The Chronicle issue on Diversity in Academe came out a few weeks ago, and it contains several articles, reports, and opinion pieces on where the American campus currently stands. We have statements about efforts to bring more minorities and women into the faculty, the identity of Asian-Americans and Middle-Easterners, bureaucratic silos, and more.
It all sounds like a dynamic enterprise underway, with lots of thought and energy and innovation and critical thinking (about disappointments) in play.
But to anybody who hasn’t adopted diversity as a primary motivation or object of interest, Diversity in Academe looks much different — and downright strange. Diversity is an idea and a value that few academics would contest. We regret the racial gaps in academic and economic achievement, and want to see more underrepresented groups in classrooms. We also see the dangers of uniformity and groupthink on campus, and desire more minority perspectives in the room.
But the reflective approach to diversity isn’t only to value and advocate it. It is also to recognize that diversity so conceived can conflict with other values. These include merit, equity, independence (from the diversity party line), productivity (when resources are steered toward diversity initiatives), and free speech (when the speech is anti-diversity). Diversity folks claim, of course, that diversity initiatives are out to ensure merit etc., not to hinder them, but all too often, their claim aims to close the question, not to entertain it.
In their hands, diversity eclipses the rest, which means that they end up in an untenable position. In sum, they put too much institutional, ideological, and psychic pressure on the idea and its practice — so much, in fact, that diversity becomes an overdetermined, fraught notion that divides people into two camps, the diversiphiles and everybody else.
Here are two examples from Diversity in Academe:
On page B22, Northeastern University has a half-page advertisement that announces:
Di-ver-si-ty: We define it as a life-changing experience. At Northeastern University, diversity is:
• The way in which we engage the world
• The opportunity to learn from new perspectives
• A core value for our University
• An essential element of contemporary life
• An expression of cultural pride
• A reflection of our campus, our community, and our global partners
Obviously, this is a lot to ask of one idea, and one wonders what some of it means (“way in which we engage the world”?). Indeed, one can see how diversity would actually oppose “expressions of cultural pride.” An ad like this, we realize, isn’t about following the statements to their full implications. It’s about passing along an attitude, an enthusiasm.
Another example carries that enthusiasm in the other direction, not toward the positive but toward the negative: “The enemies of diversity are hoisting a glass every night these days.”
That’s the opening line of an article entitled “The Wrong Fight Against Discrimination.” The policy point of the article is to criticize affirmative action in college admissions as a flawed practice, and to advocate for more resources and assistance to “dark-skinned” students from elementary school onward. But the emotional point of the article is to demonize, for it casts diversity opponents (without saying who they are) as cold, insulated, inhumane people: “They don’t care what happens to dark-skinned, low-income children; they neither have nor know any.”
What to say? If diversity has become this pressurized a term, it touches pro-folks as a sacred cause and impresses the rest as either a distraction or coercion. It can’t last. The notion has lots of social baggage but not enough intellectual heft to endure in the intellectual climate of the campus. This, I think, is why the diversity discourse is so prevalent, so voluminous and urgent. Without the panicky undertone, diversity takes its place among the other intellectual values of the campus, which is where it should be.
