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The Role of Partnership in Shaping theDiversity AgendaDavid J. Siegel aa East Carolina University , USAPublished online: 11 Jun 2007.

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Tertiary Education and ManagementVol. 13, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 99–110

ISSN 1358-3883 (print)/ISSN 1573-1936 (online)/07/020099–12© 2007 European Higher Education SocietyDOI 10.1080/13583880701238316

The Role of Partnership in Shaping the Diversity Agenda

David J. Siegel*East Carolina University, USATaylor and FrancisRTEM_A_223745.sgm10.1080/13583880701238316Tertiary Education Management1358-3883 (print)/1573-1936 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis1310000002007DavidJ.Siegelsiegeld@ecu.edu

This study examines how external stakeholders, collaborators, and partners help shape the diver-sity agenda in post-secondary education. Results from a comparative case study analysis of fourprofessional schools (public health, business, social work and engineering) at a large Americanresearch university suggest that external social actors are influential in stimulating diversity-relatedactivity and determining how post-secondary organizations address pressures, expectations,demands, requirements and incentives related to diversity.

The Role of Partnership in Shaping the Diversity Agenda

The diversity movement experienced something of a watershed moment in 2003.That was the year the United States Supreme Court heard arguments challengingthe constitutionality of collegiate admissions practices that took into account anapplicant’s race. Among the influential parties supporting the use of race as a factorin admissions were numerous multinational corporations whose self-interest hung inthe balance. Their argument was that racial and ethnic diversity is indispensable tothe global economic competitiveness of firms and that denying colleges and universi-ties the right to select students on such terms would potentially disfavor Americanbusinesses around the globe. In connecting their fortunes back to colleges anduniversities as training grounds for the nation’s workforce, corporate supportershighlighted the interdependent nature of the diversity project.

The first amicus brief in what came to be known as the Michigan cases (Grutter v.Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger) was submitted by a coalition of 20 leading corpora-tions on 16 October 2000. By the time the cases went to the Supreme Court in early2003, fully 65 Fortune 500 companies had filed amicus briefs supporting the use ofrace in admissions. They were joined by retired military leaders, scores of colleges

*Department of Educational Leadership, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA.Email: siegeld@.ecu.edu

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and universities, congressional and senate leaders, social scientists and professionaland academic associations like the American Bar Association and the AmericanEducational Research Association. To judge by the briefs, many compelling inter-ests—economic, educational, professional, and military, to name just a few—areserved by diversity and by the use of race-sensitive admissions policies. Ultimately,the signatories’ advocacy and alliance may have helped make the crucial differencein a hotly contested case, both at the Supreme Court and in the wider court ofpublic opinion. Indeed, the many companies and other activist organizations thatagitated on behalf of higher education might be considered nothing less than strate-gic partners in the effort.

Collective action of this kind fairly illustrates the new terms of the diversity move-ment. The central proposition of this paper is that external social actors—describedalternately as stakeholders, collaborators, and partners—play a significant andexpanding role in shaping the diversity agenda in post-secondary education. In manyways, what is transpiring on the diversity front can be considered an inevitableoutgrowth of increasingly boundaryless interaction between the academic enterprise,industry, and various other sectors (see, for example, Bok, 2003; Business–HigherEducation Forum, 2001; Etzkowitz & Ledersdorff, 2000; Taylor, 2001). To detailthis phenomenon, I will (1) present relevant examples drawn from a study of profes-sional schools at a large American university, (2) discuss the particular case of anacademic–industry–nonprofit partnership model that is trying to achieve diversity-related goals, and (3) briefly suggest some considerations as diversity is pursued inpartnership.

Key Concepts and Theoretical Framework

First, a working definition of partnership is in order. For the purposes of this study,partnership is a term used to describe the interconnected network of organizationsadvancing the cause of diversity. This rendering may include coordinated andpurposive collaboration between organizations in the joint pursuit of diversity-related goals, but it also includes less formalized or official forms of partnership. Ahelpful conceptual distinction may be made between formal and official partnerships(those in name) and informal and unofficial ones (those in effect); the interest here isin both categories of partnership. As will become evident, the partnership constructused in this study is perhaps more along the lines of what Rhodes (1998) hasdescribed as a ‘social compact’ than a contractual agreement between parties (as inthe case of some academic–industry research initiatives). While this ecumenicalapproach to the definition of partnership is a bit at odds with the conventional depic-tion (see, for example, Buettner, Morrison, & Wasicek, 2002), it may extend ourunderstanding of how partnership functions in the postsecondary setting.

The study is grounded in an open systems perspective, which emphasizes the roleof the external environment in creating demands, pressures, expectations, andincentives for organizational behavior related to diversity. Institutional and resourcedependence theories (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Oliver,

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Shaping the Diversity Agenda 101

1991; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Scott, 1995) are especially helpful in conceptualiz-ing the interconnected nature of organizational environments. From this perspec-tive, diversity-related activity within colleges and universities can be understood asan effort to secure and protect resources, support, and legitimacy from key partners.Oliver (1991) has provided a conceptual framework for thinking about institutionalpressures in terms of their cause, constituents, content, control, and context. Herframework is used to organize the inquiry.

The external environment in this investigation is viewed as consisting of (1) theuniversity superstructure within which constituent schools are embedded and (2) thewider social and professional contexts enveloping the units of interest. Importantly,the university setting in this study was operating under a campus-wide diversity‘mandate’ that served as one of many sources of institutional pressure on academicunits.

Methodology

I undertook a comparative case study analysis of four professional schools—PublicHealth, Business, Social Work, and Engineering—at Lakewood University (a pseud-onym). The influence of market culture in academe is most easily observed in theprofessional school setting; still, there is wide variation among professional schoolsin terms of the sectors in which they are involved, their orientations, and the sets ofassumptions under which they operate. These differences were thought to allow foran interesting comparison of the responses of professional schools within a complexresearch university.

Data were gathered primarily from 47 semi-structured interviews with organiza-tion members across the four sites. Participants included deans, associate and assis-tant deans, department chairs, faculty and staff. Additionally, I analyzed writtendocumentation and archival records in order to triangulate the data. Informantsreviewed and commented on the case study narratives as a means of establishingconstruct validity.

Key Findings

What follows is a selective presentation of findings from a broader study of postsec-ondary organizational responsiveness to diversity-related pressures and expectations.Those interested in a more extensive treatment should consult Siegel (2003).

Cause

In Oliver’s (1991) formulation, cause can be understood as the reason(s) organiza-tions are asked to conform to societal expectations, pressures, demands, or require-ments. The sample schools in this study encountered a variety of rationales forattention to diversity. What the schools had in common was that their notions of thevalue of diversity—and their reasons for vigorously pursuing it in their policies and

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programs—were shaped to a large extent by the wishes, needs, and preferences ofkey external agents. Alignment with stakeholder expectations secured a measure oflegitimacy that in turn activated various forms of support, including financialsupport. Specific examples help illustrate this point.

In the School of Public Health, informants consistently emphasized that theirorganization’s commitment to diversity was a natural outgrowth of the field’s ownevolving interest in and commitment to issues of diversity. Minority populationstend to suffer disproportionately from certain health maladies (infant mortality,cardiovascular disease, diabetes, AIDS and depression, for example), and infor-mants explained that the larger public health agenda is about understanding thecauses and consequences of these racial and ethnic disparities in health status.Schools of public health play a central role in the education, research and outreachthat contribute to advances in public health knowledge and practice. Given thisarrangement, informants explained, Lakewood’s School of Public Health, like itscounterparts nationally, could not be considered a relevant and responsible memberof the academic public health community if it did not take seriously its obligations toaddress diversity in its core academic functions. This reasoning had the effect ofmaking the commitment to diversity a nearly invisible—in the sense of being takenfor granted—feature of the School. Indeed, some faculty and administrators strug-gled to articulate the School’s interest in diversity because they perceived it as beinga part of the ‘warp and woof’ of the place, an ingrained pattern.

A similar dynamic was revealed at the School of Social Work. Issues of diversityand multiculturalism occupy center stage in the social work community—socialjustice, empowerment, equality, and the alleviation of poverty are among the defin-ing and foundational elements of the profession. As in the case of the School ofPublic Health, members of the School of Social Work found it difficult to separatetheir organization’s commitment to diversity from the overall social work project.(Social workers as professionals and educators tend to be intellectually and emotion-ally invested in the issue, said informants, although the extent of interest naturallyvaries.) Because many social welfare services are ultimately directed to populationsof color, the School’s teaching, research, and outreach were expected to reflect andaddress the social realities of these groups.

In the Business School, a tightly reasoned business case for diversity was describedas the great animating force behind the School’s own support of the diversity agenda.Roughly, the business case argues that diversity is profitable, in the sense that itcontributes to performance advantages like enhanced problem solving, creativity andstrategic alignment with emerging multicultural markets. Additionally, companiesare experiencing acute pressure for enhanced corporate social responsibility, a cover-ing term for environmental and social stewardship. As companies have added diver-sity to their stable of core competencies and competitive advantages, it has catalyzeda movement among business schools to recruit, retain and develop greater numbersof underrepresented minorities.

The School of Engineering’s diversity-related activities, like those of the BusinessSchool, were guided largely by its industrial clientele. Societal and industrial interest

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in filling the pipeline with talented minorities and women was cited by informants asthe chief rationale for the School of Engineering’s engagement with issues of diver-sity. For many years, the paucity of women and minorities in science, math andengineering programs has been a source of concern; a 1990 report issued by theNational Science Foundation—Future Scarcities of Scientists and Engineers: Problemsand Solutions—effectively put the academic engineering community on notice that ithad a critical role to play in encouraging under-represented minorities to pursueengineering education and careers in engineering. Consequently, the phenomenonwas described by members of the School of Engineering as a national ‘problem’ thatthe country’s schools of engineering were all, more or less, trying to help solve.Unlike their counterparts in the other sample organizations, none of the informantsat the School of Engineering suggested that their interest in diversity was motivatedby idealism or a sense that promoting diversity is simply ‘the right thing to do’.

On balance, the rationales identified and cited by informants appeared to bestructured largely by the markets in which each of the schools operated. Wheninformants across the sites talked of the reasons their schools were expected toaddress the challenges of diversity, they invariably framed the discussion in terms ofcitizenship (although they did not apply that term). That is, they viewed theirschools as situated within webs of inclusion and dependency, such that their actionswere motivated by relationships with the other members of their organizationalfields.

Constituents

The one stakeholder shared by all four schools was, of course, Lakewood University.This may seem obvious, but it is worth bearing in mind that Lakewood, like its peerresearch universities, is the parent of fiercely independent offspring (in the form ofsemi-autonomous units). The net effect of this decentralized arrangement is thatcollaborators, partners and stakeholders beyond the University’s boundaries oftenheld more sway over the four case study organizations’ activities than the institu-tion’s central administration.

A variety of external stakeholders articulated expectations for the School of PublicHealth’s attention to diversity in its teaching, research, service and practitionertraining. These groups included community-based organizations, local healthdepartments, client populations, health care organizations, various private founda-tions that supported the School financially, and federal government agencies. Inmany cases, the maintenance of critical relationships (including funding relation-ships) involved a demonstrated commitment on the School’s part to increase therepresentation of students and faculty of color, enhance the organizational climatefor diversity and address issues of diversity in research projects.

The business community’s acknowledgment of the market value of diversity keptthe Business School focused on diversity, especially as it related to student recruit-ment, retention and graduation. In particular, members of the School’s corporateadvisory board—a group composed of executives representing major multinational

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companies—informed the dean that the single thing they valued most about theirrelationship with Lakewood Business School was the racial and ethnic diversity theyfound on their recruiting trips to the campus. More pointedly, board members indi-cated that if the School failed to supply the diverse talent their organizationsrequired, corporate recruiters would go elsewhere. This threat of losing lucrativerecruiting relationships with top companies was well-known to all who were inter-viewed at the Business School; the details of the corporate advisory board’s ultima-tum had taken on myth-like status and served as a constant reminder of the tangibleconsequences of the School’s commitment to diversity.

Informants identified the School of Social Work’s accrediting body—the Councilon Social Work Education (CSWE)—as a principal stakeholder, mainly because itsguidelines clearly specified that all member schools had to include multiculturalcurricular content in order to receive accreditation. Social Work’s focus on diversitywas also motivated by those to whom it provided direct or indirect services, namely,individuals and groups, community organizations and the agencies in which socialwork is performed.

Engineering informants indicated that the School was influenced by a tripartitecoalition of industry, government (in the form of national laboratories) and otheracademic institutions. Of the three sectors, industry was deemed to carry the great-est weight. An associate dean remarked that ‘unless we keep current, unless we keepup with what industry wants, we become dated very quickly’.

Content

What were the case study organizations expected, pressed, or required to do aboutdiversity? At the most general and abstract level, the schools were expected to play‘niche’ roles—that is, to assume specialized functional responsibilities—in an inter-connected (systemic and comprehensive) societal response to the challenges ofdiversity. Operationally, this diversity-related activity was expected to encompassstudent and faculty recruitment and retention, assessment and improvement of theracial climate, the incorporation of multicultural content into the academic curricu-lum, and outreach efforts to create and develop pipelines of minority students. Asprofessional schools, these entities all shared the commitment to prepare future lead-ers for the world of practice in their particular domains—public health, social work,business and industry. All four of the schools were clearly calibrated to the prepara-tion of a cadre of future leaders who would take up residence in a world character-ized by growing complexity and diversity.

At the School of Public Health, informants explained that their diversity-relatedobligations centered on research relevant to diverse populations, recruitment andretention of a racially diverse student body, minority faculty hiring and promotion,and concerted efforts to assess and continuously improve the climate for diversity.The School of Social Work, far more than its counterparts in the sample, wasexpected to weave diversity and multiculturalism into its course content in order tofacilitate the development of multicultural competence among students. Since

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academic social work already tends to attract a higher proportion of minority facultyand students than many other disciplines, this element of the diversity agendareceived comparatively less attention at the School of Social Work.

Given escalating corporate demand for minority workers and managers, it was nosurprise that the Business School was expected to attract, develop and graduate aracially and ethnically diverse student body. Taking a cue from its vast network ofcorporate clients, the pursuit of student diversity emerged as one of the School’sprimary strategic objectives. The issues of faculty diversity and multicultural curricu-lar content were distant secondary considerations.

Like the Business School, the School of Engineering was expected to participatein the broader national effort to prepare women and minorities for careers inscience and engineering. This was to be accomplished through a combination ofextensive outreach to under-represented populations, enhanced recruitment andretention, and the creation or extension of support services geared to minorities andwomen.

Control

Control may be understood as the means employed by external agents to enforcecompliance with their wishes and evaluate progress toward stated objectives.Informants identified a range of control options that served to hold their organiza-tions accountable in this regard. The University’s mandate was said by informantsacross the four case study sites to provide a generally supportive framework withinwhich unit-based diversity initiatives could flourish, but it was not recognized as aregulatory mechanism in the strict sense. External forms of control largely unique toeach school were viewed as more directive.

In the School of Public Health, for example, informants found ‘normative pres-sure’—that arising from academic public health and communities of practice—to bemost influential in structuring the School’s commitment to diversity. Like theircolleagues in Public Health, informants in the School of Social Work pointed to thegoverning influence of field-based norms, although these norms were described inmore palpable terms than was the case in Public Health. Normative pressure wascodified in the guidelines put forward by the Council on Social Work Education.This took on the mantle of a regulatory requirement, demonstrating the reality thatmultiple forms of control occasionally prevailed in the same site.

The School of Engineering provided a further example of this observation. There,School officials were required by the University’s central administration to produce astrategic plan for diversity, something not required of any other unit on campus. Thecompulsory plan detailed diversity-related goals and actions and was monitored bythe institution’s provost. Informants in the School of Engineering, though, tended toview the actions of peer schools as more determinative of the organization’s commit-ment to diversity than the strategic planning initiative. The School made consciousand calculated efforts to survey the best practices of its rivals, participating in aninformal and voluntary network through which rapid diffusion of information could

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occur. Competition for top students and faculty was a defining feature of theacademic engineering landscape, according to informants, and Lakewood’s Schoolof Engineering—far more than its counterparts in the study—actively compareditself to peers by investigating successful diversity-related models and programsacross the country.

While the Business School was not subject to formalized control of its diversityagenda by external interests, it did confront the unambiguous demand of a corporatecommunity highly motivated to diversify its own workforce. Consequently, membersof the School—faculty and administrators alike—possessed an elaborate understand-ing of the rewards for their compliance with corporate desire and the dire conse-quences of noncompliance. In the case of the Business School, market demandoperated as a rule system that was every bit as powerful as those encountered by theother case study organizations.

Context

One of the most persistent environmental conditions noted by respondents acrossthe case study sites, but particularly by those in Business and Engineering, was theshallow pool of minority faculty candidates and students of color. The BusinessSchool’s membership in two national ventures—the Consortium for GraduateStudy in Management and the LEAD (Leadership Education and Development)program—was a strategic attempt to connect with key partners (namely, corpora-tions) in order to identify, recruit, graduate, and employ a diverse population offuture business leaders. Similarly, the School of Engineering was constrained bythe national shortage of underrepresented minorities and women in the studentand faculty pipelines. To address this issue, the School embarked on majorprojects—with significant corporate and foundation backing—to recruit, retain andbetter serve the interests of women and minority engineering students. PublicHealth developed its own early outreach initiative (a summer enrichment program)to encourage minority students to pursue careers in health care administration,with major funding provided by private foundations and participating health careorganizations.

The foregoing findings demonstrate that formal and informal partnerships withother social actors strongly influenced the diversity practices of the professionalschools in this sample, both in terms of stimulating attention to diversity in the firstplace and shaping how it got addressed inside the organizations of interest. Each ofthe different schools, however, confronted some unique demands, pressures,requirements, expectations, and incentives from its partnership networks; SocialWork’s stakeholders and partners, for example, expected and demanded certainstandards of performance that were not expected or demanded in the counterpartschools. Business and Engineering were clearly calibrated to the needs of their busi-ness partners, and this was especially true of the Business School. Of special interestin the next section is the way in which issues of pipeline development are addressedthrough formal partnerships in business education.

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The Case of LEAD

The LEAD Program in Business is a specific instance of a multi-partner syndicateinvolved in a postsecondary diversity initiative. LEAD utilizes a ‘triple helix’ modelof partnership that includes (1) the Philadelphia-based umbrella organization(LEAD National), which has been operating for approximately 25 years, (2) 11top American business schools that host residential Summer Business Institutes(SBIs) on their campuses, and (3) corporate sponsors that take an active role inthe overall education experience and provide financial support to underwriteprogrammatic costs. Affiliated business schools are the University of Pennsylvania(Wharton), the University of Michigan (Ross), Northwestern University (Kellogg),UCLA (Anderson), Duke University (Fuqua), the University of Minnesota(Carlson), the University of Virginia (Darden), Dartmouth College (Tuck),Cornell University (Johnson), Stanford University and the University of Illinois.

Every summer, participating schools host thirty students each for a 3–4-week SBI.(These students have successfully competed for admission to the program; LEADreceives approximately 1200 applications for 330 spots.) Students learn the basics ofa range of subjects—accounting, finance, marketing, strategy, operations, ethics andothers—from senior business faculty, receive tips on applying to college and interactwith corporate sponsors through site-visits and in-class presentations. In all, 34 majorcorporations and (to a lesser extent) foundations support LEAD, including Cisco,GlaxoSmithKline, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson &Johnson, IBM, Ford Motor Company, General Mills and Pfizer. Since its inception,LEAD has hosted over 6600 students; today, 65% of LEAD alumni are pursuingbusiness careers, and 50% of alumni have received or are actively pursuing an MBAfrom a top-25 business school. Corporate partners may access the LEAD alumnidatabase to help fill their talent needs, thus making the LEAD connection a dynamicone that returns value long beyond the original engagement. LEAD has been nation-ally recognized, and the Business Higher Education Forum (BHEF), an associationof corporate CEOs and university presidents, has identified the program as a prom-ising model that might stimulate the development of additional projects of this type.

At the heart of the LEAD partnership model is a convergence of interests to beserved and satisfied. Corporate motivation in this regard is largely pragmatic; corpo-rate participants value diversity because it contributes to the development of cultur-ally sensitive products and services that meet the needs of an increasingly diverseconsumer base, encourages more productive working relationships with businesspartners and customers across cultures, and minimizes incidents of costly racialdiscrimination and stereotyping in the workplace. Businesses recognize that expo-sure to racial diversity prepares students to succeed in a global marketplace charac-terized by diverse people, cultures and ideas. From this perspective, the interest ofcompanies in campus diversity is largely about securing a future diverse workforce:universities (and specifically business schools) are their talent incubators. Workforcepreparation efforts are beginning much earlier in the education pipeline, as LEADillustrates.

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For their part, business schools are eager to diversify their student bodies andappeal to corporate recruiters. A program like LEAD clearly helps schools do bothsimultaneously.

Several questions remain to be addressed by an ongoing investigation of LEAD.In particular:

● How do participants (business schools, corporate partners, and LEAD National)change their practices as a result of involvement in LEAD? Does involvement inLEAD, for example, catalyze diversity-related organizational changes at top busi-ness schools? How about at companies? How is the LEAD experience integratedinto other organizational plans? Do business schools and corporate partnersparticipate in LEAD so that they don’t have to do anything else in this domain?How does partnership contribute to innovative practice, risk-taking, or newapproaches?

● What are the different expectations that partners bring to the table, and how arethese addressed? What constitutes success from each of the partner perspectives,and how do these different pictures of success get negotiated in the actual conductof the program? How (and how precisely) is return on investment calculated?

● What is the idiosyncratic knowledge that develops between partners in the LEADnetwork, and what are the uses or applications of this knowledge?

● Does the dependency of organizations on each other (for ensuring the success ofthe program) create normative or mimetic isomorphic pressures to behave andlook like one another?

● To what extent do LEAD SBIs—particularly new ones—pattern their programson the examples of existing programs? Does this contribute to homogeneity ofform and content?

● Why do partners join or leave the program? How can knowledge of the stories ofentry and exit help us improve our partnership efforts?

Implications

As colleges and universities (and their units) join forces with an ever-expandingarray of partners to work together on diversity-related issues, there is a risk that wewill become too sensitized to the needs and preferences of external stakeholdersrather than the dictates of our own institutional priorities. In this scheme, greaterattention needs to be paid to partnership arrangements and dynamics. Somethinglike memoranda of understanding—in spirit rather than in a legal or technicalsense—should guide collaborations in order to protect the core values of partneringorganizations and promote common objectives. Not all conflicts could be resolvedby such an action, but at least it would serve as a vehicle for outlining and acknowl-edging non-negotiable needs (Hall, 2004) and monitoring partnerships to see thatsuch needs are satisfied. Cultural differences between partnering organizations canmake for particularly challenging relationships (Spangler, 2002), and a key questionin this vein concerns how post-secondary institutions, corporations and nonprofits

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can become better and more sensitive partners to each other in ways that respect andbridge organizational divides.

Conclusion

To understand higher education’s interest in diversity, it is necessary to understandthe vast and intricate web of interconnections that exert pressure on post-secondaryinstitutions to address issues of diversity in the curriculum, in student composition,and in faculty representation. Colleges and universities are most assuredly not inde-pendent agents in this matter; rather, they are responsive to demands, requirements,expectations, and incentives from industry, the professions, community-based orga-nizations, private foundations, and a host of other powerful groups. (One measure ofthe role of stakeholder and partner influence is the extent to which it, rather than theUniversity’s own mandate, was viewed by the sample organizations as a catalyst forattention to diversity-related activity.) This arrangement stands in sharp contrast tothe popular (and persistent) depiction of the academy as an ivory tower sealed offfrom wider realities. It is important to recognize that diversity-related efforts arebeing undertaken within the context of societal needs and priorities. The resultsfrom this study demonstrate that diversity is a collaborative undertaking, one ofcommon cause and common enterprise.

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