Affirmative Action in Higher Education

A few years ago, when James Banks was President of the American Educational Research Association, he asked me to bring together researchers and advocates in the area of race and higher education to assess the knowledge base, especially in light of the imminent needs for social science evidence in court cases that challenge affirmative action programs.

I worked with Mitchell Chang (now at UCLA) to bring together a distinguished group of individuals, and we identified and addressed arguments in this area:

• Justice: whether the historical vestiges of racism have been erased or still needs to be addressed through public policy.
• Merit: whether standardized test scores such as the SAT are sufficiently valid measures of merit in admissions to selective colleges and universities.
• Racism: whether race-neutrality and fairness exists in current social psychology.
• Benefits: whether there are institutional and collective benefits from racially diverse institutions of higher learning.

These issues and more have were synthesized and discussed by the group. The conference proceedings and an edited book (to be published by Stanford University Press) are available. Click here to begin.

After the conference, I worked with colleagues Anthony Antonio, Mitchell Chang, David Kenny, Shana Levin and Jeff Milem to conduct a multi-site social psychology experiment using random assignment of subjects to group discussions with racially diverse and nondiverse peers, and we found clear effects for the role of race in promoting critical thinking skills in college students. Click here for the study website at http://www.stanford.edu/group/diversity/