THIS PAST weekend I was schooled in the art of being profoundly shamed by another university's newspaper. While I visited Boston over fall break, I discovered a copy of Harvard's newspaper, The Crimson (opposition research, if you will). To my horror, the front-page headline read, "UVA Strikes Back After Wave of Hate."
Thanks to my mongoose-like throwing reflexes and a conspicuously open window nearby, the Harvard students were none the wiser. I, however, mulled over the subject for the rest of my trip. At Harvard, where diversity is so hackneyed as to be nearly unremarkable, why did Virginia seem worlds away?
The common request from our University's administration has been to "stand together" and "embrace diversity." In doing so, they propose that standing together is unquestionably virtuous. Additionally, they presume, by asking us to embrace it, that diversity actually exists.
Certainly we are more diverse than we once were -- in fact, more diverse than ever. But having advanced past the days of denying admittance for women (before 1970) and denying admittance to minorities (before the 1950s), cannot be enough to claim a truly "diverse" environment. Wherever readers pick up this newspaper, they are surrounded by students, 58 percent of whom come from families with incomes higher than $100,000. Over 20 percent of the student population hails from families with incomes above $200,000. To call such an environment "diverse" in the economic sense would be ridiculous. A diverse university is more than a multicolored, polyglot boarding house, to use Theodore Roosevelt's descriptive language of America. Rather, diversity much be realized in varied facets of society: culturally, religiously and economically.
We are told to stand together, but we should try to stand for something worthwhile before we bother doing it together. An environment of genuine progressive thought and broadmindedness is essential for true diversity to flourish. Social backwardness and conventionality smother the potential benefits of diversity.
Unfortunately for this University, Southern "gentlementality" does not always meld well with new ideals and racial diversity. Christopher Hitchens observed that those who sport the Confederate flag on walls, bumpers, belts or cell phones, those who are nostalgic for an army of grey, tend to only think in black and white.
Learning from the past and harboring nostalgia for it are two different, and often contradictory, behaviors. Great change grows in subtle and excruciating increments -- so while we await some calamitous social conflict, we fail to observe the constant erosion by subtle yet destructive waves of unannounced racism. This process of attrition goes unnoticed, or at least unaddressed, and often to terrible, lasting consequences -- like public acknowledgement of our failures as far away as Boston.
Our bouts with bigotry and racism erect a looming wall of separation between the University and bright new minds. This sort of reputation repels the type of student who could reverse it. Admissions Dean John Blackburn says that minority students "sometimes need to overcome the barrier that they feel, that they don't belong." He further explains, "We need to make the University more accessible financially
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