How the Corporate University Created and Destroyed Diversity

This blog originally appeared in Counterpunch. 

The Supreme Court did not kill diversity. Higher education did it to itself. It has done it slowly and methodically over the last few years, as the corporate university created and then destroyed diversity as part of its business plan to attract students and make itself more relevant to American capitalism.

Many thought that the US Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended affirmative action, pronounced the death knell for diversity in higher education. The reality is that colleges produce the seeds for its destruction. Typifying this undermining  of diversity is a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article highlighting how many colleges are now advertising to students that they are  a school where everybody is just like you.

How did all this happen?

The history of higher education in America has always faced a contradiction.  On the one hand, universities have preached diversity as intellectual openness to new ideas, while excluding or segregating women, the poor, those of certain religions,  and people of color. Yet from the 1960s, partly as a result of the civil rights movement and of changing demographics in America, universities gave lip service to demographic diversity.   This resulted in affirmative action programs providing special consideration for women and individuals of color.

In the landmark 1978  Regents of California  v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that while racial quotas were unconstitutional, the use of race could be considered as an effort to try to promote diversity. From that decision on, schools struggled with what it means to be diverse, how to promote it, and really, who would be the beneficiaries of it.  But for the corporate university, diversity rested less on a concept of fairness and equity than it did on both a way to expand its customer base and use the concept as a marketing tool to achieve that.

Who won from diversity?  In part because of the failures of K-12 to deliver an adequate and equitable education for students of color, the pipeline to college was racially constricted.  The main beneficiaries of affirmative action became middle class white females. Recruiting them allowed schools to “check the box” for diversity. Over the course of the last 50 years, higher education has transformed from being a male-dominated  to a female-dominated institution, with some numbers suggesting that more than 60% of those enrolled in colleges and universities are now female.   That has come at the expense of persons of color, whose numbers continue to dwindle, or at least remain stagnate, especially at some of the elite schools such as Harvard.

At the same time, the corporate university in its effort to boost enrollment and to define a niche for itself, has increasingly pitched its message to its students that it is a school that will specialize to the  particular needs of students in the same way businesses market to locate customers and maximize profits.  This narrowing of the focus of higher education comes at the same time that schools are deemphasizing liberal arts education. Liberal arts, at its best, was about exposing students to new and contrasting ideas. It was intellectual diversity that went beyond gender and skin color.

But liberal arts is expensive. It requires universities to staff a variety of courses and programs that are not necessarily high profit producing even though they are important for intellectual diversity. The narrowing of the perspectives of higher education has morphed into intellectual safeness and narrowness, protecting both conservative and liberal students from opposing ideas from which they disagree.

The result is that the real diversity that college universities are supposed to stand for—exposure to new ideas, different perspectives, and different people—has gradually eroded.

The business plan of the corporate university in its effort to save money has narrowed the intellectual scope and diversity of both the ideas that it offers and the students that it caters to.  The future of higher education increasingly looks much like the past of higher education.