Here's part three of my ongoing serial blog on racism at Iowa State's school of journalism. Scroll down to the entries for Sunday and Friday to get background on faculty resignations and classroom tensions arising from the school's racially fraught atmosphere.

I want to begin this blog with an hypothesis: That at Iowa State, the issue is not racism, but radically different generational concepts of what higher education and scholarly excellence are about. It's worth noting that the racial balkanization at the journalism school divides sharply along generational lines. It's worth noting, too, that these generational lines are in turn hierarchical professional lines: the older professors are not only mostly white, they are also tenured; it is untenured minority faculty who are angry enough with them to want to leave. When the old guard objects to the way its department is pursuing diversity, it is simply stupid to assume that the sole motivation is festering, unenlightened white privilege. The journalism school's senior faculty are seasoned professionals, people who have, for better or worse, dedicated their lives to academe. At the very least, they deserve to be heard, however difficult it may be to acknowledge and address the issues they raise. This blog is an attempt to outline those issues as I see them.

Iowa State's provost has vociferously denied that there is any problem at the journalism school other than that of some singularly offensive faculty who have made some singularly offensive remarks. Nonetheless, his comments on the matter unintentionally express the very problem he is working so hard to deny. On the one hand, he observes that "Individuals who make the claim that they are being discriminated against to favor minorities I think simply do not understand the constraints that are put in a minority's way." On the other hand, he explains that "We cannot be competitive if we don't offer salaries and perquisites that other universities are offering, and we're happy to offer them." The provost's comments unwittingly reveal how closely bound hypocritical pieties and manipulative pragmatics are in the logic of affirmative action as Iowa State practices it; together they ensure that the mercenary and ethically dubious practice of buying minority faculty, of bidding for the honor of the ethnic hire, cannot be challenged, or even properly named. As the provost makes abundantly clear, to do so is to show an ignorance so embedded in the blindnesses of white privilege that it is virtually indistinguishable from racism.

Without meaning to, the provost has acknowledged the unspeakable double standard the journalism senior faculty have been trying unsuccessfully to bring to light: that the priority is neither parity nor a recruitment strategy that meshes with the particular culture and quality of Iowa State's journalism faculty, but doing well in the bidding war that frequently surrounds young scholars of color. Without meaning to, too, the provost here confesses to an otherwise unspeakable fact: that one of the "constraints that are put in a minority's way" is the onerous task of deciding among multiple job offers, of playing prospective employers off against one another in order to jack up one's starting salary. We should all be under such constraints.

The real constraint here, however, is the one facing Iowa State schools as they attempt to meet the state Board of Regents' pressure to achieve the ever-elusive, all-important "diversity." The Regents want 8.5% minority enrollment--a tall order in whitebread Iowa. ISU is currently at 7%, and has recently begun bolstering its minority recruitment program by making special efforts to attract minority faculty. Last year, almost 14% of ISU's 1757 faculty were minorities; in 1995, only 9% were. As rapidly as the numbers have changed, however, the push for faculty diversity has been both expensive and disappointing. Just about two years ago, the university launched a $5.8 million plan for recruiting minority faculty (among other things, the plan included a provision for finding jobs for the spouses of minority hires). But even so, the university has had a hard time competing with other schools for top candidates for the simple reason the Iowa State is, well, in Iowa. As one professor put it, "I think if you have a situation in a job market where you don't have very many of the kinds of people you want to attract and you want to bring them to a place where most of them aren't from, you have to offer them something to encourage them." Exhorbitant salaries and perks are thus being offered to minority job candidates in the hope that money and privilege will mitigate the monocultural horror of having to live in homogenous Ames.

The results: distorted, distracted hiring practices in which a job candidate's race becomes her most important professional qualification; and a race-based class system in which minority faculty are so much more valuable than white faculty that they begin their careers making substantially more money than their experienced, established senior colleagues are making after many years of proven service. I would imagine that a related result would be differential tenuring patterns for white and minority faculty: a university that is investing so much money in minority recruitment and retention is not going to want to fire its recruits.

The issues I outline above are issues affecting just about every university in the country. The nation's most elite schools spend a lot of money competing for minority faculty, too. They pay them disproportionately well, too. They tenure them more readily, too. And they breed resentment for doing so, too. But there is a crucial difference between the social engineering that goes on at, say, a Columbia or a Berkeley, and an Iowa State, and that is a difference in degree. The machinations involved in attracting and keeping minority faculty at top schools are nothing compared to those involved in trying to get those faculty to take second-tier jobs at landlocked schools situated smack in the middle of the Bible belt. And the payoff for those machinations will inevitably be much higher for those schools that can offer their candidates not only a pretty salary, but location and prestige. Those are the schools that are going to get the top candidates. The Iowa States of the world are going to end up jostling for the job candidates that are left after the Ivy League and the schools on the coasts take their pick.

Iowa State administrators admit as much when they acknowledge that it is a challenge to get any minority job candidate to come to Ames. What they do not say--and what they do not want anyone to ask--is whether, in paying through the nose for minority faculty, they get their money's worth. My guess is that the top minority job candidates in the field are going to Harvard, and Columbia, and UCLA, and Berkeley, and NYU, and Duke, and so on. My guess is that the minorities who do wind up on the faculty at Iowa State are not "top tier" scholars--if they were, they would be getting better offers from better schools. And my guess is that a lot of what is behind the frustration of the supposedly racist journalism faculty is just that: the painful realization that their unit is being fragmented--and oddly segregated--by an absurdly misguided race to produce an ideal demographic. Even if the junior hires are marvelously talented scholars at the absolute top of their field, the means by which they are being hired are wildly divisive and for that reason alone highly questionable.

Academics know that they cannot question, or even frankly discuss, affirmative action without risking being accused of racism. It's crucial to recognize that when they do question affirmative action, it isn't, in most cases, because they are "racially insensitive," but because they are concerned about the quality, credibility, and future of higher education--concerned enough to open themselves to an incredibly damning accusation. At Iowa State, there are some journalism professors who have paid that price, voicing concerns that, in the provost's telling words, "could be construed as racist" in order to call the administration on its own discriminatory practices. There is courage there, and quite possibly some naivete. But I don't see any bigotry.

As for the outraged faculty who are leaving, that seems to me to be the combined result of their own and their university's unreasonable expectations. The minority junior faculty who were receiving the high salaries and special perks apparently expected that no one would question the fairness of their privileged position, not even those whom their position personally affronts. The university that doled out the high salaries and special perks expected, too, that white faculty would put their white guilt ahead of their sense of fair play, that they would happily look aside while preferential treatment of minority faculty both glorified genetics over ability and demeaned the very idea of intellectual seriousness and professional accomplishment. My point--and I think this is also the point of the senior faculty at Iowa State--is that everyone, minorities included, is belittled when the pursuit of instantaneous diversity becomes an end in itself, when it is so important that it must be achieved immediately, at any--and all--costs.