Enhancing Campus Climates for Diversity

Research has found that a campus' climate negatively affects students of color. There was a longitudinal study of Latino students, for instance, that "perceptions of racial tension in the first year had a negative effect on academic and psychological adjustment" in the rest of their college career.
With such repercussions, campus climate is an important component of study when searching for solutions to the lack of informal interactions of diversity.

Campus climate is made up of internal and external factors. The internal factors stem from an institution's history of discrimination, or lack thereof against people of color, its structural diversity, and its psychological and behavioral climate. Psychological climates are the attitudes students hold for other races while behavioral climate is the actual intergroup friendships. Since people are found to be most affected by their friends, the psychological climate is most affected by the fact that most people do not have cross-group friends. The external factors are involved with governmental involvement, such as legal decisions on segregation and affirmative action, and the sociohistoric influences, such as current events that bring issues of race and ethnicity to the forefront.

Some solutions or methods to alleviate the issues campus climate perpetuates are to create and execute culturally educational programs that address stereotypes and myths about other sub-groups, to have clear policies set in place to manage racial issues when they arise, to regularly monitor the climate in an effort to maintain a good campus climate, to ensure culture organizations are adequately funded and staffed, to find staff that would professionally support students of color, to oblige students to make peer groups with people of differences in class, and to raise faculty's awareness of their racial biases and how this affects students. Other possible solutions or methods of alleviation include clearly expressing the expectation, based on the university's high value of diversity, that students engage with people different from them along with providing students with on-going safe environments to do so where all participants are regarded as equal and the aura is one of cooperation rather than competition. Furthermore, professors could implement cooperative learning activities to encourage cross-group friendships and consider how to reduce competition in the classroom. Finally, the university can implement more multicultural programs and activities and enlist the support of campus leaders to emphasize the importance of such programs and activities.

When it comes to culture clubs, studies have shown that cultural organizations help people feel more comfortable with their identity and that a possible result of this comfort is an increased penchant for cross-cultural activities. Studies showed that students who were members of culture clubs were more likely to attend diversity workshops and report more diverse informal interactions.

College Diversity - Meta-Analysis

A couple of the benefits of diversity are the reduction of prejudice and the improvement of cognition. There are two types of cognition: cognitive skills and cognitive tendencies. Cognitive skills are a students' information processing, thinking, and reasoning skills such as critical-thinking and problem-solving. Cognitive tendencies involve a students' penchant for certain thinking patterns such as effortful thinking or attributional complexity, that is, the understanding that human behavior is influenced by complex factors. Because it is likely that cognitive tendencies are the easier shaped of the two types of cognition diversity experiences may be more influential on cognitive tendencies than on cognitive skills.

There are studies on diversity that have differing results on the relationship but this may be due to the "type of diversity experience measured, type of cognitive outcome, and study design characteristics." Informal interactional diversity, the type of diversity I am hoping to see more of at universities, includes "both the frequency and the quality of interactions with diverse peers that occur outside of class." Although structural diversity is needed for interactional diversity to be possible, merely having a university with a lot of diverse people is not enough to achieve the benefits of diverse interactions. When it comes down to it, "enlightenment", that is, "classroom diversity" is also not enough to achieve the benefits of diverse interactions.

Despite the various confounding variables in studies of diversity, at the end of the day, the evidence from the meta-analysis in this article shows a positive relationship between experiences of diversity and cognitive development. Albeit, the magnitude of this relationship could be considered "small" to some, but, when put into context, this effect can be quite meaningful when one accounts for the fact that measurements of such abstract concepts as cognitive tendencies can be full of measurement error as well as the fact that a "small" effect's smallness depends on what academic field one is in.

Going forward, research needs to focus more on how universities can maximize the benefits of diversity, not whether one exists in the first place. For instance, Bowman (2009) found that cognitive benefits from diversity coursework are often only in White students and students from low- and middle-income families. One way universities can help promote informal interactional diversity is by having a graduation requirement that all students enroll in one diversity course. This requirement would be especially important for students in natural sciences and engineering since these students are less liekly to be engaged with diversity and enroll in diversity classes. Interestingly enough, if students enroll in more than one diversity course, there is no difference seen in benefits versus a student enrolling in one diversity course.

Diversity's Impact - Studies on Diversity in College Classes

The diversity of students has greatly increased since the early 1960s, so much so that, as of 2000, there is one minority for every four non-minority persons. This is possible in part due to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Brown Vs. Board, and affirmative action practices. The value of diversity, specifically "the belief that knowledge or understanding flourishes best in a climate of vigorous debate" has been around since Socrates' time, and it continues to be important to this day.

One of the reasons diversity is vital is due to the critical analysis that occurs in diverse groups in which the "common-sense" knowledge is often not so common, that is, not everyone has the same experiences, perceptions, and knowledge. In today's world of inter dependability and globalization, it is increasingly important that future leaders are able to effectively work in environments of difference. College is a crucial point in people's lives where these said leaders can be exposed to diversity and practice accepting and working with the strengths and weaknesses that come with collaborating with these diverse people.

According to Gurin, there are three types of diversity: structural, classroom, and informal interactional. All of which are required to reap the benefits of diversity.  The type of diversity I will be focusing on is interactional, that is "the extent to which the campus provides opportunities for informal interaction across diverse groups." Benefits of classroom and informal interaction include "increased active thinking, academic engagement, motivation, and academic and intellectual skills [in addition to] greater involvement in citizenship activities, greater appreciation for differences as compatible with societal unity and greater cross-racial interaction." Diversity was found in later studies to be so significant as to influence students for as long as nine years after starting college.

Often universities emphasize structural diversity via practices such as affirmative action but this is as far as the "diversity" that colleges tout goes. It is a superficial type of diversity and I am interested in how to move past this surface diversity into the more beneficial types of diversity, more specifically, informal interactional diversity.