In my university, we are about to make an offer to someone, a
woman from India who’s from a high caste and probably grew up
with twelve servants and so on, but she’s considered under a spe-
cial minority hiring. We can hire her without any search for a po-
sition that doesn’t otherwise exist. I find that totally baffling. Cer-
tainly, if there were any evidence again of bias against minorities,
that would be something to root out, but I just haven’t encoun-
teredthat...Inother words, if we’re not using the same standard,
whatever that is, I’d be worried about being patronizing—you
know, “Well, I’ve got to lower the standard, it’s a black candidate.”Very few panelists mention class diversity. They do not appear
to question that middle-class students, who are generally better en-
dowed culturally for academic success through various forms of
transmitted cultural capital, will be privileged in most academic se-
lections. One interviewee, however, notes:
[Class diversity] is a deep problem for the American university in
that gradually and [despite] many different kinds of efforts, the
pool of people going into the humanities is becoming less diverse,
wealthier, and more established—I don’t know the situation in
the social sciences. When you make a selection like this, you’re al-
ready selecting from what is mostly [a] bourgeois group of very
privileged people who have gone to elite universities and colleges,
even if they didn’t come from the elite...Therewerepeople
from Harvard and Wellesley, but there was also a kid from Berke-
ley who supported himself managing a Barnes and Noble. So it
was very good to see that we had a real range.Awareness of Gender Bias
Social science research has contributed important findings on gen-
der discrimination in scholarly performance evaluations.^27 For in-
Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity / 221