Engaging Diversity: More Important Than Ever

Three key challenges compel the United States to deepen its engagement with diversity in higher education. One, the demographic challenge: The United States will be a majority-minority country sometime around 2045. Two, the democracy challenge: All members of society must be offered a place at the table of community and political discourse. Third, the dispersion challenge: In what Fareed Zakaria calls “the rise of the rest,” many other nations are growing economically and demanding to share leadership and power in the world. Higher education is the primary institution for teaching the world’s historical and cultural knowledge, and for assuring that future U.S. leaders are equipped to negotiate, collaborate and dialogue across differences. 

In this Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity lecture, Patricia Gurin, the Nancy Cantor Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, will delineate the importance of engaging diversity so that higher education produces leaders who can address these demographic, democracy, and dispersion challenges. Gurin will present social science evidence on the educational benefit of diversity that has played a role in legal challenges to affirmative action. She will draw especially from a large-scale, multi-university experimental study of intergroup dialogue first launched in the 1990s at the University of Michigan.

This event is co-sponsored by SCOPE.