“… So what do students really think about whether universities should make diversity a priority when recruiting students and faculty? Are campuses polarized into pro- and anti-diversity camps? These are important questions, but uncovering what students really think about hot-button issues is not simple.” …
It seems like the article is claiming some things that aren’t supported by their evidence.
This would suggest not that they support diversity, but that they want the best candidate for the position. This view is not anti-diversity or pro-diversity, it’s apathetic towards diversity. I might be reading too much into this line, but that seems to be a fairly meritocratic stance with some weight given to extenuating circumstances, such as coming from a low-income neighborhood or being a first-generation college student.
However, earlier in the article, there’s a huge gap between the opinion’s on diversity recruitment based on racial/ethnic divisions. The article plainly states that blacks prefer non-white candidates by 51 points over a comparable white candidate. Consider that the average preference for all groups was only 12 points for a black candidate and 9 points for a Native American or Latino candidate, and this paints a very different picture in my opinion.
I find the article’s use of certain terms also quite strange. I’m not really hip with the PC lingo, but on my campus it’s much more common to refer to non-whites as people of color. Hispanic is also viewed as an ambiguous (and slightly racist) term in my friend group, and African American tends to be viewed as excluding people who are black but not of African descent or African and not American.
The article doesn’t make it very clear, but the actual results are published and a link is provided in the article. The most interesting/surprising result (in my opinion) is that the single component with the largest marginal effect on the person’s desirability is not research quality, race, gender, degree, or what institution they attended. Actually, it’s the quality of the professor as a teacher. Being a good teacher has a larger marginal effect than any of the other components, and being an excellent teacher has almost double the effect of any other quality.
Other results that aren’t put in the article but are interesting nonetheless would be how the degree effects desirability. The most desirable PhDs are biology and computer science in the eyes of the students, with engineering, neuroscience, and environmental studies having a negative impact on an applicant’s desirability. The humanities degrees and social science degree options all had negative impacts on a candidates desirability, which I find a bit surprising (by far the most negatively viewed degree was African and African-American Studies).
The article should’ve shown the overall chart on how each individual characteristic affects marginal desirability. I think it’s an incomplete and misleading article without it.
Probably should be “What do Dartmouth students really think about diversity? We asked.” Dartmouth students may not be especially representative of college students overall in various ways.