University of Illinois

President // Speeches and Statements

Diversity in America - at a Crossroad
B. Joseph White, President

Niagara Foundation
Chicago

June 12, 2007  

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. 

Congratulations to the Niagara Foundation on the important work you do in promoting global understanding and peace and friendship among diverse peoples. Nothing is more important in today’s world. 

My wife, Mary, and I traveled to Istanbul, Ephesus and other locations in Turkey several years ago. We have never had a more inspiring or informative experience than seeing firsthand this nation at the crossroad of East and West. We were deeply impressed by the co-existence of people with deeply held faiths in this modern, democratic state. The Turkish people we met could not have been warmer or more hospitable. 

By the way, many Turkish students have found their way to the University of Illinois over the years. Of our 11,000 international alumni in 100 countries, nearly 250 are from Turkey.

Staying with the crossroad theme: I want to speak with you today about diversity in America at a crossroad.  I come at this subject as president of the University of Illinois and so I have a particular focus on diversity in higher education.

My message today has several related points. Let me put them right up front:

  • First, a college education has never been more important than today — for individuals and for the nation. Not nearly enough Americans are earning a college education today, relative to their own hopes and dreams and relative to the nation's needs.
  • Second,America works as a large, diverse democracy when the opportunity to get ahead — and success in getting ahead — are widely distributed across our population, among people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and economic circumstances. 
  • Third, we face an enormous challenge in preparing more Americans for college and delivering to them a quality college education that is both affordable and accessible. This challenge is being met by Americans families in the top income quartile, regardless of race or ethnicity. For everyone else — 75 percent of American families — the challenge is proving to be overwhelming.
  • Fourth, since African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans are disproportionately represented in these lower-income quartiles, they are especially — but by no means exclusively — affected by our failure to prepare people for and provide them with an accessible, affordable college education.
  • Finally, therefore, we must together mount a serious and urgent attack on the obstacles to success for our diverse population, starting with access to quality education. 

Now, let me expand on these observations. 

Diversity has been a hot topic in America’s universities for decades. I experienced it firsthand when I served as interim president at the University of Michigan in 2002, the year that U of M cases on affirmative action were heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. The University prevailed in the Supreme Court decisions. But, illustrating the contentious nature of these matters, last year the citizens of Michigan voted down any use of racial preferences in public university admissions. 

There is good reason for campus controversy over diversity. A college education is the most important gateway of opportunity in a globally competitive world in which education is the key to achieving one’s personal dreams. College graduates in America have 70 percent higher lifetime earnings than high school graduates as well as a one-third lower unemployment rate and a much higher propensity to vote, a good thing for our diverse democracy. 

In the context of the Niagara Foundation’s work, I would also assert that education is the key to reducing the ignorance, hopelessness and hatred that are the breeding ground for intolerance and demagoguery around the world. 

So, in every respect, education, and especially college education, are very good things.  Yet, while about 85 percent of Americans graduate from high school, only 30 percent graduate from college. Among African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans, these rates are much lower — fewer than 15 percent graduate from college. This has given rise to the widely used term, “underrepresented minorities,” on America’s campuses. It has also given rise to the question of who gets to benefit from the extraordinary gateway of opportunity that a college education represents — especially one from a highly selective institution.

Affirmative action, yes or no?  If yes, how much should there be and how should it be practiced? In its 2003 decisions in the Michigan cases, the Supreme Court essentially gave a qualified “yes” to affirmative action. But conditions for it were specified, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor expressed the hope held by many Americans, including me, that within a quarter century affirmative action will no longer be needed to help right historic wrongs and create a more level playing field in American society. 

Let me go back for a moment to the observation that we have major education gaps in America, gaps that are dashing individual dreams and weakening the nation’s democracy and global competitiveness. 

The remarkable fact is that at exactly the time the U.S. should be increasing our lead in providing a college education (and more) to our citizens, we are regressing relative to many other nations. 

As recently as 1998, the U.S. ranked first among industrial democracies of the world in the share of 25 to 29 year olds with at least a bachelor’s degree. By 2004 we were fifth, we are on track to be ninth this year, and if present trends continue, we will be 13th in 2009. This is exactly the wrong trend at exactly the wrong time. 

I have traveled during the last decade to the “Asian Tiger” economies: Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and others. These nations have all gone from Third World to First World status in less than 50 years by pouring money, public and private, into education, including higher education. South Korea now spends a higher percentage of its national income on education than nearly any other country in the world. And it’s not just an Asian phenomenon. Ireland’s economic boom has been spurred, in part, by opening up and expanding primary and secondary schools and increasing funding for universities. 

As these nations have increased public investment in higher education, we in America have chosen to shift more and more of the cost of higher education to individuals and their families.

That has not been much of a problem for well-off Americans. Among top quartile American families, those with incomes over $95,000 per year, the college graduation rate is 75 percent. These families have the habit and the will, and they find the means to send their kids to college, and they stay in school and graduate. 

But below the top-quartile families, the college graduation rate drops off at a shocking pace: 28 percent in the second quartile, 13 percent in the third and only 9 percent in the fourth quartile. Not enough of these families have the custom and tradition, the expectation and the means to ensure that their children go to college, stay in college and graduate. Clearly, the consequences for these families, and for America, are very negative and very serious. 

What does all of this have to do with diversity on college campuses and diversity in America being at a crossroad? Just this. 

While we must continue to think of diversity in racial and ethnic terms, we must increasingly think of diversity in terms of income and wealth and socio-economic class, dimensions that transcend race and ethnicity. We must identify and attack, passionately, obstacles to economic and social mobility that thwart young people of ability and ambition —  black, white, Latino of any ethnicity — from developing and fulfilling their potential. Among these barriers, inadequate or poor education from pre-school through graduate school is by far the most salient. 

I think the wrong way of attacking this problem is to plant the seeds of class warfare, pursuing the politics of envy and hatred. Throughout human history, this approach has ended badly, often very badly.

In America, the right way is to commit ourselves — as parents, leaders, educators and citizens — to encourage our nation’s extraordinarily diverse young people to get smart, get motivated, get educated and get ahead — and ensure they have the means to do so. 

This commitment, if we have the courage to make it, will be very hard-edged. We won’t continue to accept public schools that are failing our children and spawning an explosion of private education alternatives for those who can afford them. We’ll see the vast injustice of some children going to schools that spend over $15,000 per child while others, just a few miles away, spend half that amount. We’ll question the growth in merit-based scholarships at the expense of need-based aid. We’ll notice with alarm that slots in the nation’s top Ph.D. programs in science and engineering are dominated by international students since not enough young Americans are preparing themselves for that rigorous route. We’ll understand that we either spend public monies on education now or on incarceration later. And so on. 

Diversity is at a crossroad in America because, while we still have much work to do on race and ethnicity, more and more of our work must focus on tearing down the barriers to economic and social mobility that transcend race and ethnicity. In taking on this work, we may find something — indeed, I hope we will find something — that America badly needs today: a unifying purpose that will benefit the nation and all of our citizens.