College Accreditation Panel Adopts Plan on Diversity

Brushing aside objections from prestigious California universities, the association responsible for accreditation Wednesday adopted a controversial diversity statement that encourages institutions of higher education to promote multiculturalism on campus.

Meeting in San Francisco, 15 commissioners of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges unanimously approved a “statement on diversity” that requires four-year colleges and for-profit trade schools in California, Hawaii and Guam to examine their progress on multiculturalism during accreditation reviews.

The 20-page statement has drawn the ire of Stanford University President Gerhard Casper, USC President Steven B. Sample and a number of private college presidents who argue that the new diversity guidelines are too vague and an intrusion on academic freedom.

The college presidents contend that the statement could allow outsiders to dictate how schools should teach students about racial harmony and cultural sensitivity. They also said it portends a dramatic turn in the field of college accreditation, where accrediting agencies have concerned themselves with minimal standards.

But Donald R. Gerth, president of Cal State Sacramento, who chaired the meeting Wednesday, said commissioners adopted the diversity statement because “there is widespread support for this among the leadership of the colleges and universities in this region.”

Gerth said the statement is “not a new standard,” but a clarification of a 1988 diversity guideline that was already in the accreditation handbook. The 1988 policy said that appreciation of diversity should be an “outcome of undergraduate education,” and the new statement suggests ways this can be accomplished--including extending college curricula beyond traditional Western values.

Gerth said the statement was intended to give “direction or purpose” to schools looking at their efforts to promote multiculturalism and fears that it would be used as a hard-and-fast standard were “speculative.”

“We have absolutely no intention as a commission for these various ghosts to appear,” he said.

The accreditation controversy has been one of the most hotly debated recent subjects in academia, and by the time the statement came to a vote Wednesday it had gone through several revisions.

In all, 92 institutions with 433,000 full-time students went on record as supporting the new statement, while 14 schools with slightly fewer than 59,000 students--among them Pepperdine and smaller religious institutions such as Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula--were in opposition. Five schools wrote to the association but took no position.

During almost two hours of discussion Wednesday, 19 speakers testified about the statement. Representatives from Stanford and Thomas Aquinas continued to voice opposition, while speakers from the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, the state’s Postsecondary Education Commission and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles urged commissioners to adopt the measure, said Gerth and other association employees.

“I think we took seriously everything that was said,” Gerth said. “The members of the commission on the whole feel that what we are doing is sensible and reasonable. We listened to the comments and we proceeded.”

Gerth said the statement will be included in the criteria used to evaluate schools in the accreditation process.

A Stanford spokesman late Wednesday said Casper, one of the top academics opposed to the statement, would have no comment.