This text is edited from a forthcoming book chapter that considers the culture of school rankings through a data-driven study of the U.S. architecture professoriate across the country’s 130 accredited architecture programs.
Upon receiving an Architecture League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Sarah Aziz, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning (UNM), where I am the dean, reflected on our U.S. architecture programs:
“As someone who’s come from the U.K. and went to two lesser-known institutions, I find it perplexing that the majority of architecture department chairs and deans in the Midwest are from the Ivy Leagues. I’ve taught at universities where there’s been an enormous disconnect between the local context and visions of senior administrators. In one case, there was the ambition to transform the school of architecture into ‘the next Princeton,’ which I’ve never understood—we should valorize the creative capacity of students from across the flyover states.”
Aziz’s statement aligns with my work to rethink school ranking systems, breaking the discipline and practice of architecture free from the holding pattern in which it’s long been locked. My ongoing research into the U.S. architecture professoriate, which will be published in a forthcoming book chapter, presents the unsurprising data that a significant number of architecture faculty do indeed come from Ivy League schools. If our charge as educators is to prepare architects for success in today’s diverse world, we need to further diversify the educational composition of our faculty. Choosing professors from a diversity of institutions ultimately diversifies faculty, students, and an overall program.
Aziz’s words also resonate with an emerging backlash against the Ivies, noted recently in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the article “New Research Lays Bare Just How Inequitable Elite Colleges Are,” Zachary Schermele wrote that “the nation’s most selective private colleges have long been criticized for perpetuating inequality” because “they amplify the persistence of privilege across generations.” How this perpetuated privilege of privates vs publics translates into the architecture discipline is no different from that in other fields, but additional hierarchies also emerge when looking at how elite institutions have intersected with the evolution of the 130 accredited architecture programs in the United States. My research into architecture program provenance suggests elite status is related to an evolving profession and to pedagogies rather than to the anointed prestige of an Ivy.
I have long worked with a distinctly regional set of schools committed to building programs on local/regional needs, strengths, and distinctions. During my Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) presidency in 2021-22, I aimed to set ACSA on a committed path to help university programs build lasting connections with community colleges, which are wholly devoted to their local communities. However, Aziz’s statement challenges my own biases. My own training at MIT and the University of California Berkeley was not officially Ivy League, but I am still a product of the U.S.’s obsession with university ranking systems and pedagogies that teach students to revere “Architecture with a capital A.”
Racial/Ethnic Diversity Efforts During the DEI Backlash
In addition to institutional divides like Ivy/non-Ivy and public/private, other divisions persist across universities. Faculty of color, especially historically underrepresented minorities, remain at the bottom of the professoriate ladder, as seen in annual data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics, which indicate white instructors significantly outnumber Black, Hispanic, and Asian ones across the professor ranks in post-secondary institutions. In Malika Jeffries-El’s article “How Do We Mitigate the Impact of Systemic Bias on Faculty from Underrepresented Groups?” published in AAAS-IUSE, she illustrates with a bar graphic the stark contrast: White female assistant professors outnumber white male assistant professors, and faculty of color remain at the bottom. We need to scrutinize the gateways of exclusion that have historically been institutionalized in academia, such as the composition of search committees, where faculty choose their future colleagues. Universities have attempted to address unconscious bias and what is often called “affinity bias” by requiring more diversity committees that have at least one faculty of color member, for example—granted that your state allows it.
Some states are actively dismantling diversity and equity initiatives, which intensifies racism, gender discrimination, and heteronormativity on our campuses. Under such new strictures, the white gatekeeping would likely persist and even worsen. If this U.S. trend continues, it could draw greater contrasts between architecture programs: Some might work toward heterogeneity while others remain predominantly white; some may encourage progressive efforts while others are limited to safe topics like environmentalism and climate change (though the fundamentals of the latter may be challenged). This split, already emerging, will increasingly mirror the politics of our divided country. But this division is not between elite and nonelite institutions. As my UNM colleague Renia Ehrenfeucht has pointed out, some schools in white-dominant areas are struggling to incorporate antiracism in education. Elite institutions are diligently working to retain diversity initiatives, despite being impeded by the culture of elitism.
As a minoritized senior administrator, I am a representative of queer men of color from society’s bottom echelons, and though I know that my educational path helped propel my career, my position pushes against the elite membership spaces of academia, where dominant structures of power and institutional racism prevail. While we have worked diligently to address gender discrimination in the Academy—and continue to do so—the issue of racial and ethnic diversity should be our most urgent concern today. Historically, the U.S. educational system has been dominated by male/white faculty, and this continues to be reinforced by professional figureheads.
Avoiding Disparities by Finding the Right Path
Beyond racial and ethnic diversity, the related problem of degree diversity is worth studying. Aziz’s sentiment inspires us to look closely at how we’re building our architecture programs, to ask uncomfortable questions, and to carefully consider which models to emulate. The critical question to ask may not be about the Ivy League representation in our accredited program faculty, which my study reveals is actually in decline. Faculty members disproportionately coming from elite institutions, however, is related to lower percentages of faculty of color being hired. Instead, let’s ask how we can better address the continued disparities between public and elite/private universities, as this also addresses the urgently needed diversification of faculty and students.
We should want to diversify because we need faculty who reflect different worldviews and perspectives, and we need professionals who reflect the people who live in the world they shape. Diversification directly translates to an architecture program’s prioritization of values, which are transposed onto our local and regional work, as well as to the audiences and allies we foster. However, we cannot address heterogeneity without addressing how racism, sexism, etc., reinforce elitist, exclusionary practices in our programs. For starters, we should commit to creating a 360-degree assessment across all our programs that demonstrate the persistent lack of racial and ethnic diversity on our faculties and then encourage administrators to take a stance. My data-driven research will help us begin to do this. Our increasingly diverse prospective students will want to know where a school stands, and they may choose their educational pathways with faculty heterogeneity in mind.
For students and their parents, cost and access will also always be part of the equation. Some undergraduate programs remain relatively affordable. Ten states, including New Mexico, offer free tuition to all in-state undergraduates in public universities. And it is no secret that community colleges offer the greatest affordability and, importantly, diverse student populations. Currently there are 30 states offering some version of a free tuition program in their two-year community college programs. If we value a program’s heterogeneity, let’s create meaningful partnerships with community colleges; ACSA’s new Toolkit for Community Colleges can help us do this.
The Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative
So, what can architecture educators do to support diversity in the Academy? During the early days of the pandemic in 2020, I helped found a group called the Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative (DEII) with several other design school deans; our efforts were led by Thäisa Way, director of garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Our first exploration included Deborah Berke (Yale University), Ila Berman (University of Virginia), Sarah Whiting (Harvard University), J. Meejin Yoon (Cornell University), Way, and myself. The pandemic was a time of great upheaval, when universities were reassessing the value of the classroom and students were reconfiguring social and academic engagement. This also took place after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that sparked diversity, equity, and inclusion movements across the country. Our intention was to bring schools together that were usually not in the same room. Similar thinking led to newly spearheaded projects like Dark Matter University, which began to pair up professors from Ivy League schools and HBCUs to offer co-taught graduate and undergraduate courses. Places Journal also began to expand its board with the same intention to diversify and broaden its reach across architecture school leadership. There was an overall desire to break down hierarchies rooted in entrenched ranking obsessions and bicoastal elitism for too long.
In our first meetings, we began by discussing the struggles we were experiencing heading design schools during a pandemic and ways to address the passionate demands our visionary students were making. However, we also saw institutions hastily diversifying with new activities; many were increasingly hiring target faculty to address social justice issues through newly formed postdocs, assistant professor lines, and other teaching posts. We observed too what many have underscored, that it is always faculty of color who are tasked with fixing the lack of diversity in our schools.
The DEII program that resulted allows these newly recruited, often solo-flying changemakers to come together as fellows throughout the year to share mutual support and to gain direct mentorship from academic leadership. To date, over 80 DEII fellows have joined. (You can learn more about our 2021–24 cohorts here.) The DEII group continues to grow, with more than 40 deans and directors joining us throughout the year to foster national conversations and knowledge exchange. DEII is one of the few venues that offers a regular stage for exchange, aligning architecture program leadership across the country with the mission to diversify and keep our schools from reflecting or even contributing to our nation’s political divide.
The kind of exchange between deans that is part of DEII is an entirely new type of national-level exchange as it keeps us in direct contact with the future professoriate across all 50 states. The results have been quite impactful and unlike anything I have previously experienced in academia. This is just one way to unite a divided academic culture and retain our faculty of color. But more work is needed.
I see the link between racial/ethnic diversity and degree diversity in the data I am preparing for future publication, which considers the many degrees of faculty across ranks. The assistant professors we are hiring today, although they remain predominantly male and white, are more diverse than the full professors at the top rank. Progress takes time. One thing I feel certain about is that a diverse professoriate is a key factor for students of color to make progress, because architecture is a discipline that has historically seen biased mentorship in the architecture studio transition into biased labor in the firm. These are the spaces where institutional racism and gender discrimination fester in our discipline, and the demographics of our architects reflect this. The creation of a diverse professoriate is one way for academia to meaningfully counter the national divisions we see today, and our faculties have the power to make this happen.
Robert Alexander González, PhD, AIA, is dean and a professor at the UNM School of Architecture and Planning. He is a registered architect and has served as an administrator for over 13 years, previously heading a community college–university program for nine years.
