Diversity

 We keep hearing that we need more diversity in just about everywhere, colleges, businesses, government, congress, and our lives. So what are we doing about it? At my university, they named a chief diversity officer. We have approximately 30 people in the office of institutional diversity. My college recently named a chief diversity officer. Personally, I think this is a cop-out. My dean can say, “I’m doing a lot for diversity. I have a diversity officer. All of my faculty and staff are required to take a diversity course.” (By the way, all of these diversity office staff are minorities. See what a great job we have done.) Having a diversity officer does nothing for diversity. It is all talk and no action. People that genuinely lead don’t need someone to do diversity for them. They promote diversity through their actions.

It is not diversity that is needed in society. It is inclusion. We do not need token minorities; we need minorities included to benefit from all points of view. We need people who listen, not pontificate. As RBG said in response to the question of when will have enough women on the supreme court? When we have nine female supreme court justices. It is not enough to include race, but we also need to include gender, gender identification, religion, age, and skills. The reason I included skills is that we have too many faculty that can do research but do not teach. Until the university values teaching, students will be getting an inferior education. Until we change the goals of higher education and replace administrators who are stagnant, higher education will continue to decline in value as the costs continue to escalate.