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1. Defined: Equity and Social Movements

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3. It Doesn’t Have to Be Mysterious: A Case for Systems Theory in Higher Education

Trapdoors: Equity & Higher Education

Marc Dones

The Opportunity Trap

The root of this confusion seems easy enough to trace. In a country that prides itself on the idea of “equal opportunity,” the easiest way to approach the concept of equity is from the premise that the creation of equal opportunity requires an acknowledgment that opportunity has not historically been evenly distributed. Therefore, some individuals/communities require additional supports to access the same opportunities as individuals/communities that belong to historically privileged groups (e.g., cis, white, male). This premise is the orbital frame that’s given rise to the numerous versions of the same cartoon (see Figure 1) depicting individuals (typically of different height) all attempting to access the same thing (a baseball game, an item from a shelf, etc.) (Froehle, 2018). The visual thesis here is that in order for outcomes to be the same, investments will necessarily have to be different. It is a relatively simple equation where the amount of investment provided is equal to the evidenced need. In a world that has traditionally been modeled on the premise of scarcity and the concept of equal shares, this formulation is actually revolutionary; it should not be downplayed as anything less. However, it's important to note that even here, there's a core confusion that isn’t really interrogated. Namely, is access (a better way to formulate the question of opportunity) to a thing (the baseball game) the same as experiencing a positive outcome from that access, and should we even be concerned with this question?

To both questions, I think the answer is yes. Let’s use a better set of examples.

Doorways and Hallways

Frankly, no one focuses on a more vexing question: what exactly are you giving people access to? The world writ large has not suddenly become friendlier to people with disabilities. The designated seats are still taken, public transit remains barely usable, and accessing healthcare is still a fight. To be clear, the argument here is not against curb cuts; rather, we are advocating for a notion of equity that is expansive enough to include reconfiguring the world beyond just the point of entry. Functionally speaking, this would require us to approach the narrative from a non-dominant perspective. That is to say, when we go beyond access, we have to ask if the thing we are ‘graciously’ allowing entry to is even any good. Suddenly, a much deeper set of questions about our societal value system (and the nature of that value) appear that we must answer. Put simply: why bother inviting anyone over if the house is a mess?

To go beyond the doorway would require us to more fully embrace a serious consideration of what produces the outcomes that we want to see. What happens when someone steps beyond the doorway? Does it matter if they take up residence and thrive? Does it matter if they trip over a misplaced boot and bash their head open in the mudroom? Probably. The problem with outcomes is that they're quite complicated. Outcomes—unlike outputs— do not necessarily have a linear pathway into being. Rather, they are the result of many different factors acting in concert over time, with varying (and often inconsistent) strengths. For this reason, outcomes are better conceptualized in a behavioral sense, whereas outputs are more discrete (and thusly more measurable).

Pathways, Trajectories, and Launch Codes

In truth, any discussion of outcomes requires us to engage far beyond the point of entry and to consider the pathways of the individuals and communities that make it to and then through the doorway. We might consider the metaphor of a rocket. If we’re all attempting to get somewhere (into a good college, hired for a good job, to the Moon, to Mars), it makes sense to consider not just the launchpad, not just the building of the rocket itself but also the path of that rocket—the trajectory. Returning to our popular cartoon example, we might ask whether the people who are now able to see the game are inspired to learn to play. If so, are there teams for them to join, others for them to learn to play with, and a league for them to become a part of? Further, how good is their equipment? Could their parents, teachers, and grandparents come to see them when they played? And of course, attached to all of these potential answers are the whys-and-why-nots. If we make equity fully inclusive of outcomes, then one thing is immediately clear: equity is a story.

It's here I'd like to turn to the question of higher education—which is indeed a question. Higher education, as a field, has been concerned with the question of equity for quite some time (Bhopal, 2017). However, the vast majority of academic, programmatic, and legal activity has prioritized the question of access (Brown, 2002).

Much has been made of this doorway and the journey to it, particularly for historically marginalized communities. It is, in fact, by many accounts the original site of the “culture wars” in the United States. It’s been the subject of whole volumes of legislation and jurisprudence, innumerable studies, and a truly stunning amount of social and political energy. While fully tracing the contours of its development is well beyond the scope of anything I intend to do here, suffice it to say that, as a policy space, almost nothing is as fraught, convoluted, or conflicted as education (Raines, 2006; Ellis and Geller, 2016; Lin, 2007).

This is, in fact, precisely because education has been positioned as the doorway to the good life. Literally, it is the thing one must pass through in order to have their skills and ambitions validated and approved for takeoff. In this way education functions as the launch codes for our rockets—our permission to takeoff. As such, getting access to that doorway has (justifiably) been the focus of generations of marginalized populations. But if that's the case, if the purpose of education is to acquire the launch codes to your rocket, then surely no better case could be made for expanding the notion of equity. After all, launching a rocket is so much more than simply firing up the boosters. Again, trajectory matters. You have to be able to tell the story of where you're trying to go—and if you got there.

Aims & Ends

So, where are we trying to go? What are we aiming for, and to what end? What's the underlying architecture of ‘the good life’? Considerable work has been done on the structure of the American Dream (Stout and Le, 2012), and I won't belabor that here. Instead, I want to focus on the architecture of the hallway leading to that dream. On this topic, there has also been a great deal of writing (Glater, 2016; Adwere-Boamah, 2015; Gilbert and Heller, 2013). How the hallway curves, ascends, descends…these are the elements that affect trajectory. But we also have to consider the destination. Where are we headed? What trajectory is most effective is dependent on destination. For the purposes of this analysis, I'd like to condense the applicable structures down to three main goals:

• economic mobility,

• social capital, and

• educational achievement.

If we take these to be the three principal goals of our higher education system, then seeking an understanding of how system structures inform one’s ability to seek and attain these goals makes a great deal of sense. I want to be careful to note that the ordering of these goals is not arbitrary, rather they are listed in order of importance. For example, this ordering explains why institutions like Harvard have a mandatory dorm residence requirement for all incoming students (Harvard College Dean of Student Life, 2019). In such a policy, there is an embedded understanding of the value of attending Harvard, not simply being about attaining a degree from Harvard. Rather there is also an articulated value in becoming socialized by Harvard. In fact, Harvard places such a premium on this that they will not allow incoming students (whether traditional first-years or older transfer students) to live off-campus.

Economic Mobility

If economic mobility is the primary goal of the higher education system, then it would stand that there be a fair amount of obsessing over this as a primary outcome of interacting (successfully) with the system. And indeed, there is. A relatively cursory review of the marketing materials for both the for- and non-profit institutions demonstrates a clear focus on advertising to prospective students, and that matriculation is tantamount to economic success (Conick, 2016; Ramachandran, 2010). However, if we look at the mobility of historically marginalized people who attend HEIs, that doesn't appear to be the case. In fact, these individuals are more likely to graduate debt-burdened (often causing long-term credit issues) (Elliott and Friedline, 2013). Historically marginalized communities are also less likely to earn wages commensurate with their degree (Franklin, 2000). In fact, Black women, as a demographic, hold more graduate degrees than any other group and continue to trail in earnings across every field (Raine, 2010). A combination of high levels of debt, low wages, and bad credit are, in fact, a recipe for economic stagnation, not mobility. On this primary measure of success, we would not find this to be a positive evaluation.

Social Capital

This formulation, however, should not be seen as downplaying instances of actual violence. Recently, sitting at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression, the New York Times ran a piece on a person who accused, now, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh of sexual assault that highlighted—among other things— that the capacity to respond to sexual assault may be undermined by a sense that the price of entry for historically marginalized groups into these privileged spaces may, in fact, be (literal) violence (Saul, Pogrebin, Mcintire, and Protess, 2018). Diane Gusa notes in her excellent analysis of what she calls “White Institutional Presence” (WIP) most Black students seem to find it difficult to go a week without experiencing a racist interaction at HEIs (Gusa, 2010). Illustrating this point further, D’Augelli and Hershberger asked Black students to estimate the general frequency with which they encountered verbal prejudice and indicate if they had ever experienced blatant forms of prejudice (threats, violence, or property damage) (1993). They found that 89 percent of their participants reported having heard disparaging comments about Black people “occasionally” to “frequently.” In addition, they found that 59 percent of students reported being verbally insulted personally and that 36 percent reported experiencing incidents involving threats or violence while at college.

In a more recent study (Swim, Hyers, Cohen, Fitzgerald, and Bylsma, 2003), Black participants (n = 51) at a university kept a daily journal for two weeks. The participants reported an average of one race-related event every other week and that all perpetrators except for one were White. The two most common events were stares (36%) and verbal expressions (24%) that included racial slurs, insensitive comments, and racial stereotyping.

The combination of these bursts of violence and an overall feeling that they don’t belong (or more specifically aren't welcome) leads many persons of color (POC) students to report less expansive social networks than their dominant culture counterparts.

So, then this, too, is not exactly a goal with a success story.

Educational Achievement

This is, by and large, a numbers game. The current higher education system primarily evaluates itself on numeric measures of student retention and degree completion. And, we don't have to dig deep to find that, here too, historically marginalized communities do not have particularly good outcomes (Carpenter and Ramirez, 2012; Garibaldi, 2013; Guinier, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2013; Orfield, Marin, and Horn, 2005; Reid, 2013; Stewart, 2013; Williams, 2011).

For instance, even before students access higher education, by the 12th grade only 16% of Black students as compared to 47%white students demonstrated proficiency in reading, and 62% of Black students as compared to 25%white students had a 'below basic' in mathematics proficiency (Pitre, 2014). Further, in New York and Chicago public schools, enrolling nearly 10% of the nation’s Black male students alone, within four years of high school attendance, they fail to graduate more than 70% of those students (Harper, 2008).

When looking at achievement in the context of higher education, the American Council on Education found that only 44% of Black students as compared to 54%white students, 54% of Native American students, and 61% of Asian American (D'Augelli and Hershberger, 1993, p. 67) graduate after six years.

The Hallway Revisited

If we need to think about equity as a hallway and not a doorway, then we'll turn to look for more complex representations of how outcomes are produced. It may help to consider a slightly more complicated visual (Figure 2). While this is not the full cartoon, here we see a much more articulated understanding of what experiences people transit as they simply seek to approach the doorway. And this is really the last missing ingredient from a clear architecture of what makes up equity—that is to say we're still in need of time. That is to say, if equity is a story, then stories progress—they are animated by the passage of time. Linking it all together what I would propose is that equity is composed of five primary components:

1. History

2. Outcome

3. Opportunity (the doorway)

4. Experience (the hallway)

5. Outcome

To think this through, we can repurpose a commonly used design-thinking visual on divergent/convergent thinking that illustrates the relationships between them (Figure 3).

In this example, the initial commonality is history. This should not be mistaken as presupposing that two individuals have the same relationship to history—only that the fundamental nature of that history (e.g., what did or did not happen) is, in fact, shared because of the nature of time. However, that historical starting point necessarily births a multiplicity of pathways that could lead to the next moment of convergence: the doorway. Our obsession with ensuring that all paths can approach the doorway has made it impossible to see that the doorway is itself the next point of divergence. It is, in fact, the experience of the hallway beyond that doorway that will most accurately predict outcomes—the final (and most important) component. Our focus has been on these moments of convergence because they are substantially easier to document. They can (largely) be reduced to questions of numbers without having to consider two extremely difficult variables: time and subjective experience.

This is, functionally, an extension of Derrick Bell's famous convergence dilemma (Bell, 1980; Bell, Delgado, and Stefancic, 2005). Bell advanced the notion that whites will only accommodate the needs and interests of Blacks when it is in the interest of middle- and upper-class whites (interest convergence). Bell correctly identified that an underlying driver of the Brown v. Board of Education case was a primary example of these convergent interests (Bell, 1980; Gahagan, and Brophy, 2014), but that the implementation of the decision represented a divergence (particularly for Black communities in Boston and Atlanta) that ends in policy that is substantively different than what some of the plaintiffs thought they'd won (Crenshaw, 2013). What I posit here is that the convergence dilemma doesn't simply act to differentiate the interests of dominant vs. non-dominant communities; it also serves to create confusion in dominant communities about whether or not a separation of interests even exists.

Convergence confusion would explain why so much of the White-centered conversation mistakes the doorway for being the primary point of equity-based work. If we enter the house shoulder-to-shoulder, then why wouldn't we be experiencing the same thing? These moments of convergence (in name only) can then be (re)deployed to assert the existence of an equitable system architecture without having to adequately address the radically different experiences before and after these brief points of ostensible sameness. In this moment, we would be wise to learn lessons that have already been taught elsewhere. "Biology warns us against over-hasty acceptance...The fact that two organs are analogous need not mean there is an evolutionary link between them" (Deleuze, 1999; emphasis in the original). Nature can make an eye in a thousand ways; however, everything that comes to meet our gaze should not be taken at face value.

To accurately understand the nature of the hallway, we would need drastically different data sets and fundamental shifts in what we understand as being salient with regard to the measurement of success in higher education. This change requires a radical rethinking of what the goals of the system are. In reviewing the literature on HBCUs and HEIs, it's readily apparent that the function of higher education for historically marginalized populations is not an agreed-upon thing. If the purpose is truly economic mobility and accompanied visions of social inclusion, then it would be (relatively) simple to extend measurements of integration and prosocial behavior for matriculating students. However, while this may be valuable, it skirts an underlying question that ought to be more aggressively centered in the discourse: What do historically marginalized communities want?

Missing Voices and Missing the Point

All of this conversation around the needs of historically marginalized communities (particularly Black and Latinx communities) is painfully thin on the voices of the communities themselves. There has been a great deal of work to evaluate how Black and Latinx students fair against traditional (white dominant) goals. However, there has been very little work to establish what goals these communities might have for themselves with respect to the purpose of higher education (or any education for that matter).

This is not to suggest that historically marginalized communities may not share some of the goals articulated by the majority system, but it is to say that there are likely other, and equally important, goals that are not captured. Returning again to Bell's documentation of the convergence dilemma, some Black people opposed desegregatory bussing policy even though they still wanted equal access to educational resources due to the increased burdens it primarily placed upon the Black community (Woodward, 2010). What they would have designed and built with those resources we may never know from the dominant discourse. However, we can be clear that they were deeply opposed to the idea that white-majority schools possessed any inherent “better-ness” that would necessarily benefit non-White children who attended (Ibid.).

Conclusion

In order to move the conversation forward, I suggest three explicit research aims for scholars seeking to expand the scope of equity in higher education:

• Clearly define the white-dominant educational goals (and naming them as such),

• the experiences of historically marginalized communities at HEIs; and

• The goals of historically marginalized communities who are seeking higher education.

Taken together, these objectives could unlock the necessary data to appropriately structure a conversation about equity in higher education that finally steps over the threshold of the doorway by considering the space beyond.

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