The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty

Abstract

The widespread sense that faculties at US colleges and universities need to be more diverse is tied to the sense that the students at US colleges and universities have become more diverse, which indeed they have. The increase in diversity in higher education over the last forty years has been matched by an increase in wealth. Thus the question about who should be on the faculty is a question about who should teach the rich kids, and although no one has argued that professors should be both as diverse as their students and as rich, the incomes of the teachers have, in fact, risen. The general rule of American upper-class life is that inequality is not a problem except when it comes to race and sex; the application of that rule to American colleges and universities is the call for faculty diversity. (Contains 4 notes.)