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All Stick, No Carrot

For this blog post, I want to take an opportunity to share some interesting research that I have been reading, and apply it to my own research within the UW-Eau Claire scope.


In an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Why Diversity Initiatives Fail,” author Pamela Newkirk delves into the costly and ineffective diversity initiatives that continue to fail. Newkirk interviews many professors from incredibly driven institutions, from Yale to Harvard, in attempt to navigate what exactly causes EDI initiatives to fail within institutions.


“Strategies for controlling bias — which drive most diversity efforts — have failed spectacularly,” Harvard’s Frank Dobbin and Tel Aviv University’s Alexandra Kalev concluded in their study Why Diversity Programs Fail,” published in Harvard Business Review in 2016. Dobbin and Kalev, both sociologists, examined three decades of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewed hundreds of managers and executives. The study took an especially dim view of mandatory training, which was found to trigger a backlash against those it was intended to help.


Many professors target the issue as the fact that professors, staff, and students do not want to take the time to delve into what it means to be inclusive and intersectional, and institutions only need to look inclusive to be successful. “They want drive-by diversity,” Mehri says. “If diversity and inclusion is buried in the organizational structure, it’s not going to have a lot of power. When you keep choosing the options on the menu that don’t create change, you’re purposely not creating change. It’s part of the intentional discrimination.”


Another professor refers to EDI initiatives as “a matter of intention.” He continues to say that left to its own devices, it just won’t happen. Dental-school professor Dennis Mitchell bluntly refers to EDI as “all stick, no carrot.” Among the other challenges for university presidents at institutions like Yale are alumni, who are majorly white and male and often less inclined to champion diversity. “Sometimes you have to take a hit from the press and the alumni,” Richard Bribiescas said. “You have to admit you have a problem, that the school has a problem.” He cited as a model the former Harvard president Drew Faust, who conceded the university’s racial challenges. I really want my work to incite a revelation that UW-Eau Claire may need to take a hit and admit that this is all stick, no carrot when it comes to the QTPOC and queer students on this campus.


Adding this to my prior research focusing on Sara Ahmed’s work, “Institutionalizing Diversity,” my focus on the ways that institutions fail queer and QTPOC students has begun to take shape in ways that I couldn’t have imagined last month. During my collaboration with Dr. Rylander, we have begun to pinpoint exactly where my research will go as soon as we begin interviewing students. For now, the focus is on how to ask the right questions in order to get intriguing and telling responses from students, which is exactly who we need to hear from.


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