Harvard law professor Lani Guinier was invited to speak about the problem of diversity in higher education to conclude the symposium for the College Access Project for African Americans at the UCLA Hammer Museum on Friday evening.
The College Access Project, a six-year research project conducted by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, focuses on black students’ access to and equality in colleges.
“People think there’s a trade-off between diversity and excellence,” said Darnell Hunt, director of the Bunche Center. “There is a lot of evidence to show it’s a myth, but it hasn’t circulated in the media or the community, and we’re working on showing it’s a myth and better communicating the findings of our research.”
The symposium on Friday brought together members of the research team and media. Hunt said the goal of the day was to find an effective way to communicate the research to both the media and the community.
The project has included a number of studies in areas such as affirmative action, disparities in access to resources in high schools and alternative curricula in the K-12 school system.
Researchers examined how diversity in high schools positively impacts a student’s choice about employment later in life and how the assessment of a student’s potential with grade point averages and SAT scores impacts admission to higher education, as well.
During the symposium, researchers also discussed the system of meritocracy, defined in a Bunche Center report as “a system in which opportunity and progress rest on rewarding ability and talent.”
Guinier also discusses meritocracy her upcoming book, “Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race and Higher Education Became a Gift From the Poor to the Rich.”
Guinier, who has been an active advocate for civil rights for many years, wasted no time Friday evening in ensuring the audience that her lecture would not be an ordinary one.
“So, I’m going to be controversial,” Guinier said.
Her main focus was on how admission to a public university has become a prize based on an individual’s merit, rather than the university’s mission to educate future leaders.
At one point, she referenced a study by the University of Michigan that showed that students admitted through affirmative action were more likely to give back to the community than students admitted based on the traditional evaluation of merit, GPAs and SAT scores. But she said affirmative action is not a good long-term solution to the problem of inequality, because it only admits a small number of students.
“We shouldn’t be evaluating the credentials of an individual. The problem is not individual phenomena, but structural phenomena,” said Guinier. “We need … to change the ways in which the university thinks about its mission. We need to start evaluating the institution based on democratic meritocracy, how they are contributing to the society that is subsidizing them.”
Rather than simply admitting students with the highest GPAs and SAT scores, Guinier said she believes there are alternate ways to admit students to a university that, in the long run, are more effective in producing graduates who give back to the community.
“If you know someone’s SAT scores, you can better predict the car their parents drive than their first-year college grades. … I’m not worried about how well people do in college. I want to know how well people do in life,” Guinier said.
Public universities receive more money from government organizations than other state and local governmental agencies, she said, because they are meant to create leaders and good citizens who will give back to the community.
“The purpose to learning is not simply to advance your career, but to make a better society,” she said.
She suggested that when forming a group based on test scores, for example, an admissions team should look at the questions an individual gets wrong rather than those that are correct to facilitate the creation of a more efficient, diverse group full of different cognitive skills.
“This kind of forward thinking and critique of public policy is going to save us. We as a society are losing the benefit of the untapped talent of all other classes that we don’t have included,” said June Baldwin, a Harvard lawyer.
Hunt said Guinier was the perfect speaker to end the symposium and sum up the project’s findings from a legal perspective.
In light of the recent increase in the number of underrepresented minorities enrolling in the incoming freshman class and the inauguration of Chancellor Block, he said, “It’s a complete contradiction for a university like UCLA not to reflect diversity. We have a long way to go, but I’m confident that we have leadership to make it more likely to get there.”