When I was executive director of NASPA, it was common for administrators in student affairs to call me to discuss issues on their campuses or within higher education in general. During this time, there was quite a lot of focus on campus crime and new regulations regarding how colleges were reporting them to the U.S. Department of Education.
One such call was not so much concern about the requirement to report campus crimes, but concern about how to address an increase in conflicts around social and cultural issues that might be interpreted and recorded as campus crimes.
The administrator wanted to find a way to get more students engaged in activities related to diversity without, in the words of the administrator, “it being reduced to conversations focused only on Black people, feminist women, and gay people.” The conundrum for this administrator was how to make discussions about diversity palatable. The administrator posited that diversity meant something different in 1999 than how it had been characterized in previous years. For example, there could be a focus on internationalism and the diversity of cultures.
I understood the desire to address hard issues by substituting something innocuous that would make it easier to swallow the real medicine. While this administrator genuinely cared about having students interrogate their values, suspend their judgments, and work to enlarge the intellectual community, using language like “difficult dialogues” was not going to engender participation among students at this university. It was a bridge too far.
That was 1999. Today, being against diversity, equity, and inclusion has become an audacious rallying point for cultural politics. Colleges and universities are targets for punishment if any acts or decisions appear to be addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is a sad and stunning moment in our history because of the echoes of the discriminatory past. Lessons learned seem to be about how to roll back the rights gained and how to foment social conflicts.
I doubt that the administrator I spoke with in 1999 would have ever thought that the subtle and incremental way of approaching diversity would be one of the challenges of our time in 2023.
Gwen Dungy 