Sarah Blugis: To solve SMPA’s diversity problem, look at the data

Corrections appended

Sarah Blugis, a sophomore majoring in political communication, is a Hatchet columnist.

In programs that teach aspiring journalists and political strategists – people who thrive on understanding different perspectives – diversity is paramount. But if you’ve taken a class in the School of Media and Public Affairs, you might have noticed a lack of racial and ethnic diversity.

The strangest and most frustrating part though is that we don’t even know the scope of the problem.

To measure challenges and propose solutions, any decision maker, journalist or college administrator will tell you that you need to look at what the data says. But for SMPA, that data doesn’t exist in the Office of Institutional Research.

The University only breaks down data on student demographics for the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the liberal arts school that helps fund, govern and support SMPA.

But GW has a responsibility to keep track student demographics data in SMPA specifically, which houses a total of about 400 students in its undergraduate and graduate programs. That makes the program about the size of the GW School of Nursing, which has plenty of readily available demographic data.

We have a commitment to diversity, and by not tracking data – or at least making it public – we’re unable to know if GW is fulfilling its promise.

Although we don’t have hard data, we do have observations. Many students, including myself, have noticed the underwhelming number of black or minority students present in journalism and political communication classes. A lack of diversity means that GW will not contribute to curing the underrepresentation of minorities in the journalism and communications industries.

This lack of diversity exists at many other journalism schools and isn’t unique to GW. The Atlantic reported last year that although non-whites comprise about 37 percent of the country, they only make up 12.37 percent of the average newsroom. Failing to collect and publish this data at schools preparing future journalists means cloaking a clear problem.

The University as a whole has made their commitment to diversity clear. It has long-term plans to recruit more minority faculty members, in particular.

But it seems particularly strange that GW isn’t formally working harder to buck the trend of diversity in newsrooms. Without the necessary data, we can’t even begin to solve this problem.

This post was updated Feb. 16, 2014 to reflect the following:
Corrections appended

The column stated that SMPA administrators balked at giving diversity data in the school. An administrator referred columnist to GW’s institutional research office, but did not avoid giving data.

The Hatchet also misstated the number of students in SMPA. It’s about 400, not 650. We regret the errors.