What is "diversity"?

What is re-branding when it comes to a college campus?

I have an answer to the rest of your question but would you answer that for me.
BTW apologies if i’m being a dipshot because it’s late and I’m ready for bed but thought I’d answer this first.

How can you have a diverse experience or view point if your environment does not have people from diverse background. Being a woman, being a person of color, being gay, being disabled, being of another culture, or the combination of any of the above will undeniably enrich a social environment because life experience is very much affected by one’s social background/identity.

While looking different on the outside is one measure of diversity, another very important one is geographical diversity, since culture and thought patterns vary by location. This is why the University of Texas has a recruiting office in New York City.

Perhaps your institution needs not only to reach out to those from different genetic and physical backgrounds, but also those from different parts of America and the world.

@RedPowerLady We have a very unique course of study at my college. Everyone studies the same set of great books in mathematics, politics, philosophy, literature, history, etc. It is a very rigorous and serious place. And we expect devoted students who understand the gravity of “the program” and are willing to undertake it with the utmost commitment. However, we are having trouble in this economically uncertain time finding students to enroll (In my opinion because we are targeting high school students and not people who are dissatisfied with their current academic culture or college dropouts who left because they couldn’t handle the hypocrisy of the American Higher Education system).

Branding is an important part of a college’s survival. A college is a business, especially if it doesn’t have a substantial endowment. The administration of my school is “re-branding” by changing our admissions materials and advertisements. Rather than advertising a bunch of “talking heads” smoking pipes in small rooms, it wants to project an image of a bunch of rock-climbing douche-bags with an asian here, an african american there, a white person here, a latino person there sitting around a fountain laughing with one another.

Our current admission material consists of a little brown paper book with 70 pages of text describing what our program is. There are almost no pictures, and what few there are are black and white. That’s what I mean by branding.

What college is this?

St. John’s College, with two campuses in Santa Fe, NM and Annapolis, MD

One of the problems I see is that the college advertises itself as studying the works of dead white men. These days at any rate you need to have some diversity in who you study as well as in your students.

In addition, the degree conferred is simply a liberal arts degree. It doesn’t make anyone particularly employable, which is a problem these days. I would suggest that the college talk at least some about successful alumni and what place they have found for themselves in the world.

I think your institution should be applauded for wanting to branch out and develop a varied student body. As an inspiring educator I will always give the up most of respect to higher education however I think education also comes from experiences. If you only know your own prospective and that of others in similar backgrounds as yourself your perceptions is so closed and limited. The more people from different backgrounds and cultures you interact with the better chance you have of understanding what the world is ready made up of.

Interesting question. Diversity is important, maybe even more so in a small liberal arts college. To get a truly diverse student body, I definitely think attracting more people of color is essential. Regardless of the different life experiences you all bring to the table right now, all of you have had these experiences within the framework of your skin color (or lack thereof). Gender certainly plays a role, too.

I can see why your school would like to inject some ‘fun’ pictures into its recruiting materials, but if they de-emphasize the rigor of the course work, I think that would be a grave mistake. Both for them, and any new students. I don’t see why they can’t be shown side by side, though.

@RedPowerLady You and I, being of various pigments and colours; part Jewish/part ostrich can be defined as diverse.

Oddly enough I had never heard of St. Johns College before this thread, yet this morning I saw it cited in a novel I was reading. Interesting coincidence!

@aeschylus What makes you think that by bringing in more diversity or by targeting diverse audiences your school will somehow change for the worse?
Or are you simply peeved by the re-branding and not the targeting of new audiences?

You will find that your school is just catching up in this arena. When I was in college I was part of a series of student unions for students of color and other “minority” groups. I cannot tell you how many times someone would come down to our tiny hall, in the basement nonetheless, just to take pictures of the people of color so they could go in their recruitment magazines. It was horribly annoying. I agree that the academics should be the main focus and diversity should not be falsely advertised. In fact the drop out rate of students of color during their first year is so high because they come to school and find there is no one here to support them, they are all alone. However, recruiting diverse students is absolutely necessary for a complete academic experience. It simply needs to be done more honestly.

@NewZen You know it’s good you mention that, so many people forget to target the ostrich society when it comes to their academic institutions

@RedPowerLady ARE WE RELATED TO THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY TOO?

@NewZen I won’t claim them but you can ;)

@RedPowerLady Thank you for your response. I didn’t mean for this to become a discussion about my school, but I don’t want to leave your question hanging. It’s hard to communicate in any timely fashion what my school is about, so its difficult to say succinctly how this change would harm its mission. Basically, in class I see an increasing lack of preparation and growing apathy, mostly because people are admitted who haven’t formed a clear notion of what our “community of learning” does at the college. That seems to me like the goal of admissions material and advertisement for an institution with any integrity: clearly communicate the mission, course of study, and facilities of the college. I welcome a more diverse student body, but I just don’t know how that can be meaningfully measured or promoted, and I disagree with the dishonest way (as you have pointed out) that they are going about attracting people, especially since it threatens to harm our community by de-emphasizing a clear presentation of the information people need to consider before coming to our school. In a very small community, 100 new people showing up every year makes a HUGE difference in the culture of the place, and in just a few years can completely change the tone of the work we do (not that it should matter to me, as a senior). I am concerned about the mission of my college and consider it valuable, so I am threatened by a movement to water it down in favor of a concept, “diversity,” that seems largely nebulous and that may have no value in itself, but rather only the supplementary value of enriching an educational environment that could become bankrupt and therefore no longer worth enriching.

As for the rest of your response, I think it provides a great basis for further discussion. I would like to hear more about your experiences with student unions. How does acknowledging our differences and establishing organizations to segregate groups of students help us gain from diversity (presenting this in a polemic manner here, no offense intended)? Is the need for these unions indicative of a real unique point of view measurable by genetic background? How can one be “all alone” in a community full of thoughtful human beings?

Thanks for you participation, I hope you’ll stay with us in the discussion.

@aeschylus The reason I ask questions about your college in particular is because I think too often we discuss the issue of diversity as it is some object outside of us when in fact it affects us all very personally. I find it a much more effective tool to address diversity as it pertains to specific examples than to address the issue so widely as it is a very large issue.

In terms of what is going on in your school I feel as if there are two issues you are addressing.
1. The new branding is not honest and de-emphasizes academics. I think most all of us can agree that this is not appropriate.
2. That focusing on diversity will hurt the mission statement and academic focus of your school. This is where I beg to differ. I would argue that focusing on diversity is necessary for an honest academic career and that by not having diversity at your school you are seriously lacking in your academics as well as your social education.

In response to your questions:

1. How does acknowledging our differences and establishing organizations to segregate groups of students help us gain from diversity (presenting this in a polemic manner here, no offense intended)?
There are two pre-dominant reasons that student unions are helpful.
A. It helps students of color, those who are a part of the student unions, find support. So this helps reduce drop-out rates. You have to understand that students of color come from cultures and backgrounds that are often very different than the culture of the academic institution. This culture shock can be devastating and is much more extreme than for those who are part of the majority. These unions create a buffer. They also allow students to practice their cultural values while away from their communities.
B. It helps promote diversity among those who are not part of the organization. Again this happens in multiple ways.
– You get a variety of viewpoints in your classroom. Since the students are allowed to keep their cultural values alive and supported through student unions they feel more comfortable bringing in cultural viewpoints to the classroom. This helps further the discussion of most academic subjects. It helps majority students learn how each subject is really indeed complex.
– The student unions offer cultural events. And all students are allowed to attend these events. This is cultural sharing which obviously creates an understanding and acceptance of different cultures.

2. Is the need for these unions indicative of a real unique point of view measurable by genetic background?
Could you clarify?

3. How can one be “all alone” in a community full of thoughtful human beings?
It’s really quite simple. Thoughtful human beings are subject to different forms of thought. Unless you’ve been part of a different culture you may not understand how this works but your thought processes are shaped by your culture. When you come into an academic institution most people are thinking in a way that is much different from the way you were taught to think. Not only this but perhaps more importantly is the idea that without diversity biased thoughts are actually encouraged which alienates students of color.

@Darwin

Our study of the dead white men (although I don’t think Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, or W.E.B. DuBois fall among them), is an attempt to probe the assumptions underlying modern modes of thought and civilization-wide neuroses that go back to Plato and Aristotle.

Although it may not be immediately apparent, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes, Euclid, Apollonius and Einstein are still relevant today. We live in the west, and we should try to know our place in our own history, if we wish to thoughtfully and consciously direct its future.

I do not think undergraduate degrees are very valuable in general. Experience is much more important. Or, more to the point, providing valuable to people in your community (whether local or global) is the ultimate source of wealth and happiness. Being “employable” is frankly not very important as such. Companies are just proxy servers to customers, they get all their money from people who make choices about how to live their lives; providing them with a valuable choice is where money comes from.

St. John’s used to have no qualms about its uselessness, because frankly usefulness is a limited and rather narrow view of value. Aristotle dismissed it with a wave because anything useful must be useful for something else. St. John’s is not deliberately useful to the end of getting a job at a company, and I don’t think it should lie to people and say that it is. Successful alumni (I would say from ANY college) are successful by their own skills and perseverance, not in any large part because of the school they went to.

I do not intend to convince anyone that what St. John’s does is useful or even valuable. Those who see its value will be attracted to it and those who don’t, won’t. For Christ’s sake we only need to enroll 200 people per year. You don’t think there are 200 people out of the 1.5 billion who would be able to find out about it that want to read Euclid in the original, or learn electromagnetism from Maxwell himself?

@RedPowerLady Your 1st point makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for telling me about these unions. We have nothing like them at St. John’s and I never really got into the college life of other universities I have attended, so I’m not familiar with them at all. They sound like they would be a great facility for the campus, and that advertising that facility would make people who don’t come from institutional backgrounds more comfortable applying. Unfortunately, I guess a college needs a sizable population from that culture to establish a union.

Your third point also makes me think of things differently. Usually arguments of this sort stem from the belief that simply being around a lot of people that are superficially different from you but similar to each other would isolate a person, even though they are around people 24/7, live with them, eat with them, and go to class with them. But it sounds like you’re saying that it is the institutional environment itself, and the mindset of people who are so used to institutions, that poses the real threat to culture. If this is what you mean, I couldn’t agree more.

Is the significance of diversity then more fundamentally about defining ourselves with cultural integrity in spite of the wide-spread institutionalization of society?

Your comments also make me think of another kind of diversity. Diversity of viewpoints over time (much as Darwin pointed out the importance of geographic diversity earlier). How valuable are the points of view of people from 200 years ago in Europe, or 100 years ago in America? Does this fit in with diversity?

“For Christ’s sake we only need to enroll 200 people per year.”

Then forget diversity and target those who want to read Euclid in the original.

Unfortunately, I guess a college needs a sizable population from that culture to establish a union.
Many smaller institutions have what is called a Multicultural Center instead of separate student unions. It works much in the same way as there are not enough students to support the separate student unions.

it is the institutional environment itself, and the mindset of people who are so used to institutions, that poses the real threat to culture. If this is what you mean, I couldn’t agree more. Yes this is spot on.

Is the significance of diversity then more fundamentally about defining ourselves with cultural integrity in spite of the wide-spread institutionalization of society?
Absolutely! And what better way to define cultural identity than exploring your own cultural roots or those of another person. You simply cannot do that without cultural diversity. It is impossible.

How valuable are the points of view of people from 200 years ago in Europe, or 100 years ago in America? Does this fit in with diversity? They provide an interesting beginning of the conversation when it comes to diversity. However you have to understand that the viewpoints from the past are particularly from the colonizers and slaveowners viewpoints. This does not form diversity in thought but rather uniformity in thought. So for these viewpoints to be truly indicative of diversity in thought you would need two additional components:
1. You would have to search for viewpoints written by individuals who were not colonizers. Slave diaries, Native American oral traditions etc…
2. You have to include people from these diverse backgrounds so they can explain how the viewpoints of the dead white men are not the only ones that exist and how the viewpoints from their culture are important and how the viewpoints of the dead white men have often hurt cultural diversity. You don’t always have to believe the viewpoints of those who are culturally diverse but you absolutely need their input to form any educated decisions or diversity of thought.
(3). I would also include discussion on these viewpoints translate into modern phenomenon.

@Darwin I hope you’re not being facetious, although I couldn’t blame you if you were.

I think wanting to do the course of study is the necessary condition of applying, but that’s not to say such a place wouldn’t need people who both want to do the work and come from different cultural backgrounds.

Maybe it really is silly to expect people from backgrounds which the thrust of western culture has basically screwed over to want to study western culture. Although, shouldn’t one know their enemy? It does make for an interesting class to have someone constantly attacking a book, as long as they’ve made an effort to get inside the author’s head first.

I guess that’s what I mean by temporal diversity. Even if always in the context of “the west,” reading a book from such a different time is an interaction with a foreign culture and point of view, and that point of view is at least valuable as just that, an “Other’s” point of view, even for people from very marginalized segments of the global society.

@RedPowerLady I’m glad we’ve come to an understanding on some of these things. This is by far the best discussion I’ve ever had about diversity. Thanks also for telling me about the multicultural centers.

I would like to explore your last three points a little more. Having read a number of these books by now, I have to disagree that they are mostly the products of slave-owning and colonizing cultures. In fact, many of these books were written by people who were ostracized from their homes for expressing their viewpoints, they have survived and are studied precisely because they went so strongly against the grain and produced real, lasting change in the way people thought. Socrates went to trial as a political criminal for having been affiliated with those who opposed Athens’ colonization of the rest of Greece. One of his closest associates, Alcibiades, is famed for having gone over to the Persians and adapted so well to their culture that he became one of their leading men. Socrates was also trying to raise the awareness of the youth by constantly asking them abstract questions about how things really were, outside of the cultural context of the day. It was for this habit, with which he enraged his judges during his trial, that he was put to death. Plato, as one of his students, recorded Socrates’ interactions in a literary form, injecting his own thoughts on some of Socrates’ questions by means of the medium in which he was writing. He is one of the first people on record to advocate equality among men and women in The Republic. Spinoza, as a Spanish Jew, had to flee Spain and was ex-communicated both from the Jewish community and the Christian Church for his viewpoints. The continuing dialogue of mathematics and physics has little or nothing to do with colonialism. The greatest bias in physics was Newton’s conception of absolute space and time, which was refuted by Aristotle in the 300s BCE.

Examples abound. I think the thing linking them all is that they made a huge difference on the way people thought in the very flow of history, precisely because they appealed to a standard of general human excellence and dignity in the face of limiting and destructive institutions. They are so well crafted and thought out that they could not be marginalized or destroyed. This is also the case with some civil rights leaders and supreme court cases, but I don’t think it is the case with slave diaries. In general, it has largely been the colonizers and slave-owners who have been ignored by the flow of ideas throughout time, probably because they have had little to offer of universal human interest. Perhaps that’s why the Romans produced no original works of note in any branch of knowledge or art, with the exception of some cheap copies of Greek poetry and sculpture.

In the later twentieth century people came of age as to the importance of preserving traditions, like the Native American oral traditions, for the sake of preserving them. Because their history was oral, we have no way of knowing how it truly fits in to the history of the conquerors, because it died with the people and could not be copied. Thus, their points of view have had little or no impact on the forces that predominate in the world, whereas those that overthrow or successfully outwit the conquerors with the truth and prescience of their ideas do.

Much has been lost. But much of very high quality has been preserved. Should we not study the things that have survived and changed the lives of billions with as much (or, I daresay, more) attention than those that have not?

That being said, I definitely sympathize with your second and third points. What has been lost and why, and what affect it has had on the modern day should certainly form a major part of any curriculum. However, I refuse to disbelieve that there have been works done that speak to a universal human spirit, that address questions of great importance to any individual or culture in a beautiful way. And I also believe that if a choice should have to made between such a work, and a work that has only barely survived a span of 200–400 years, that I would choose the first.

@aeschylus If you can respectfully disagree that most not all of history is written from the colonizers viewpoint then I believe cultural education could benefit you some. You have provided a great example using Socrates. But he is by far not the majority.

The continuing dialogue of mathematics and physics has little or nothing to do with colonialism.
I would argue that you are missing the point here. How often do you study Aztec math or other cultural forms of math in your academic career? Perhaps the ongoing dialogue in the field of mathematics is not culturally controversial but it is culturally lacking. Thus the need for diversity. I cannot speak in regards to physics, i will admit my failing in that, because I really know very little about the topic.

it has largely been the colonizers and slave-owners who have been ignored by the flow of ideas throughout time
Absolutely not true. How do you figure? Our entire view of history is taught by the perspective of colonizers and slave owners. Of course you are going quite a bit farther back in history by relating Roman and Greek times to more recent histories of slave-owners and colonizers. Perhaps you should distinguish between the two because there is simply no argument for more contemporary colonizers and slave-owners writing the American history that is taught in both primary and higher education today.

In the later twentieth century people came of age as to the importance of preserving traditions, like the Native American oral traditions, for the sake of preserving them. Because their history was oral, we have no way of knowing how it truly fits in to the history of the conquerors, because it died with the people and could not be copied. Thus, their points of view have had little or no impact on the forces that predominate in the world, whereas those that overthrow or successfully outwit the conquerors with the truth and prescience of their ideas do

This is also lacking in cultural education. Native oral traditions are preserved by their very nature. They are not dead. And the idea that their points of view have had no impact on the forces that predominate the world is entirely false and it is even culturally biased. I may add that I am Native American so as not to confuse you with where my information comes from. This statement is also very racially biased and in fact scares me a bit: whereas those that overthrow or successfully outwit the conquerors with the truth and prescience of their ideas do. This is the ideology of a white supremacist.

Much has been lost. But much of very high quality has been preserved. Should we not study the things that have survived and changed the lives of billions with as much (or, I daresay, more) attention than those that have not?

I’m not sure what you are referring to as lost?

Now on your last note please consider that I am not saying that one should not study historical thought but rather that one must study multicultural historical thought and also have the viewpoint of people from many cultures to interpret it and it’s relevance on both contemporary times and historical times. Otherwise you are stuck in a very linear model of thinking that is in fact quite lacking in diversity.

My reasoning for pointing out what is lacking in cultural education is not to be rude but to be poignant. You seem very open to hearing my point of view and make very good an respectful arguments. I sincerely appreciate that. At the same time I notice some arguments that lack in cultural understanding, I point those out as part of my reasoning that this very education is needed in our academic institutions.

Also it can be helpful to provide clear examples rather than speak in generalities as it becomes a bit confusing. So if it is possible please provide examples of what you mean (i.e. what are you referring to as lost).

Perhaps it would be easier to take one point at a time?

Oh boy, this is not going anywhere fast.

I have a native friend. One of the most fascinating history I learned from the natives is on gender issues. There are matriarchal tribes and two spirited people. It made me angry to read that their tradition is wiped due to the european view on the gender binary. I think we would all benefit if we learn to challenge the gender binary and the role of women and men in the captialist economy. I know people are awakened to changes, I hope more changes will come through.

On the other hand, I do enjoy the education of “dead white men”. I love Aristotle, even though he was sexist, and approved slavery. I don’t deny that they had alot of things that are relevant to human existence. “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

But it is surely a welcome move when school adds diversity , feminist thoughts, queer theory, native studies to the core cirrculum. It really enhances our worldview.

@airowDee Very well said on all points. I am so glad your friend educated you on Native matriarchies and two spirit people. There are other gender classifications as well that are quite interesting.

I’m not saying that “dead white men” aren’t valuable. Rather that they are more valuable when diversity is incorporated into the academic agenda.

A bullshit bumpersticker buzzword.