An article I wrote about critical mass for Affirmative Action has just been published in the Law & Society Review and I’m excited to finally share my findings. In this paper, I investigate the concept of critical mass and how it has been used in the social sciences and, specifically, in legal and social scientific arguments about Affirmative Action programs.
Affirmative Action programs have been been the subject of many rounds of litigation over the past few decades. These programs were originally meant to provide a mechanism for extending equal opportunity to students from groups that have historically been systematically excluded from higher education. Now, in response to legal rulings that have come out of the many challenges to these programs, the focus has shifted from righting historical inequities to a contemporary goal of creating “diverse” environments in institutions of higher education for the sake of the benefits that diversity is expected to bring. There is a lot I could say about how the term "diversity” has become problematic because it seems to have taken on a code meaning related to race, just like “minority” no longer just refers to numbers but is a code word for “not white” (I use the term minority here and in the article, despite its problematic lumping together of many different people from many different groups based on their shared “not white” status, because it is the term used by the Supreme Court and the Universities in their discussion of Affirmative Action). But for now, let’s agree that the contemporary goal of Affirmative Action programs is to create student bodies that comprise students from many different backgrounds so as to create at least a marginally more heterogeneous list of admits than they would have without the programs.
The question of how the universities meet this goal has been the subject of the many legal challenges. In 2003, the case Grutter v. Bollinger was heard before the Supreme Court. In the majority opinion in that case, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court stated that Affirmative Action programs are necessary to create a “critical mass” of minority students in order to accomplish three things. First, to ensure that minority students don’t feel isolated on campus and don’t feel like “tokens” or spokespersons for their group. Second, a critical mass should provide the educational benefits of diversity for all students (there is extensive research that indicates that a diverse student body does provide the opportunity for many benefits to students of all groups, but reaping those benefits requires a bit more than simply having the existence of a diverse group of students on campus). Third, critical mass was meant to reduce negative stereotypes held by students in the majority group about the students in the minority groups by showing them the wide rage of diversity within racial and ethnic groups, which would help to disprove the idea that all members of racial/ethnic groups are the same.
So we need Affirmative Action to create a “critical mass” in order to achieve the three goals stated above, but what exactly is a critical mass? In the physical sciences, critical mass refers to a specific amount of material that will start a chain reaction, causing a sudden, irreversible change of state. For example, in nuclear fission, a critical mass is the amount of fissionable material needed under particular conditions to start a chain reaction that is self-sustaining. This concept has been adopted into the social sciences, but its application has been inconsistent. For example, there is often little distinction drawn between the use of “critical mass” as a metaphor or as a scientific description of specific expected mathematical properties that we can expect when a certain amount of something has accumulated.
Given the lack of specificity with which social scientists have used the term “critical mass”, or maybe more accurately the overall lack of consensus about its exact definition, and its potential importance to the implementation of Affirmative Action programs due to the Court’s embrace of this concept as an acceptable goal, I decided to investigate if critical mass actually mathematically describes the relationships the Court sets up in its decision. In other words, in this article, I test whether there actually is a particular number of minority students, or a critical mass, that starts a sudden, substantial, and sustained change in isolation and stereotyping in a student body as the Supreme Court’s description implies. To do this, I use a technique called Agent Based Modeling (all models were programmed in the Mesa module in Python). Agent Based Models (ABMs) are simulations in which a number of “agents” are programmed to do specific things in interaction with one another. The programmer codes the simulation to run a set number of times and the program records what happens in each iteration. The data that the simulation generates can be analyzed to see what emerges when the actors in the simulation interact over and over again within the rules set by the program. I created ABMs to test the assumptions the Court makes about the relationship between student body composition and the outcomes of isolation and stereotyping. I wanted to see if a critical mass, or tipping point, existed where once you reach a particular amount of student body representation you suddenly achieve the goals the Court detailed.
What I found is that there is no specific number of minority students, or a critical mass, that can bring about a sudden, substantial, and sustained change in either the amount of isolation felt by minority students or the stereotypes held by majority students about minority students; instead, what I found is that more representation of minority students is related to consistently better outcomes, but that the relationships between student representation and those outcomes (less isolation, fewer students holding negative stereotypes) are context specific. In other words, more is better, but numbers alone are not sufficient to fix issues related to underrepresentation in universities. Rather, there needs to be a combination of more representation and a climate of inclusion in order to achieve the goals the Court assigns to Affirmative Action programs. My findings suggest that researchers must do a lot more to figure out the complicated relationships between student representation and university climate so that educational and organizational policy can be better tailored towards achieving and managing greater diversity and unlocking its benefits for all students. Critical mass may be a useful metaphor for the ongoing and important legal fight to maintain Affirmative Action programs, but we shouldn’t mistake the metaphor for the actual mathematical relationship between representation and the desired outcomes when we are trying to analyze organizations and design programs and policies to improve them.