WHILE we students were away enjoying the booze and blahs of summer life, our University administration was hard at work to ensure a warmer and fuzzier community for us to come back to. On June 11, the co-chairs of the President's Commission on Diversity and Equity delivered a presentation entitled "Embracing Diversity in Pursuit of Excellence" to the Board of Visitors' Special Committee on Diversity. From the "Voices of Diversity" section of the University Web site, it's clear that everyone involved agrees that the University should indeed embrace diversity in the pursuit of excellence. Right after we save the whales.
In the hands of college administrators, the word "diversity" has been unceremoniously catapulted up through the ranks of the most vague and hackneyed terms in the English vocabulary. It has also become a showcase for the intellectual laziness and anti-individualism that pervades college administrations today. So before anybody rushes off to embrace anything, we first need to stop and calmly take stock of exactly what diversity is -- and, more urgently, what it isn't.
On July 8, The Cavalier Daily News section reported the surprising headline, "Class of 2008 more diverse than last year." The subheading elaborates: "Percentage of students in minority groups accepting offers of admission increases slightly from years past." If you read the rest of the article, you'll notice that this is what the claim about increased diversity boils down to -- more racial minorities, more diversity. There is no mention of students' intellectual interests, political affiliations or personality traits. Nothing on the issues of socioeconomic status, hobbies or interests. There is no mention of geographical region or religious persuasion. Instead, the crass simplification lies bare: The class of 2008 is more diverse because a smaller proportion of it is white. Where could The Cavalier Daily have gotten such a strange idea?
When searching for the source of confusion on Grounds, University officials are always a good place to start. On July 1, the University's Top News Daily issued a press release that is superlatively awful in its distortion of the word diversity. The article's ridiculous contents are nicely foreshadowed by its nonsensical headline, "Diversity numbers increase among Asian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics."
The first sentence of the article quickly reveals itself as the progenitor of the claim that the class of 2008 is "more diverse" than the class before it. But the real money quote comes in the second paragraph: "African-Americans and blacks from other countries made up 10 percent of the 3,165 students who had accepted U.Va.'s offer of admission, up from 9 percent last year. Also increasing were the percentage of Asian and Asian-American students (14 percent, up from 13 percent last year) and Hispanic/Latino students (5 percent, up from 3 percent)." No explanation appears to vindicate these three group identities. Why are American blacks lumped together with Moroccans, Kenyans, South Africans, Nigerians and blacks from the Caribbean islands? Why are American Asians lumped together with Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Cambodian students? And why are North American Hispanics linked with South Americans, Central Americans and students from Spain? These groups are composed of people from vastly different cultures and even different continents. And even if they weren't, the students in these groups surely would still have a wealth of individuating characteristics that mere nationality or ethnicity could never capture. Sadly, however, like The Cavalier Daily article that followed it, the Top News Daily article mentions nothing more than race to justify its claim of increased diversity in the class of 2008.
Whenever any student or administrator is pressed on the issue, they're always quick to claim that they are committed to genuine diversity, not just racial superficiality. But given the casual (and until now unchallenged) "race-equals-diversity" attitude of the University's two major news sources, that commitment is called into serious question. The message of these news articles is clear: Simply tally up the students in each class on the easy criterion of their appearance, and presto! You have an instant index that can determine which class is the "most diverse," down to the precision of a single percentage point.
On its face, this conception of diversity is incredibly insulting not just because it is moronically simplistic, but also because it belittles the complexity and the dignity of the individual. It pigeonholes people according to their trivial externalities, while ignoring the variety of intellect and personality that is the true substance of human difference. It is truly disheartening that, for all of their committees, boards and embraces in the pursuit of excellence, our administration still seems unable to grasp the simple truth that humanity perpetually asserts: It is a fool's errand to try to quantify diversity, or to conceptualize it on the basis of skin color.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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