Diversity -- I've typed it three times already -- is a perennial academic buzzword if there ever was or will be one. In today's higher education, we are under perpetual bombardment with the question, "Are we diverse enough?" You'd almost think the administrators who keep dropping the "d" word would start adopting children of different races to promote diversity in their own households. But seriously, I think that it would help every now and then to step away from just accepting the need for diversity, incontrovertible though it may seem, and remind ourselves for what sake we desire diversity.
Statistics rule our lives more than we'd like to think, and statistics about diversity can be the most damning thing an institution can suffer (and harder to recover from than bankruptcy). Last spring when the Greek system was under fire for being too heavily white, Greek advocates fired back that the faculty who voted to end their existence was itself even less diverse. Well, we could argue statistics all year long.
I often turn to the words of an old friend (and pizza industry employee) who once said, "The most important things in life can be learned from pizza." I walked into Food Court last night and got some pizza that looked like it had a bunch of vegetables. All my favorite toppings: onions, peppers, mushrooms and (gasp!) summer squash? At first I thought it was just another example of the system doing its job to fulfill our needs for topping diversity. Then I remembered that once when I was delivering for Domino's I had to take a pizza to the local Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. You know what toppings he got? All of them. He didn't discriminate. The morals of this (very nearly irrelevant) story are that statistics are like pizza toppings: you can't read too much into them and you should never take the advice of someone who dresses like Elvis and does fake wrestling.
But what we're after is something we easily forget. I turn to the standard criticism of the movement for an Asian American Studies program: why do we need yet another department tailoring to the needs of a specific group? Apparently, it's too easy to forget that if we were all here to segregate by and learn about our own cultures, none of our parents would find it worthwhile to be paying our enormous tuition (except for you diploma-hungry few, damn you).
What we need, at least in the long run, is not simply a Latina sorority. While this would allow the Greek system to claim greater diversity, the campus would stay just as segregated as before. What we need is more than a Korean language program for Koreans and greater numbers of minority students to make our minorities feel more comfortable. Someone's got to get the message out that increased diversity is for us, and by "us" I mean both all of us and also specifically people like me who come from a socially and economically segregated high school and hometown.
To the '04s choosing your majors and thinking about your course loads for the coming years: if there's one thing I regret about my time here, it's not branching out more and taking more courses about other cultures and religions sooner than I did, not leaving myself time to take random courses simply "because they're different" or "because they don't affect me." The latter I mean ironically, as it's used as an easy and lame excuse to stick to the basics -- the canon -- the comfortable stuff. I don't mean to preach, since I've been guilty of it myself. Rather, I think the message needs to get out, at least louder than before, that what's missing from diversity initiatives is us, the students, for whose benefit this all is about. What's missing from the landscape of diversity on campus is our coming together, socially and academically, and taking full advantage of the available resources (including each other).
How can we do this? It's going to take more than just a change in our distributive requirements, more than a new office for Ozzie Harris and more than me whistling "Dixie" in The Dartmouth week after week. Like most campus-improving efforts, this column is starting to feel like the committee that infinitely makes speeches about the merit of action over words in Monty Python's "Life of Brian." But for one moment longer, I beg you: shut your cynical hole and listen!
Discussion of these issues is not mere talk, for in considering each other's perspective we accomplish more than most obvious actions. Cooperation between different groups has been and will continue to be the best way to organize events to bring diversity issues and a diversity of students together. Greek houses especially (though some have done so admirably) must take more active roles in this process! Finally, organization is key here and as jaded as we've all become to the thought of new committees, the Student Assembly's proposal coming back up for vote on Tuesday is the best chance we've got. This is our opportunity to make "diversity" more than a bunch of numbers. I'm coming out to support it -- are you?
