We just had our annual diversity day here at University of Wisconsin. Luckily attendance isn't mandatory. But perhaps I should take the opportunity to ask just what in the world we're talking about.
The canonical definition of a diverse humanities faculty is hiring a white male poststructuralist, a black female poststructuralist, a Chinese lesbian poststructuralist, a plains Indian tribe poststructuralist, and so on.
Listening for laughter. Oh well. I guess `the sad kills the funny.'
Research Diversity
This is a research university. Faculty, staff, and students participate in studying various research topics. In a department you might find 2 professors and 2 graduate students studying nuclear oscillations; 1 professor studying the atomic theory of thin platinum films; 6 professors, 8 scientists and post-docs and 7 graduate students studying plasma confinement; and so on. Some of these research projects are large both in number of participants and in research money, while others are quite small: perhaps only 1/4 time of some professor.
Each department has to strike a balance between nurturing a variety of research fields and maintaining strong research groups. Simple fact of life: one researcher does not constitute a strong research group. Even a genius needs somebody to bounce ideas off, and true genius is pretty scarce. We ordinary folk need each other even more. If you want to attract people to an exciting research program, you have to supply enough man hours to welcome, guide, and challenge them. That means more than one person. If the research requires a lot of apparatus, you need a lot of people to run the experiments.
On the other hand, no single program can exhaust all the possibilities in a research field, and who knows which approach will be the most fruitful five years from now? Dual theory and Regge trajectories were useful in their time (and sometimes still are), but other theories rule the roost today. Projects have life spans, and eventually each will dry up and die. Keeping a variety of interests around keeps the department as a whole alive. And sometimes you get a synergy between different approaches (and even different departments).
Of course, striking that balance between strong groups and diverse research interests seems to generate nasty political battles, but that's a risk you run when trying to do anything important.
Diversity in Teaching Styles
Students come with different learning styles; visual, aural, reading/writing,and kinesthetic. (I saw it, I heard it, I read/wrote it, I touched it). Some learn a concept best by seeing it illustrated, others by hearing a lecture about it, others by reading or writing about it, and others by doing something tangible with it. On the surface the University caters only to the aural learners sitting in lecture hall listening to long talks. But demonstrations, labs, discussion sessions, and even office hours can ensure that all learning styles get a chance. What else can you call a lab but `hands-on study;' just right for the kinesthetic student? For those who need to talk something through, there are discussion sessions with TA's or one on one chats with the professor during office hours.
Some departments are better at fostering this kind of learning diversity than others. In the sciences and especially in engineering you almost always have to get your hands dirty, which is great for the often overlooked kinesthetic learners. On the other hand, mathematicians have a love for elegance which doesn't always translate into simple examples for the visual learners. Some other departments are quite poor at reaching out to non-aural non-reading/writing learners. (I invite you to imagine a person who learns best by seeing examples who tries to earn a degree in English Literature. I'd advise a career change...)
Can we do better at working with all learning styles? The `Rah Rah' answer is always yes, but the real answer is maybe. Each department should look at what it wants to teach, and how well these can be taught in other ways. Some disciplines just aren't well suited to certain learning styles.
Diversity in Debate
In some disciplines great questions are unanswered, and some problems are best understood by rediscovery through debate. We know that some problems are hard for one man to wrap his mind around, and on such issues collegial debate and new points of view are essential. ("What is freedom?") In other words, some diversity of points of view helps. We must bear in mind several points if we want to help find truth through diversity.
Merely having had different life experiences from somebody else doesn't automatically give you a different point of view on deep questions. It may. Raising children will certainly give you insights on the nature of freedom that a childless man won't automatically acquire--but he can learn these insights by watching his neighbors. Growing up in a different culture with different values may give you new insights--but these may already be quite familiar to your colleagues, who are generally able to read. Obviously skin color has no direct relevance to new points of view, though it can correlate with culture, which does.
I assume that real debate and real communication are possible. I am aware that many otherwise intelligent people disagree with me, claiming instead that personal narratives are unique and incommunicable. Let me merely point out that if they attempt to argue with me they concede my point.
There seem to be limits to the diversity we need. Diversity of viewpoint is a means to an end--discovering the truth. We do not invite flat-earth society members to astronomy seminars. We can safely say that some things have been proven wrong. Similarly a solipsistic philosopher has nothing to contribute to a debate. Pi is not equal to 3, and the Marxist prescription for governing proved to be the greatest catastrophe of the last century.
On the other hand, we do not know for sure if the speed of light has been constant throughout the Universe's lifetime. We expect that it has, but if you think you're on the path to figuring out how to test it, we'd like to hear from you. We welcome that kind of diversity. It has not been decisively proven that the oppressor/victim model is the only useful model of human interaction--but unfortunately a number of the humanities departments still maintain a mono-culture of partisans of that model.
One major problem militating against diversity in debate is the aforementioned desire for strong research groups. Big groups often take to empire-building and new hires are directed toward the dominant team. This becomes even more noxious if the group in question pretends to have perfect knowledge in debatable matters—it sometimes demonizes and drives out all opposition. I wish I could say the UW doesn't have this problem, but I've heard otherwise. Frequently.
Diversity in the Body
I find an intangible benefit to the experience of getting to know people of different perspectives and cultures that has nothing to do with debate or formal learning. I'm not talking about changing minds or attitudes, but of sensing more of what people can be like. Connaître vs savoir, if you like.
Debates are inevitably more abstract than daily life. You can see a difference between the nature of the knowledge of a woman who knows about a value and that of a woman who has internalized it and lives it out. Life is complex, and you can more easily see the limits of application of a philosophy when someone is living it. Most of these insights come as you grow friends with her. Her philosophy may be dead wrong, of course, and her life crippled accordingly--not all philosophies are equally valid. But you will understand even the errors in new ways as you get to know her, and learn how to distinguish character from beliefs.
We've always held that traveling broadened the mind: this is the same effect. To travel to a land with a different culture or to study the history of peoples with different values shows us how different values are actually lived, not just how they appear in the abstract. It is not necessary to live in every culture in the world to achieve this broadening of mind; just one or two new ones seems enough to benefit.
Don't forget our goal: finding truth (and building a noble character). The claim that all societies are equally good is unsupported, but it seems that just about every culture cultivates some virtue not as well respected in my own culture. And we in turn encourage virtues other cultures don't cultivate.
We can't test for this 'broadening of mind' and 'understanding of how ideas are lived.' It is by nature extremely personal. If we pretend to measure it by checking answers against a list of expected attitudes, we take the student's focus away from his friends and put it on a checklist of approved attitudes. It is counterproductive and stupid to try to measure things so intangible. Set up an environment that encourages interaction between students of different cultures, and hope for the best.
Unfortunately some cultures disparage education. Current examples include 'ghetto culture' which rejects what it can of the dominant culture and Wahabi culture which values only Koranic study. History is unpleasantly full of other examples of barbarians who despise anything associated with their civilized enemies (and 'ghetto cultures' are common too). Unless a youth from one of these cultures is eager to buck his society and value learning, he will not benefit from his time here, and his peers will not benefit from his presence. If he wants to come, we should assume he's eager.
Diversity in the Student Body
This is rather complicated.
- A state university should in theory find within it proportions of different cultures and races in its student body like those of the state it serves. Unfortunately, some cultures (ghetto culture, Wahabi, etc.) disparage education, and so you will find fewer students from those cultures. When such a culture correlates well with race, you wind up with an inevitable racial disproportion in the student body.
The usual tools for dealing with this are aggressive recruiting and lowering admission standards—both missing the point. The real problems have to be addressed elsewhere; in the inferior elementary schools and in the subculture. To skew proportions still farther, if you have a good university and people from around the world want to attend, the student body looks even less like the state.
- Part of the university experience is supposed to involve making friends, some of whom will have challenging ideas and approaches to life and to knowledge. Such friends can stretch you in ways no professor can inspire. The school can ensure that you make acquaintances, but not that you make friends.
If a man wants to major in wine and women there isn't much the university can do about it so long as he pays his fees and does his ordinary course work. A couple of hundred years ago a college might throw such a student out for violating moral standards. Modern universities don't do that any more; but they are trying to revive the principle, just applying it to political correctness
instead.
This seems to argue a counsel of despair: you can't honestly get the racial proportions that the bean counters want, and even if you did there's no guarantee that the students would benefit. Just watch how students cluster in their familiar groups. And of course the desirable diversity is cultural and not racial.
But the US has major cultural divisions, some running along racial lines, and students sometimes arrive with quite significant prejudices about other races or religions. (I've seen them; you probably have too.) I agree that we need to be proactive in admonishing incoming students (and faculty?) that all seekers of wisdom are to be welcomed. Currently our orientation program is profoundly defective: it assumes that only whites are prejudiced and that cultural and religious conservatives are manifestly wrong. Can you say `bigotry?' (I refer to 2002 and 2003—I haven't looked at this year's orientations.)
Men and Women
Perhaps the most famous example of differences in 'culture' is that men and women approach life slightly differently. There's a common misconception that gender is socially constructed. This is, of course, an error. The
expression of gender is heavily socially constructed, but there remain irreducible differences. In all cultures I'm familiar with the social expressions of masculinity and femininity differ from each other, as though there were some automatic polarization at work regardless of the culture. Anyone who watches young children closely can observe similar polarization arising without any outside pressure.
Unfortunately I don't find the arguments either for or against co-ed classrooms compelling. I want the arguments for co-ed classes to be compelling: it seems valuable to have both masculine and feminine points of view in some of the liberal arts. (Of course such differences in point of view are irrelevant in math or the physical sciences.) Unfortunately we also find a kind of "courtship dance" in class, which distracts and which skews participation. I can't confidently conclude that co-ed classes are better or worse than single-sex classrooms. Determining that answer is a job for experiment, and since the culture changes the experiment needs to be repeated every few decades. If I must guess, I guess that the penalty for failing to focus will weed out the overly hormonal, and so co-ed is fine; and that for some of the liberal arts it provides helpful variation in points of view.
That the University environment is better with both men and women seems clear enough—that's who the real world is made of.
Summary
Diversity is not a goal, but a means to an end. Our goal is to discover and teach the truth; and traditionally also to help develop character, both by exposure to wisdom and by broadening the mind with exposure to other cultures and values.
- In research we have to balance diversity with concentration (strength).
- We need to make sure our teaching methods are varied enough to accommodate our student's diverse learning style--as much as is practical.
- We need to understand which questions are debatable, and welcome varieties of approach.
- We need to keep in mind what we want to achieve with diversity, and not merely try to measure our diversity by the number of shades of skin color in a picture.
Edited lightly: 20-Dec-2008
