July 7, 2016

A rather bizarre story out of the University of Cincinnati today. A student is suing the university regarding a practice that allowed female students in physics' classes to work only with other females. Is this gender-based discrimination or an effective retention strategy?  The university, or at least the Physics Department, claims the latter.

As my linked Inside Higher Ed article above cites, one of the Physics' faculty asserts that "Studies have shown that females do better in small lab groups (three or four) that contain more females than males than more males than females."

I will come back later to challenge that statement.  Because it truly is ridiculous to tie their policy to that "research" claim. 

Instead, this seems like a useful opportunity to address the way that "stereotyping" and offering different levels of service based upon a student's race, gender, background, etc. is often pushed as an acceptable retention strategy across universities and colleges.

Allow me to take what is a frequently employed college strategy centered on new student orientation.  Many colleges will now use an online orientation for all students.  However, some students who are deemed not college-ready, through any fallible testing or predictive mechanism, may be required to have a face-to-face orientation. They also then might be assigned a special advisor, often when other students don't get assigned any advisor.

Don't kid yourself: these practices are in essence academic profiling.  And few institutions aren't doing that or aren't willing to do that in the interest of improving retention. Besides if we don't improve our retention, we are likely to get less funding.

As a general rule, this global profiling by some cold measurement (test score, predictive analytic data) seems to rise above (or sink to a common level) demographics.  The reality is that for many institutions, that student population sitting through the required face-to-face orientation will start to "look" fairly similar.  They might all be coming from a poorer school district.  They might all be of one race.  They might predominantly be of one gender.

In essence, the balancing act colleges and universities have with these students is singling them out without making them appear singled out. What are we to do?  If challenged, we fall back on the argument that these specific strategies are for these students' "own good," but that has been a slippery slope throughout history, has it not?

Which brings me back to the University of Cincinnati.  Sure, having female science students work only with other female science students may minimize the way that working with males affects them, but why isn't the focus on what the male-dominated groups are doing to the females?  That would be a much more difficult element to address. We might as well blame the rape victim for being where she wasn't safe, or wearing the wrong outfit, or drinking alcohol.