Public Values Ethnic Diversity, Survey Finds

Americans believe strongly in the value of ethnic diversity in the United States, but feel the nation is becoming more divided along racial lines than less, a new study released Tuesday shows.

The study conducted by DYG Inc., a New York polling firm, for the Ford Foundation avoids any mention of affirmative action, a hot-button term that tends to draw strong negative reactions. Instead, researchers asked voters to disclose their feelings concerning the broader and less sensitive topic of diversity on college campuses.

Seventy-one percent of respondents say, for example, that college students should learn more about other ethnic groups as a way of bringing the nation closer together. However, three in five questioned say they believe that the nation is growing apart rather than together.

Among selected poll findings:

* 91% agreed that “our society is multicultural and the more we know about each other, the better we get along.”

* 75% said a diverse student body on campus has a positive effect on the education of students, compared with 18% who said it has a negative effect.

* 69% said courses and campus activities that emphasize diversity and diverse perspectives have more of a positive effect on the education of students, compared with 22% that said it has more of a negative effect.

Study Tried to Skirt Affirmative Action

“Despite the heated public debate over diversity, Americans are clear in their views,” said Alison R. Bernstein, a vice president of the foundation, whose Campus Diversity Initiative sponsored the poll. “They support diversity in higher education. They recognize that diversity is important to student success and they believe that diversity education can help bring the country together.”

Daniel Yankelovich, chairman of DYG Inc., said the study took pains to avoid using the emotion-laden term of affirmative action because it would have skewed the findings. “Affirmative action is the code word for a set of practices that are seen as zero-sum, where somebody wins and somebody loses,” he said. “Diversity isn’t seen that way. Diversity is seen as everyone wins, as advancing the goals that everyone embraces.”

University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger said it would be wrong to assume that a majority of Americans favors antiaffirmative action programs like Proposition 209--approved by California voters in 1996--that outlawed all state support for programs based on race.

“Many people thought a poll like this would come out very differently,” he said at a press conference here to release the results. “This is great news because it’s counterintuitive. We may have misled ourselves about what people really think.”

William H. Gray III, president and chief executive of the the College Fund/United Negro College Fund, agreed that “Americans may be way ahead of the political leaders, social leaders and economic leaders in understanding this change.”

The findings of California respondents generally tracked along the same lines as national respondents, showing strong support for college diversity. For example, 58% of the California respondents disagreed when asked whether diversity is used as an excuse to admit and graduate students who wouldn’t otherwise make it, compared with 33% who agreed. Nationally, 52% disagreed and 38% agreed.

“I thought that we were going to get a borderline, shrug-of-the-shoulders support for diversity programs,” San Francisco State University president Robert Corrigan said in an interview. “What I see is strong support across the board.”

Corrigan said he was encouraged, for instance, by the public’s positive views on ethnic studies courses, which have been criticized as intellectually soft by UC Regent Ward Connerly and other conservatives.

In the poll, 52% of voters said that such multicultural courses as women’s studies or African American studies raise academic standards on campus, while only 16% believe it lowered such standards. Twenty-one percent thought it did neither.

But the results also showed that 59% of those interviewed agreed that “diversity education always seems to have a liberal political agenda.”

Corrigan did not shrink from the L-word.

“Is it a political agenda more to the left than the right? Clearly it is,” he said. “But I don’t find that offensive. There is nothing wrong with liberal. Without it, there would have been no civil rights movement.”