Minority and women students are like the canaries that miners once used to detect dangerous levels of toxic gases, civil-rights advocate Lani Guinier told a UC Davis audience last week. Their difficulties thriving in the classroom should be seen as warnings for everyone in the university, she said. "We have taken to assume that the solution is either to fix the canary-outfit it with a little pint-size gas mask to withstand the toxic atmosphere of the mines-or repopulate the hierarchy with more canaries because they will then exercise power differently. "We need to heed the signal and fix the mine, not the canaries." Guinier's Nov. 2 speech-"Rethinking Power: The Work that Race and Gender Do"-given to an overflow crowd in the Main Theatre, drew praise from a number of UC Davis faculty and staff members who have been working to increase campus diversity. They said Guinier's analysis of power offered a new framework for examining classroom instructional methods and faculty hiring and promotions, as well as campus culture and values. "People were very excited and energized," said Desmond Jolly, director of the UC Davis Small Farm Center. "I think it had a lot to do with her personally because she is so articulate, bright and brave. "I don't expect a groundswell of change, but I think she brought an analysis to us that I think we can use to understand how academic politics work." English department chair Linda Morris agreed. "I thought a lot of what she was saying could help us rethink what we're doing and what we're looking for," Morris said. Guinier, a former Clinton nominee to head the U.S. Justice Department's civil-rights division, questioned the strategy of civil-rights activists and feminists who have focused simply on increasing the representation of minorities and women in corporations and the professions. That strategy assumes that "if we infiltrate the hierarchy of power with different people...that we will change the way that power is exercised for everyone," Guinier said. "From my experience, that assumption doesn't always ring true." Instead, she said, society needs to look beyond the power struggle itself to also examine two other dimensions of power-who designed the rules of the game and the winner-take-all "master narrative" that excludes the losers from sharing power. "You've got to rethink power in order to move to the next level of social justice," she said to applause. Rooted in teaching methods Guinier gave two examples where she said troubles faced by women and minority students turned out to be rooted not in the students themselves but in the professors' traditional "sage-on-the-stage" teaching methods. Efforts to make learning more interactive benefited not only women and minorities, but all students, she said. At the University of Pennysylvania Law School, where Guinier taught before she joined the Harvard Law School faculty, female students' grades begin trailing those of male students by the end of their first year even though they enter with virtually the same academic credentials. A survey by one of Guinier's students found that more than two-thirds of women rarely raised their hands in class. About the same percentage of men volunteered to speak at least once a week. "The men in law school treat the Socratic classroom as a game you win, a game of being first," Guinier said. "The women looked at it as a conversation. They want to say something concise and relevant." While some of Guinier's colleagues suggested that women students should learn to compete more like their male counterparts, she said that law schools should instead rethink their curriculum. Law schools are training future attorneys primarily to "ask rude questions," questions that they already know the answers to, when they should be training them to be creative problem-solvers, she said. Guinier has worked at Harvard and at the University of Pennsylvania with diverse groups of students in designing curriculum and picking textbooks, which she said develops their problem-solving skills. "They work harder in this course than in any other class," she said. At UC Berkeley, a calculus professor concerned about the test scores of his African American students discovered they were actually spending longer hours at their books than high-scoring Chinese American students were. However, the African American students were studying alone, while their Chinese American peers were working in groups. After the professor created peer-study workshops, the African American students' scores rose within the year to among the highest in the class, Guinier said. Guinier's speech was interrupted numerous times by applause and concluded with a standing ovation from the more than 500 people in the audience. "What she had to say seemed to really resonate with people," said Robin Whitmore, director of the Women's Resources and Research Center, which sponsored Guinier's talk with the campus Office of Diversity and the Provost's Campus Council on Com-munity and Diversity. "Professor Guinier gave us an analysis of the existing situation," Whitmore said. "What we need now are practical ideas for how we can transform UC Davis. Maybe those have to come from all of us." Last month, UC Davis began forming several committees to examine how the campus can hire more women and minorities.(See the provost's letter on page 2.) At the same time, the campus has expanded a diversity education series offered this year through Professional and Staff Development. Among the workshops is one titled "Intercultural Interviewing: the Key to Effective Hiring," which will be offered this spring for the first time. "Our goal is to help people see that diversity education just doesn't happen in a two-hour workshop. It's a lifelong process and we need to continually engage ourselves in it," said Karen Roth, coordinator of the Diversity Awareness Program. Morris of the English department said she was encouraged by "very forceful statement" made recently by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert Grey about the campus's pursuit of diversity. "It's going to take, among other things, that kind of strong statement at the top to make a change," she said. "There has to be a change in the culture. It's got to be a lot of people's priorities." Morris said UC Davis, like other large research universities, needs to re-examine its priorities in hiring faculty. False dichotomy "If you're in charge of a search and you keep saying, 'We've got to go for the best person,' how you see 'best' depends on what you're looking for," she said. "People talk about it as if it were an absolute. I think there is a false dichotomy between 'best' and 'diverse.'" "In the end it's actually fairly insulting-and I don't think people mean to be-to imply that if you are a woman or person of color, you can't be the best." Morris suggested the campus could give incentives, such as additional faculty positions, for schools and colleges, that hire more diverse faculties. She also suggested closing hiring searches if a position fails to attract a diverse pool of applicants. "I do not think of this as a matter of accommodating somebody," Morris said. "It's a matter of rethinking our values." Law professor Martha West, who has worked for 18 years to improve recruitment and retention of women faculty campuswide, said she was discouraged by recent hiring trends. "I really appreciated [Guinier's] description of power and how power exerts itself," West said. "From a woman faculty member's point of view, those in power-whether consciously or unconsciously-practice exclusion on a regular basis. "Those who make the hiring decisions on the faculty are 80 percent male, and in the last two years the percentage of women hired has fallen from a 34 percent average to 15 percent and 18 percent." West said a previous task force found that only 15 percent of applicants for UC Davis faculty positions from 1986 to 1991 were women, while the nationwide pool of scholars receving doctorates in recent years was 40 percent female. "Part of the problem is the departments don't have a standardized way of keeping track of applicants," she said. Existing recruitment procedures require deans to verify that applicants reflect the available pool before finalists are invited here for interviews. "We have procedures in place that are not being enforced," she said. On the other hand, West said women law students here fare far better than their counterparts at Harvard or the University of Pennsylania. At King Hall, the top 10 percent of the class is half female, reflecting their representation in the entire student body. She said that is because the law school here is relatively young, more open and emphasizes good teaching. Jolly, a consumer specialist in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department, said he was skeptical about chances for widespread change. "I'm not holding my breath. I've been on the campus for 30 years. Unfortunately, I sense little interest in rethinking power in the academy." However, he added, "I think bright people, reflective people will start looking deeper, beyond the numbers, to the psycho-socio-political dynamics that lie behind the numbers." Jolly said a sense of mission and faculty unity the campus enjoyed in its early days as an agricultural college has been lost. "In the large multicollege university, the only sense of mission seems to be success. That success is constructed as a scarce commodity that has to be rationed." Jolly said he was considering convening a group of scholars to create a vision for the university in the 21st century. "It's not considered to be part of what we focus on. Our whole academic training is very narrow, it's very reductionist. You become a biochemist, or whatever. "It's considered passé to reflect on the quality of our own environment. People typically do that in the privacy of their own minds. We think in terms of our disciplines."