have some data from the NHS regarding diversity in the education system at all three levels which I analyzed in my book, Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote. In essence, in Ontario, as elsewhere in the country, university employees are more diverse than the population at large but median-income data indicates that visible minorities are concentrated in lower earning occupations.

Ontario University GraduationIn terms of students, all visible minority groups have higher university diploma rates than non-visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples, although it varies considerably among different groups:

The University of Toronto has committed to continuously collect race-based data from its students, the Star has learned, unprecedented among post-secondary institutions in Ontario.

The undertaking by Canada’s largest university comes amidst a broader effort to tackle a lack of representation in the lecture hall among some groups and lend hard numbers to the push for equity in the public realm.

Angela Hildyard, U of T’s vice-president for human resources and equity, hopes to see the online census rolled out next fall for the incoming crop of students.

“We’re trying to be as comprehensive and progressive as we can . . . We’re trying to be much more reflective of our own community,” Hildyard said.

The voluntary survey will likely reveal “significant under-representation of black faculty and staff,” she said, noting the new stats could be used to gauge disparities and inform recruitment policies.

Young black leaders, whose demands helped secure the university’s pledge, embrace it as a positive move toward equity in the halls of higher education — one that trumps fears of latent stereotyping revived by the prospect of racial categorizing.

“There is still so much work to be done, but we’re welcoming this as an exciting first step in creating a campus where black students feel safe and welcomed,” said Yusra Khogali, a U of T student and member of the Black Liberation Collective, a campus protest movement with local chapters across North America. “We hope to see work like this replicated at other institutions.”

Black Lives Matter co-founder Sandy Hudson said the news has “great potential” for overcoming barriers, from student diversity to program content.

The survey will allow students to self-identify with one or several ethnic backgrounds and check off racial identities drawn from Statistics Canada, ranging from Black to Chinese, South Asian, and Latin American. Students can also specify a racial background other than the roughly dozen listed.

The info would be gleaned — from all 85,000 students eventually — as part of a broader demographic data harvest that reaps information on students’ gender identity, sexual identity, religion and other areas — all largely uncharted territory for post-secondary institutions at this scale.

Carl James, director of the York Centre for Education and Community, thinks crunching numbers in fields from education to incarceration is key to confronting prejudice. “The data is critical,” he said.

Detailed demographic statistics, including information on race, is routinely collected in U.S. schools and universities. The fact that racial data-tracking breaks new ground up north speaks to deeply rooted attitudes toward race in Canada, says James.

“We have tended to think as Canadians that race is something we don’t live by or identify people with, when in fact we do,” James said.

David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, notes that “anecdotally” there seems to be a ghettoization of certain groups in particular disciplines. “Women for instance are highly concentrated in the social sciences, almost invisible in engineering. And I think there are parallels with racialized minorities.

“Right now there’s not a lot of data collection that’s going on across the country to evidence that,” Robinson said.

Administrators plan to unroll the census on the heels of a revamped employment equity survey for faculty and staff.

That bare-bones questionnaire, in place for several years and filled out by incoming employees, currently lists no racial categories beyond “visible minority” or “racialized.” For gender identity, “transgendered” can soon be ticked off alongside more traditional boxes.

Source: U of T to track race-based data of its students | Toronto Star

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The Facts on Women in Science Show Why We Don’t Need the Diversity Bureaucracy

2015/04/22 Leave a comment

While the study results are convincing, the policy conclusions less so. Other studies have shown gender and racial bias (Sex differences in academia: University challenge | The Economist) in academia:

The result of this study, authored by Cornell psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci, and published April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is hardly surprising. Since the 1980s, females have been interviewed and hired at a higher rate than their representation in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) applicant pool would predict, as documented by the National Research Council and other investigators. Pressure from campus administrators to hire a female candidate over a more qualified male peer is relentless and overwhelming. If a STEM faculty resists that pressure and hires the most qualified candidate regardless of his gender, the administrators may force the obstreperous department to hire an additional woman anyway.

Yet the myth of a sexist science hiring process has persisted, even though it is contradicted every day by the observable characteristics of faculty searches. And that myth has given rise to a stupendously expensive campus bureaucracy tasked with increasing diversity and combating alleged faculty bias. Last month, the University of California at Los Angeles hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the jaw-dropping salary of $354,900 — enough to cover the tuition of nearly 30 underprivileged students a year. That vice chancellor will be expected to ride herd on the faculty and make sure that it hires according to gender (and race). The Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego campuses of the University of California have long had their own vice chancellors for equity, diversity, and inclusion at salaries ranging from a “mere” quarter million to nearly three hundred thousand dollars a year. Each such vice chancellor presides over a princely realm of bureaucrats, all sucking up vast amounts of taxpayer and student tuition dollars.

Private universities are just as committed to the myth of faculty bias. Harvard created the position of senior vice provost for diversity and faculty development in 2005. That senior vice provost reviews faculty appointments to ensure that they contribute to “diversity in faculty ranks across the University” — in other words, that new hires be selected on the basis of gender and race, not their academic accomplishments.

The university should be the one place where reason and evidence rule. For years it has been apparent that hiring bias runs in favor of women, not against them. It’s time to shut down the costly diversity bureaucracy and allow faculty to hire on merit alone.

The Facts on Women in Science Show Why We Don’t Need the Diversity Bureaucracy | TIME.

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Space for faith: Accomodating religion on campus

2015/02/19 Leave a comment

Overview of the different approaches taken by universities to provide prayer space to students. From an integration perspective, multiculturalism-faith centres are preferable to single-faith centres:

The University of Toronto’s approach to religion on campus lies somewhere between McGill’s and Western’s. While U of T has a multi-faith centre, a building with several rooms in which weekly discussions on faith and religious diversity take place, U of T does not provide designated space for any religious group. There are several multi-purpose spaces around campus that student groups, including religious ones, are responsible for booking. “We don’t expect students to park their faith at the edge of campus,” says Richard Chambers, director of the university’s multi-faith centre. “But we don’t privilege any particular group . . . that wouldn’t fly here.” Chambers has yet to receive a request from a single religious group asking for more space.

Space for faith: Accomodating religion on campus.

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Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com

2015/02/10 Leave a comment

Gender bias universities

Frequency of word “genius” in RatemyProfessor

Interesting study on bias, this time in the university setting:

Studies have also shown that students can be biased against female professors. In one, teachers graded and returned papers to students at the exact same time, but when asked to rate their promptness, students gave female professors lower scores than men. Biases cut both ways — teachers have also been found to believe girls are not as good in math and science, even when they perform similarly to boys.

Mr. Schmidt, who made the chart as part of a project called Bookworm for searching and visualizing large texts, said he was struck by “this spectrum from smart to brilliant to genius, where each one of those is more strongly gendered male than the previous one was.” He was also surprised that relatively few people commented on female professors’ clothing or looks, which he had expected to be the case.

Another surprise, he said, was Shakespeare — apparently many more men than women teach it in English departments.

Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.

Men and women seemed equally likely to be thought of as tough or easy, lazy, distracted or inspiring.

Interestingly, women were more likely to be described in reviews as role models. Mr. Schmidt notes that the reviews are anonymous, so he doesn’t know the gender of reviewers. It could be that more female students describe female professors as role models than men do when describing men or women.

Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com.

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Looking at Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism From a Literary Perspective

2014/05/14 Leave a comment

Interesting essay by Nora Gold on why she wrote her novel, Fields of Exile, on the issue of anti-Israel sentiment on campus:

I spent years writing a novel on this topic because I was so distressed about the anti-Israelism around me that I really couldn’t write about anything else. It was like having a fish hook in my stomach.

I was pained not only by the most obvious manifestations of anti-Israelism, like Israel Apartheid Week – during which, year after year, I witnessed the emotional and psychological damage wreaked on Jewish students and professors – but also the increasing normalization of Israel-bashing in classes, in faculty meetings, and at conferences. I was appalled that in certain disciplines it was almost de rigueur to trash Israel.‎

Looking at Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism From a Literary Perspective | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com.

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UK – Islamic preachers: the pied pipers of sexual apartheid? – Telegraph

2014/02/12 1 Comment

More on the ongoing controversy, and ongoing activities, of fundamentalist preachers and the requirement for gender segregation at UK universities:

The speaker this time was Ustadh Alomgir Ali, a lecturer from Haddad’s Muslim Research and Development Foundation. His audience comprised men at the front and women – the majority of whom waited outside in the rain before the lecture began while the men gathered inside – at the back. Although there were no signs enforcing segregation, he spoke at length in favour of gender division and of a “crisis in society”, with the relationship between men and women in need of correction.

“In Islam, we have laid down certain prohibitions because it leads on to other sins,” he told his audience. “The first important point you must learn at university is lowering the gaze.”

His lecture concluded with some advice. “Brothers and sisters, the important thing is to learn etiquette of modesty, lowering your gaze, avoiding touching the opposite gender and avoiding unnecessary socialising with the opposite gender.”

Islamic preachers: the pied pipers of sexual apartheid? – Telegraph.

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Religious accommodation or ‘accessory to sexism’? York student’s case stirs debate – The Globe and Mail

2014/01/10 Leave a comment

The request by a male student at York University in Toronto to be accommodated in his wish to not be in a study group where he would have to interact with female students has understandably attracted much controversy.

Accommodation is not an automatic right but has to be balanced against the rights of others and the broader interests of society, which include the overall mandate of universities to encourage learning, discussion and knowledge, irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation etc. Professor Grayson made the right call in rejecting the request; unfortunately the Dean did not and too accommodating.

Seems to have ended up with the student accepting the Professor’s position, but still worrisome that Dr. Grayson was not backed up by the university administration:

The dean’s office told the student if he wished to drop the course, the fee would be refunded. But less than a week later, the student told Dr. Grayson he would “respect the final decision” to deny the request, was pleased with the way it had been handled, and has since met with his learning group. Even so, York has not changed its stand.

“What concerns me is that there’s an apparatus there that says this kind of thing’s okay, and you could have other students making similar requests,” Dr. Grayson said. “… There is room here for decision-making, and as far as I’m concerned, York has made the wrong decision.”

Religious accommodation or ‘accessory to sexism’? York student’s case stirs debate – The Globe and Mail.

And in Britain some similar debates about accommodation in UK university campuses for Muslim speakers who insist on separate seating for men and women (see Campus segregation: ‘religious freedom’ cannot be allowed to trump equality – Telegraph).

Agree that such accommodation in public universities is not reasonable as it undermines integration and equality:

All the more reason, then, that a fearless debate is encouraged to protect the fundamental values of a secular society. Teachings and practices in some faith schools that undermine women’s freedoms also ill prepare boys for the challenges of a modern mixed workplace. Issues such as forced arranged marriages, and domestic violence condoned by the extended family, have to be confronted, not because they are exclusive to any particular religious group, but because they are out of step with our civic life.

Segregation:our secular values need to be protected | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer.

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