A colleague asked a pertinent question at a faculty meeting: "Why are colleagues so afraid of diversity?"At the most recent plenary meeting of the faculty, Professor Harlequin Sovery Zen made some faculty smirk and others scratch their heads instead of their butts or balls. Dr. Zen ased why minor changes in the bylaws regarding the Diversity Committee so agitated a few naysayers.
Is a rhetorical question still useful if it goes over most heads? Targets of Professor Zen's pertinent impertinence likely neither smirked nor showed any reaction. Some of these faculty have been raging to one another behind closed doors about chimera once reserved to the rantings of the National Association of Scholars [NAS] and other cranks. Other atavists transmit emails complaining that Puget Sound's longstanding indifference to diversity might be ending. Among the bugaboos that headline such emails:
- Administrators might review departments' decisions about whom to interview or whom to hire. If you thought that deans and the president already did that, you are defying the hive-mind of some of our programs, schools, or departments. If you think that departments have nothing to fear from such supervision, you do not know some of the departments or programs involved. If you were in those academic units, you'd fear exposure.
- Reading lists, pedagogical tactics, and loaded language might be subject to review. Unless the NAS wants to censor I, Rigoberta Menchú or the rants of Ward Churchill or David Horowitz locates "the Left" across curricula and campuses, review and criticisms are not welcomed. Again, to know some of the individuals and some of the schools or departments involved is to appreciate why colleagues respond like feral felines. By contrast, those who know their teaching tactics and lessons will stand review cannot summon much concern. The contrast is telling.
- Some faculty, staff, and students put an editor of The Trail on the spot for an hour or more owing to multiple allegations of racially insensitive content in the student newspaper. A current version of this legend is that the Bias-Hate Emergency Reaction Team [BERT] grilled the editor about content in his or her paper. As the tale is retold, embelllishments turn a meeting into Guantánamo on campus. The more that opponents of the Diversity Committee or of diversity as understood by most faculty require a bloody shirt to wave, the more that we "learn" about "The Blunda in the Rotunda." Too bad that we learn so much that is not true.
Asked of those who spread the objections supra then, Dr. Zen's question answers itself.
What are the boys so afraid of? Startled by symbols and howling the rage of the privileged, the oh-so-conscientious objectors long for a meritocracy that never existed, for departmental autonomy they've not earned, and for security against change as Puget Sound moves from empty promises to the merest threat of sincere efforts to diversify.
How can I be sure of that? Because almost every objection to the Diversity Committee's NEW! IMPROVED! bylaws has nothing to do with the new text or the old text or new words versus old words. When professed concerns have little to do with matters under deliberation, one is entitled to infer ulterior motives for the opposition.
Take the example that the objectors have made into a thrice-told-but-never-quite-tolled-the-same tale. If BERT wears jackboots, that is due neither to the old wording nor to the new wording of the bylaws. Indeed, when the loudest of the objectors raised BERT in meetings of the Faculty Senate, the Dean of Students made it clear that BERT would be run out of the Dean of Students Office if the Diversity Committee abandoned participation. That is correct: either way the scared rabbits get BERT or something very like BERT. Maybe BERT did its job; perhaps BERT convened a Starr Chamber; probably BERT made an editor feel put upon. However, bylaws old or new do not define BERT or circumscribe BERT's conduct.
Would you care for any pickled red herring with your canard, sir?
I could go through the many objections raised by Professor Chanticleer across campus or by atavists in less public settings, but to what purpose? To listen to the objectors for even fifteen minutes establishes that they are exercised about demons and devils that the rest of us cannot see or exorcise.
Suppose, to pursue another scary story, that a big, bad Diversity Czar meddled in hiring of every department, program, and school.
- The objectors cannot plausibly connect such meddling to any existing or any envisioned language in the bylaws or the code.
So what are the objectors really afraid of? Why do they conjure such terrors?
- Departments, programs, and schools confident that their procedures and judgments would withstand critical scrutiny -- the skeptical perusal supposed to define the life of the mind -- should welcome another set of eyes. Faculty who recoil at the prospect that their departments, programs, or schools would be greatly impaired if compelled to explain decisions and processes should share with the rest of the faculty what they know about their own academic units that the rest of us would do well to learn. If they know that their units cannot withstand oversight, perhaps their fears are based on hiring inequities is their immediate pasts.
Whatever the objectors are really afraid of almost certainly resides in the departments, programs, or schools whence such rough beasts, their sour come up at last, slouch toward faculty meetings to be boring.
- Avant garde poseurs object to an emphasis on race, ethnicity, or nationality and admonish the campus to aim to for socio-economic or class diversification. They do so knowing that there is even less support for thoroughgoing socio-economic diversification than for diversification that is more familiar from the decades that other institutions have devoted to diversification. They strike progressive poses but secure most of their support from diehards and blowhards from the racial "Right."
Indeed, the poseurs resemble rabid proponents of laissez faire because they operate with the cynical assurance that policies they advocate will never be tried and hence never will fail.
So kudos to Professor Zen for unmasking the symbolic politickers. Woe to the rest of us that Zen's rhetorical question almost certainly went over the heads of most faculty. Those inattentive, clueless souls voted for the new bylaws but preserved the luxury of what they do not now and do not want to hear about.
