By SHANNON O. WELLS
When a Pitt instructor asked the speaker at a recent forum on affirmative action if she should ask new postdoc students how they further the program’s “diversity,” Dana Thompson Dorsey affirmed the intention but strongly questioned the language.
“ ‘Diversity’ is a weak word. It doesn’t mean anything,” said Thompson Dorsey, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of South Florida. “Equity, justice and inclusion mean more. I mean, all of us are diverse, right? We’re all diverse in here: some wear glasses, some don’t, right?
“It’s not just about race and color. It’s about the simplest of things: Some have straight hair, some have curly hair … but that doesn’t say anything about how you feel about equity, justice and inclusion and what you have done in your work, or your employment, your volunteer time that actually promotes (diversity, equity and inclusion practices).”
Because Pennsylvania — unlike Florida, “where DEI is banned,” she said — allows such classroom questioning, Thompson Dorsey encouraged asking students specifically how they are furthering equity and inclusion.
“Anybody can write an essay and say they believe in it: ‘Oh, I think it’s great. I think we should do this. We need more women. We need more Black and Latinx and Asian and LGBTQ.’ Anybody can say that. But actions speak louder than words. What have you done? What programs are you involved in? What groups and organizations do you volunteer with or previously worked with? What have you done to show us you are really about this life?”
This was among many insights Thompson Dorsey shared during a forum Jan. 19 in the William Pitt Union with the theme, “Affirmative Action and Racial Equity: The Impact of the Supreme Court’s Decision on Higher Education.” She was a guest of All Angles, a speaker series hosted by the Institute of Politics.
Thompson Dorsey also took part in a student-focused panel discussion the previous day alongside David Bernstein, executive director of the Liberty and Law Center at George Mason University in Virginia. Both events were moderated by Kyaien Conner, director of Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems.
The forums, which discussed the history of affirmative action, its subsequent setbacks and modern-day shortcomings, were informed by the 2022 Supreme Court decision on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College. The court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in higher education admissions violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause.
Noting the Supreme Court case fallout is “certainly” something she cares about, “and I know that all of you care about this topic,” Conner said in her introduction, “I’m really happy that we have an opportunity today to speak with an expert on this topic. As Dr. Dana would say, this topic is her jam.”
Conner encouraged conversation about how the case may influence the Pitt community and “what we can do to continue to address issues around inequities and higher education in the absence of affirmative action.”
Providing background on how affirmative action got to where it is today, Thompson Dorsey said the policies have been the center of “highly contentious, divisive, volatile legal and political debate for over 50 years, pretty much since the they went into effect after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Those who are supporters of the policies think it’s necessary, in order to fulfill the original intent of affirmative action, of bringing about equitable and equal educational access and opportunities for students, mainly students of color, who have been — traditionally and historically and continue to be — disenfranchised.
Opponents of the policies say giving preferential treatment to students based on race is “completely unconstitutional and violative of the 14th Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she added, noting that affirmative action was used as early as 1935 as part of the National Labor Relations Act.
“Since the early ‘70s, we have had seven United States Supreme Court cases. Since the mid-1990s, we have had nine states (that) have banned affirmative action,” either through a ballot initiative, direct election or a governor’s executive order.
Narrowing the wealth gap
While there have been significant drops in applications and matriculation of underrepresented students of color in state-supported universities, Oklahoma is the only state that has not reported significant drops, Thompson Dorsey said, “but I’m thinking this is because it’s Oklahoma. They’ve never had a very large percentage of underrepresented students, particularly Black and brown students.”
Perhaps surprisingly, California was the first state to actually ban affirmative action in 1996, she said. “And they reported they had a 40 percent drop in applications after they banned it. And they have since struggled, particularly at their top elite (schools). You see institutions such as Berkeley and UCLA getting those numbers back to where they were prior to 1996. So they still have some race-based admission policies in place without really going against the ban. But it’s been a struggle.”
A major factor in the larger struggle is a significant wealth gap, Thompson Dorsey said, citing a Federal Reserve report from last fall indicating the typical white family had about six times as much wealth as a typical Black family, and five times more wealth as the typical Hispanic family.
While these ratios have narrowed since 2019 — with Latinx and Asian populations seeing notable progress — the gap is still there, she said, and would take major investment and focus to significantly narrow it.
“Researchers found it will take $7.5 trillion to bring that wealth gap to half between Blacks and whites, and $15 trillion to eliminate it completely,” she said.
Other studies have estimated what a fair reparations program would accomplish in California, one calculating that unpaid labor of enslaved people at 24 hours a day was worth $14.2 trillion in today’s dollars “and that doesn’t include psychological harm that, of course, enslaved people experienced,” she said. “And the Roosevelt Institute estimates that if freed slaves had received their (politically promised) ‘40 acres and a mule,’ that would now generate an economic return worth $16.5 trillion today.
“In other words, there would be no wealth gap.”
‘An all-out war’
Following Thompson Dorsey’s talk, Conner put forth a couple questions, one related to how universities are adapting their admissions policies after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College Supreme Court ruling.
“Since the ruling on affirmative action, maybe there are differences in how this is being handled,” Conner said. “And I think that leads into a larger question of ‘What should we be doing now as social workers? How can we continue to address inequities in higher education in the absence of being able to use race-conscious admissions policies?’ ”
Thompson Dorsey said universities are struggling to determine what they can do, ‘Like, we don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to deal with this.’ And I think it really comes down to the seriousness of these institutions, the administrators of these institutions: the deans, provosts, the chancellors, vice chancellors, those who make the policies.”
Citing conservative leaders, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who claim racism and indoctrination are in the past and “we don’t have any issues,” Thompson Dorsey counters, “No, there is, and the numbers don’t lie. All the stats say it. And I think university administrators need to accept that fact. And they need to understand that disparity still exists because the country was founded on white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.
“When administrators at higher ed institutions accept that there is an all-out war to maintain that power (and) the disparities are going to get worse and we need to be affirmative in our actions to make sure that doesn’t happen, that’s the only way they’re going to actually be able to come up with policies that will work, that are legal — and I will say there are ways to do this.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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