Time to clear the air of higher education

Lani Guinier still wants to turn your thinking on its head.

Almost 16 years after conservative critics distorted her provocative views about voting enough to get her – as her son put it – dis-appointed from a key Justice Department post, Guinier continues to prod, probe and probably perturb.

It’s not that she’s a troublemaker.

It’s that she’s seeking new answers to old problems.

Her current project is rethinking college admissions.

“Universities are more like a beauty school than the Marine Corps,” Guinier told an audience at the University of Texas at Arlington on Tuesday night.

Beauty schools, focusing on status, attempt to enroll as many gorgeous people as possible, she explained. Meanwhile, the corps takes all who meet a certain threshold and then transforms them into Marines.

In beauty-school fashion, colleges boast about the average SAT score of their entering freshmen but say less about what their graduates are doing 10 or 15 years later to justify the investment in their education.

She wants to move beyond just ranking and sorting applicants.

“I’m trying to get people to think of merit in the context of democratic values … the extent to which our institutions are fulfilling their democratic responsibilities,” said Guinier, who’s the only black female tenured professor at Harvard Law School.

Working with UT law professor Gerald Torres, Guinier has developed the metaphor of the miner’s canary to build an argument for re-examining traditional approaches toward improving minority students’ college success.

Miners would use a canary to warn them of dangerous air underground; if the bird couldn’t breathe, the miners knew to get out.

In the higher-ed setting, minority students who have traditionally been left out are more vulnerable and provide a warning about institutional weaknesses.

“The mistake we tend to make,” she said, “is that when we see the canary gasping for breath … we decide that the solution is to fix the canary.”

But while a pint-size respirator might allow the bird to breathe, she said, it won’t improve the air in the mine. Likewise, solutions like affirmative action might bring racial and ethnic minority students into college, but they don’t by themselves make improvements that will help students thrive – not just minorities but all students.

Guinier said she wants us to “rethink the way we’re doing business in the mine,” to not only enable the canary to survive but also “make sure the miners are breathing fresher, cleaner, less toxic air.”

As an example of fresh thinking, she pointed to Uri Treisman, who wondered why his black students at the University of California at Berkeley didn’t do as well at calculus as his Chinese-American students. Treisman (who’s now at the University of Texas) discovered that the Chinese-Americans studied together, talked calculus over meals and collaborated on problem-solving, while the blacks tended to slog through the material alone.

Treisman organized study sessions for the black students and recruited mentors. And with those resources, their grades improved.

Guinier also talked about innovations by the Posse Foundation, which arranges for multicultural groups of 10 students from six major cities to attend a university together so they can provide the kinds of support systems that help students continue in college through graduation.

In a brief interview after the speech, Guinier elaborated, “I’m not saying we do away with merit.” Instead, she wants us to “begin to hold institutions accountable for their merit … the extent to which they’re fulfilling their democratic obligation.”

Her approach is thought-provoking, nontraditional and complex, very much like the voting-rights perspectives that made her famous – and infamous – in the 1990s.

Guinier was a voting-rights specialist at the University of Pennsylvania law school in 1993 when President Bill Clinton nominated her to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

But conservative activists caricatured her as a “quota queen” based on quick clips from nuanced law journal writings that weren’t as radical as her opponents portrayed. Clinton withdrew the nomination before Guinier had a chance to defend her views to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In answer to a question from the audience, Guinier said that one of her mentors, George Mason University history professor Roger Wilkins, told her after the experience, “Americans don’t like victims, so you have to see yourself as a woman with a cause, not a grievance.”

So she’s continued to ask the next question, the unconventional question, even the question that people might not care to hear.

“It’s important to articulate problems in a way that other people can identify with,” she said, so that “people are motivated to act, not just feel sorry.”