American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO)
President Charles R. Middleton

April 14, 2009

Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to spend a few moments this afternoon with you as you settle fully into your chairs and your lunch settles into your stomach.

It's good to be back with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. This is my third experience at the annual meeting of AACRAO – so I suppose the third time is the charm! My first experience was back in April, 1987, in Las Vegas, where I was invited to talk about "academic faculty involvement in the transfer articulation process: a help or a hindrance." The second was a year later in April, 1988, at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, where I gave a presentation on "speaking with style." Apparently, that was such an inspiration that it took over 20 years for the organization to get over it and invite me back!

I want to thank everyone at AACRAO and especially the diversity caucuses for your efforts to hold meetings, lead discussions, and sustain the conversation on issues relating to diversity and inclusiveness, particularly in the higher education workforce. Although they have been gaining momentum, the issues of diversity and under-representation of minorities and women in all of our institutions, and most especially in leadership positions, has much too often stayed under the radar of our most pressing national concerns.

Nevertheless, there has been some progress. Over the past 40 years of my career, I have seen the landscape of diversity change so that it is much different today than when I earned my Ph.D. in 1969 and entered the professoriate. Back then, clueless, straight, white men dominated. To help illustrate this point, permit me to refer to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, starring Will Ferrell. Here's a brief synopsis of the film, if you haven't already seen it -- it's one of Ferrell's greatest, though truth be told, it still borders on being ridiculous (provided by www.imdb.com):

Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is the top-rated anchorman in San Diego in the '70s. All of the broadcasters who worked in the news studio, as well as those who worked at the other four stations, are straight white men. When feminism marches into the newsroom in the form of ambitious newswoman Veronica Corningstone, played by Christina Applegate, Ron is willing to go along with the changes at first, but only so long as Veronica stays in her place, covering cat fashion shows, cooking, and other "female" interests. But when Veronica refuses to settle for being eye candy and steps behind the news desk as a co-anchor, it's more than an episodic battle between two perfectly coiffed protagonists... it's all out war. Here's how Burgundy characterized diversity when told of Veronica's pending arrival:

Ed Harken (station manager): A lot of you have been hearing the [network] complaining about a lack of diversity on the news team.

Champ Kind (the sportscaster): What in the hell's diversity?

Ron Burgundy (Ferrell): Well, I could be wrong, but I believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.

"An old, old wooden ship…." i.e. something historical, useless in the modern world we live in, and to be looked at rather than counted on to work. As a metaphor for the late 60's workforce in higher education and elsewhere, it wasn't that far off, at least on gender issues. The concept of diversity was something that was all-too-often routinely made fun of or entirely ignored. Too often leaders didn't see past having only monochromatic employees, they weren't asking the difficult questions, and they certainly weren't identifying ways to change.

Today, we are much better at dealing with these issues. Though perfection eludes us, we're confronting them, and we're working hard to solve them not just in higher education, but in many other places as well. Workforce diversity is a concept whose time has come, especially in higher education. Success, despite the fact that more has to be done, seems to generate more -- not less -- change. But the challenges grow stronger as well, and as the issues get refined, the discussions widen.

Today, I am not going to focus on evaluating where we are and how we got here. Rather, I want to look to the future and speculate on where we might be going. What are the new issues, the emerging challenges, the future questions? What does it mean, for instance, to promote diversity in California and Texas when the Census Bureau reports that in 2007 minority groups made up 59% of the population in California and 53.4% of the population in Texas, two states where they already don't have a single group with more than 50% of the population? Or what will it mean to promote diversity in the year 2050, when minority groups – those classified as non-whites – will make up 53% of the total population, according to a recent report by the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU)? Or what are the workforce implications for our institutions when, in the fall of 2006, the latest report from the Census Bureau stated that 56.3% of all college students in America were female?

I think you get the point. The concept of diversity itself, if language has any meaning, may well be nearing the end of its useful life. Or is it? Perhaps we might consider the value of diversity and inclusiveness from another vantage point, not that of challenging and supplanting the privileges and opportunities of the straight, white, male population, but rather as a way to assure that all groups, including the emerging minorities of men and whites, are valued for what they contribute to the well-being of the country. Assuredly we aren't to that point yet, not even in California and certainly not in Texas, so it is imperative that the old meanings remain in full force for awhile at least; but the demographic wave is carrying us inexorably down the path where these and other similar questions will be unavoidable. So why not ask them now?

One way to think about these issues differently is to ask: can diversity be parsed? Can inclusiveness be anything but absolute? Let me give you an example of a way of thinking that leads to a negative answer to that question. When South African President, Nelson Mandela, and the African National Congress (ANC) approved and signed the new post-apartheid constitution of South Africa, it included a clause that made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal. Of course, this immediately raised many questions that pertain to same-sex rights, specifically same-sex marriage. In South Africa, as everywhere else in the world, there was and still is a sizable group of people who oppose the idea of granting equal marriage rights to the LGBT community on religious, moral, and other grounds.

Yet, if marriage was to be a constitutional right for all South African citizens, which the ANC needed to guarantee for other historical reasons, could you carve out same-sex marriage as an exception and not thereby deny the fundamental nature of the right itself? The answer is clearly no. A right of citizenship is either a right of citizenship, or it isn't. And therefore, the South African constitution became the only constitution in the world that provides for same-sex marriage, and not as a matter of legislation, such as in Spain, Sweden, Canada, and Vermont, or of court decisions as in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and now Iowa, but as a constitutional protection for all citizens.

So we're not only in a much different world than in 1945, the year Roosevelt University was founded, but we are heading for more changes as well. I would argue, based upon the traditions of my own University, that change is likely to be more enduring and successful if it is based upon some fundamental set of core values or beliefs. Here, the history of Roosevelt University is instructive.

Roosevelt was founded by a group of faculty, administrators, and students who, in 1945, when the Board of Directors of the Central YMCA College who wanted to put quotas on the admission of African-American and Jewish veterans, elected to create their own new college. To use the language of the original faculty petition of succession, rather than tolerate these "illiberal and discriminatory purposes," they refused to deal with a board that had, as they wrote, "an imperfect understanding of [higher] education and of the times."

Even back then, you see, there was a group of people who had the intelligence and understanding that promoting racial and religious discrimination was not in the best interest of those responsible for educating future generations. Sixty-four years later, in 2009, everybody at least professes to do likewise. It's old hat, at least rhetorically, nearly everywhere in the academy.

So, what's the new frontier for progressive people? Some ask, will that frontier be defined by the economic and social needs of the country? How can it not be? It remains the responsibility of us in higher education to prepare leaders to deal with those economic and social imperatives, and so it's unavoidably an issue for every institution to address. It all boils down to how we develop our human capital. Human capital is critical for success in everything, and a well-educated population in a highly sophisticated and technological world has a greater chance for success than a population less well-prepared.

Unfortunately, the issues that would put these notions into general practice remain controversial in many quarters. Let's look at perhaps the most volatile among them: immigration. Countries like Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Germany, all of Latin America, and many parts of Africa where HIV/Aids is the scourge of the population, are experiencing population decline, and in some cases, potential population collapse. In the long run, insufficient and under-educated human capital – workers – will stress their economies with potentially disastrous social consequences.

Most of you may not know this, however, that absent immigration, the population of the United States is perilously close to being in decline as well. According to a study done by Leon Bouvier, former Vice President of the Population Reference Bureau, "more than 50 percent of the population growth since 1970 has been caused by immigrants and their descendents." And, going back to what I said earlier about minority groups making up 53 percent of the population in the year 2050, npg.org (negative population growth) reported that the Census Bureau calculates that between 1994 and 2050, immigrants and their descendents will make up 60 percent of the population increase in the United States.

So, what does this mean about the importance of educating immigrants and their children as a key component of our country's long-term success? And isn't that a key issue in supporting the expansion of diversity itself, especially when the majority of all Latinos over the age of 25 are immigrants but only 10% of those under 25 are (i.e. 90% were born in the U.S. and are thus citizens, no matter what the status of their parents)?

Here's another example: at the rate that enrollment in higher education is going, sometime in the not-too-distant future, the majority of executives are likely to be women, not men. At Roosevelt, we are already there, and we're proud of that. 11 out of the 16 senior executives are women, including the Senior Vice President for Finance and CFO. And, as an aside, of the 5 remaining executives, 2 are gay men. This is diversity!

What will this mean for comparative wages? Will this mean that women will come to earn more than men on average? Certainly one would expect that result since with more responsibility comes a higher level of compensation. It is not unreasonable to anticipate that in the future, women, who go to college and graduate at higher rates than men, on the whole will be better educated than men, and if so, this being America, they will undoubtedly out-earn them. What are the social and inter-personal implications of that kind of a result?

We can already see these things happening in the academy. When I began my career in the fall of 1969, at the University of Colorado - Boulder, in a history department of 22, only one was a woman, and there were no people of color. Today, at Roosevelt, out of 219 full-time faculty members, 41 percent are women, and 17 percent are minorities. As you can see, there is still much more work to be done, particularly in minority hiring, but if you consider only our recent faculty hires, 55 percent since 2005 have been women and 31 percent have been minorities.

Furthermore, the concept of diversity is likely to be broadened to mean total inclusivity. Civil rights issues, which in my day were largely about Dr. King's dream for the American future and energized our whole generation in new and exciting ways, the notion pretty much covered the waterfront on mostly political and educational lines.

Now with the first African-American president, this debate continues; but there are many more dimensions to it, as we all know, as the sorry state of the economy points out. Indeed, President Obama, himself. calls educating more people at a higher level "the civil rights issue of the 21st century." We're facing data-driven questions that push the inclusiveness frontier forward, such as:

• What does it mean that the Latino population is already the largest minority group in the United States and is projected to triple in size by the year 2050, according to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU)?
  
  
• What does it mean, then, that the Latino population will make up 29 percent of the population in the United States and that the African-American community will merely sustain itself at around 15 percent of the population?
  
  
• What does it mean that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people argue that civil rights cannot be parsed, and that in order for equality to be real in this country it has to be indivisible?

I'm sure you can think of other examples.

The fundamental tension in American society stretching back to the founding fathers lies between cherishing our individualism as citizens of a democracy and our human need to have community-based support for us as individuals. This duality has been debated continuously since the Declaration of Independence, and the pendulum has swung back and forth between these two concepts.

In this broader historical context, higher education itself is seen both as an individual benefit and a compelling communitarian necessity. In other words, you will earn more with a college degree over your lifetime, but so, too, will you be a different kind of citizen as a result. To quote the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), "students' values and ethics should not be addressed in isolation from their basic responsibility as learners. Rather, values, ethics, and civic responsibility should be integrally woven into the educational goals that students embrace, once they make the decision to become candidates for a college degree."

Put prosaically: while it may be really nice to have a great career and make a lot more money holding a baccalaureate degree than if you merely had a high school diploma, it is imperative for the betterment of America as a whole that you understand that you have an obligation as an educated citizen to promote ethically and socially responsible actions on all fronts, starting in your own community.

I was reminded of this, once again, when I met recently with one of our alumni, Duke Petrovich, who is the new President of the Wrigley Corp - the first non-Wrigley to hold that position, ever. He said that the most important thing about his Roosevelt education was his coming to understand that very concept: the obligation he has to promote ethically and socially responsible actions at work and everywhere else. He's hardly unique in the milieu of RU alumni because the dedication to social justice is the driving and defining characteristic of the University – and it always has been. But we should say, this should be explicitly time for all colleges and universities, not just Roosevelt University.

For us at Roosevelt, although it's tempting to say so, we're not interested in "old, old wooden ships." We are interested in inclusiveness, unparsed equality, fairness, and as Eleanor Roosevelt said, in order to attain these goals, we are "dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit through the constant search for the truth, and the growth of the human spirit through knowledge, understanding, and good will." And we believe that in these first principles of inclusiveness lies the long-term success of enhancing diversity in the United States.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some of my ideas with you today, and I hope you have a wonderful time here in Chicago.