WITH THE appearance of the Individual Rights Coalition on Grounds last Monday, the heretofore-little-known diversity training exercise stepped into the University spotlight and became the controversy du jour of discussions around Grounds. For their part, the IRC have cried foul, asserting that the requirement of any diversity exercise is tantamount to thought policing, while those in support of it argue that the final version of the exercise will help make further discussion of problems and tensions possible.
While it remains to be seen what form the exercise will take or what further action the Individual Rights Coalition plans to take in their opposition, the situation has, at the very least, prompted student questioning of the exercise, which was put into motion by the Board of Visitors on May 31 with funding set at $250,000. Despite good intentions on the planners' part, the diversity training exercise will be at best a waste of money and students' time, and at worst an imposition by University administration upon students who can and should be trusted to find their own solutions to issues of diversity.
Any well-reasoned attempt to teach or critique diversity requires a clarification of terms. Taken generally, "diversity" is an all-encompassing term, including all sets of ideas, creeds, races, political philosophies and orientations. That said, the presence of diversity is valuable and is to be encouraged. No doubt, the diversification of the University since the 1970s has played a central role in its increasing vitality and strength.
However, based on how the exercise has been described so far, it appears that the developers of the exercise take a much more narrow scope of the term, confining it solely to the black/white racial issues that were made painfully obvious last year, most prominently by the blackface incident at a fraternity party and the alleged attack on now
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