University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

Yet many experts agree that business schools - while attempting for several years to address the implications of demographic change - have not developed successful models to fully prepare students for the realities of "Workforce 2000." In fact, many in industry claim companies have takes the lead in diversity training and education, and that business schools have fallen behind.

An informal AACSB survey indicates that while some business schools have taken steps to address the topic of diversity, by adding courses or special seminars on the subject, few have made significant headway integrating the topic into the overall curriculum headway integrating the topic into the overall curriculum. Most courses are not required, and most tend to be at the graduate level.

Current approaches typically take several forms, according to several diversity researchers. One is to offer courses that provide an overview of diversity to students - addressing what the term means and defining why it is a business issue. Other schools offer specific courses in race and gender, focusing on understanding communication issues, often at the heart of workplace conflict. A third approach focuses on teaching students awareness of fundamental cultural differences - in terms of attitudes and expectations - between diverse groups of people.

There are many ways to deliver diversity coursework, the experts said, ranging from presenting a purely theoretical approach to understanding differences, to promoting experience-based learning through role playing and exposure to guest speakers representative of diverse groups.

For example, to raise awareness among student of the power of cultural stereotypes, one instructor in a diversity course asked each student to write an anonymous paper detailing all groups - women, born again Christians, blacks, gays, Hispanics, men - to which they had attached stereotypes. They also were asked to explain why they'd had trouble working with certain groups in the past.

The instructor identified patterns in the marriage, and systematically brought guest speakers to class who shattered the cultural stereotypes directed at each group. The experience generated emotional discussion on the negative power of cultural stereotypes - and fostered a new understanding of the importance of future managers assessing the impact of their personal biases on hiring decisions, communication among diverse groups and general management issues.

Regardless of isolated successful experiences, however, many experts said progress in diversity education has been slowed by the lack of a clear and comprehensive agreement in defining the concept, the failure of homogenous business school cultures to appreciate the importance of the issue, and a lack of instructors qualified to address diversity across the curriculum.

"I think some people assume when you say diversity, you're just talking minorities and women or affirmative action," said R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., president of the American Institute for Managing Diversity and secretary of Morehouse College. "When I talk about diversity, I mean the whole nature of the modern workforce - in terms of age, education differences, background, language, nationality, and a multitude of other factors."

Founded by Thomas in 1984, the Atlanta-based institute had conducted research in Fortune 500 companies that have explored diversity, with the goals of better understanding the issue and identifying effective organizational strategies for addressing change in the workplace.

Thomas, who is former business dean at Clark Atlanta University, said traditional definitions of diversity have tended to focus only on race and gender, which has led to a compartmentalized approach to the subject as many business schools. This, he said, believes the magnitude of the issue and leads to limited, narrowly focused treatment of the topic.

"We find as we work with corporations that the biggest barrier in managing diversity in the workplace is poor management - not racism or sexism," he said. "For example, we find mangers in the engineering department focusing only on engineering, as opposed to focusing on creating an environment that allows increasingly diverse groups of engineers to do their work and be as productive as possible in pursuit of larger corporate goals."

Nancy DiTomaso, professor at Rutgers' (Newark) business school, pioneered one of the first courses taught on diversity in graduate business schools in the mid-1980s. She is more cautious, saying that while it's an admirable goal for schools to try and reflect the broadest possible range of "diversity issues" in every aspect of the curriculum, a middle ground, based on course-by-course implementation, is a more realistic approach.

"I can't see an accounting professor teaching the substance of diversity as part of a regular accounting course, for example," she said. "So I'm not sure that is in fact a productive way to think about how diversity should be taught in business schools."

DiTomaso said that in the same way globalization, management of technology and other "change issues," spawned by new world realities, have not been fully integrated into all business school coursework, adding focused diversity class offerings to the curriculum is an immediate and effective strategy.

Others argue that simply adding specialized classes on diversity misses the point and does not prepare business students for the real challenges they will face on the job. They said that without integrating a comprehensive diversity message into the entire curriculum, the most relevant management education cannot occur. At its most fundamental level, they said, managing diversity is about learning to make the best of human resources to gain competitive advantage - an essential element of every discipline.

"How can we talk about high commitment work systems and total quality and worker involvement and ignore the influence of human diversity on the subjects?" asked David A. Thomas, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School.

Thomas had designed modules around issues of diversity in the first-year organizational behavior courses at The Wharton School at Penn, the Harvard Business School and the Yale School of Management. He also has worked as a consultant to a variety of other business schools regarding how to teach diversity in the classroom.

Thomas said that often business schools under estimate the importance and complexity of diversity education, attempting to cover the subject by making "diversity" an orientation theme - featuring administrators telling students about the importance of "tolerance" of differences among people. This, he said, tends to avoid the real issues, problems and needs surrounding diversity and doesn't address the substance o how diversity must actually begin to impact the educational process.

"The quick-fix classes and brief seminars might be the way you bridge the subject, buy we must find ways to integrate this subject into the entire educational process," Thomas said. "Even if these sessions are done well, if they are not connected to the ongoing work of the school, students notice the incongruent between what institutions say they are about and what they reflect in the educational enterprise."

A fundamental barrier, however, is the ability of most business faculty and deans to effectively construct classroom experiences around issues of race, gender, culture, social class and a variety of other factors. This, Thomas said, is because the vast majority of business professors have little experience with the issues and have created course materials and teaching methods that reflect their backgrounds.

"If you look at most textbooks and case studies, the protagonists are white men. The materials and solutions they teach don't fully and accurately incorporate current reality," he added.

As part of overall curriculum review, some schools, however, are attempting to re-design their programs in ways that give diversity the weight many believe the market is demanding. Ronald Koot, associate dean for undergraduate programs at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, said his school has undertaken a comprehensive review of its program to make diversity in integral element of the curriculum. Under the new approach, scheduled for implementation in 1993, each course offered to students will have a diversity component.

It's not going to be forced fit, but as the departmental level there is going to be an honest effort to determine what belongs in the course," Koot said. "We're really approaching this using the broadest possible definition of diversity, including the social, legal, operational and international realities reflected in the world. It is a genuine attempt to revolutionize our curriculum, not just some one-dimensional idea based on doing what is politically correct."

As mentioned, while many feel that incorporating diversity education into all courses - particularly in the "hard issues" like finance, accounting or banking - is impractical, Harvard's Thomas approves of Koot's approach and argues these courses lend themselves just as well as others to diversity components. In fact, he said, this is where the subject might have the most direct impact on future business practices.

Thomas pointed to the recent documentation of discriminatory mortgage lending practices toward blacks throughout the banking industry. Again, he said, this situation is far less a case of minority issues on the part of loan officers trained in the nation's business schools.

These reports illuminated the result of students being educated with materials and case studies based on lending practices that did not consider the unique situations and issues present in the minority community," Thomas said. "My guess is, unfortunately, no business school curriculum in the country will develop and teach new case studies that reflect these realities in the near future. But graduates of our programs will still continue to go out and run those banks."

Some schools have tried other approaches, forming partnerships with industry to better address the diversity issue. For example, earlier this year the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University received $750,000 from a bank in Cleveland to establish a cultural diversity program.

The program will include educational components to address the needs of students and faculty including the establishment of a minority faculty fellowship to research and teach on multi-cultural issues; the development of curriculum that integrates multi-cultural management issues; and the creation of executive education programs geared toward diversity.

Judy B. Rosener, a professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying the issue of diversity for many years. She applauds efforts by schools to move toward adopting integrated approaches - based on broad definitions of diversity - to making business education more "reality-based." But while business schools have made good faith efforts to address the subject, she said, they must quickly go further, or risk falling far behind the pace of change in today's society.

"American corporations are developing tremendous programs to train workers to deal with an increasingly diverse workforce," Rosener said. "If business is investigating so heavily in the subject, business schools must begin shifting their priorities to reflect similar values."

Ironically, she said, the fact that business has taken an "early lead" on the subject will ultimately have a positive effect on the quality of education and research in business schools. In the past, she said, there have been significant barriers - such as slowed tenure tracks, lack of peer esteem and shortage of departmental resource allocation - to faculty researching diversity and developing the necessary expertise and knowledge base required to teach the discipline.

"Industry is making it increasingly clear that diversity in its broadcast sense is a bottom-line issue," Rosener said. "This, in turn, is allowing professors who have in the past been marginalized within the business school community for pursuing such work, to gain new credibility and turn the subject into a significant academic discipline."

Rosener recently co-authored Workforce America! Managing Employee Diversity as a Vital Resource, which has been adopted by approximately 45 business schools as part of the reading lists in their diversity and organizations behavior courses.

Rita J. Shellenberger, manager of diversity for Dow, USA, said business schools are behind in teaching diversity and need to develop a fuller appreciation of the "bottom-line" nature of the issue. She said that for some time corporations have been evaluating their policies, procedures and cultures to identify the impediments to making diversity a strength in the workplace - knowing it is essential to their survival in the global economy.

"I know of very few business schools with programs that really give students the skills to be managers of diverse work teams in all functional areas of business," Shellenberger said. "Business schools need to teach the reality that diversity is a "hard" business issue - not just a be nice to women and minorities issue - and that there are real financial implications as far as competitiveness, quality and economic survival are concerned."

The reasons business schools are behind in addressing this issue are tied to their organizational cultures, she said. Organizations reflect the values of their founders, key managers and workers. Business schools, unlike American corporations, still remain homogeneous, dominated by white males with little first-hand experience with diversity. This in turn, has resulted in little appreciation for the subject, she said.

At Dow, Shellenberger said, every new employee goes through an orientation in which diversity is discussed in great detail during a week-long orientation process. The company also now includes "commitment to diversity" as part of all employee evaluation systems. Specific job performance criteria include whether an employee helps create in environment that values of diversity; understands the cost benefit of promoting diversity; generates ideas and solves problems in ways that fit diverse groups; empowers all people to make decisions and implement solutions; and considers diversity a valid criteria for successful work performance.

Increasingly, Shellenberger said, Dow will make the ability of employees to manage and operate in diverse work teams a criteria for employment.

Taylor Cox, associate professor of organizational behavior and human resource management in the University of Michigan's School of Business, said the commitment on the part of industry is what is needed to change business school attitudes on diversity. He has written on the complex dynamic that has existed within business schools regarding diversity research, racial identities and the academic publication process. He said that while the business school culture still places lower value on the subject than on functional areas such as marketing and finance, progress is being made.

"Diversity is a subject for which there is a substantial body of knowledge and skill base," he said. "IT is increasingly well developed and relevant. While no one is suggesting that it should have equal importance with all other disciplines, they must see it is not just a bringing together a group of people and appreciating their differences. It is a much more complicated, substantive and bottom-line management issue in our future."

At Michigan, Cox said, the curriculum now contains a course on diversity, which he designed. the subject has also been included as part of various executive education programs offered by the school. He admits, however, that while there has been progress, much more is needed to address what he calls "one of the greatest management challenges of the next decade."

John Howard Nesbitt, director of diversity initiatives at AACSB, said that the growing interest among business schools is apparent in the response to several of the Assembly's recent programs. He noted that a Continuous Improvement Seminar conducted by AACSB in October drew large crowds of deans, faculty and program directors to its workshops on building diversity into the curriculum.

"We are hopeful that business schools will be able to reflect the overwhelming changes in demographics and global markets that are all part of the diversity issue," Nesbitt said. "We are encouraged by both the increasing attempts by schools to add this to their curricula and the most significant efforts by schools to make the subject an integral part of their entire educational programs."

In 1993, AACSB plans to publish a curriculum resource guide in the diversity area.