I am being interviewed for a position as a humanities professor at a private, well-to-do liberal-arts college. I have sufficiently anticipated many of the committee’s questions. But then comes this one: “How do you feel about diversity?”
I’m silent, I’m searching; frankly, I’m baffled.
I blunder my way through my answer — not because I am anti-diversity (you meet few such people in the humanities today), but because the last time I underwent a job interview of this sort, more than 15 years ago, the culture was such that I wondered (though never would have asked), “Are you OK with diversity?”
My father is an immigrant from India; my mother a blonde, blue-eyed Midwesterner. And while both have Ph.D.s, my paternal grandmother grew up in a village in the Punjab and never learned to read or write. Additionally, my mother is Roman Catholic, while the entire side of my father’s family is Hindu. Growing up, I heard “mixed-blood” gibes from both sides of my family. I recall many times wondering how I would fill out those minuscule boxes in which you ticked your way to an identity. What was I going to be: Caucasian, Asian, Other? Then again, growing up, I was often assigned my identity by my peers: darkie, Paki, raghead — and once beaten up for it.
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
But I’m not in search of empathy here. The fact is, I have lived a life of economic privilege. Rather, I want, without kowtowing to knee-jerk political correctness, to wrestle with the real and radical complexity of the diversity question. What did it mean that I was being asked how I felt about diversity? And how was I to answer without having to trot out — prostitute-like, in my mind — my own diversity? Besides, there are far too many constituents packed into that catchword. Was it possible that by their putting the onus on a candidate (one shrewder than I), the questioners meant to elicit discussion of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities? Thus would everyone be able to skirt the elephant in the room — namely, the lack of socioeconomic diversity at such institutions.
First, let me say that campus inclusiveness worthily pivots on helping students feel accepted and comfortable with wearing their identities on their sleeves (or on their heads, or around their necks) — or, because they have no choice, in the color of their skin. But this sort of promoted diversity also glosses over the relative uniformity among students at elite colleges when it comes to grades, intellectual aptitude, and writing abilities as demonstrated in admission essays. Subscribing to this sort of inclusiveness disguises the economic truths underpinning such colleges and what it typically takes to join the “elite": exorbitant tuition; high SAT scores, often anchored in private or prep-school education; extracurricular lessons in piano, or lacrosse, or Mandarin; and possibly a stint volunteering with an NGO in Bangladesh — all proving that one is cultured/athletic/dedicated to serving humanity. (There are, of course, exceptions, which is why students who have defied the socioeconomic odds always seem to generate a press release.)
At the same time, those to whom one might point as exemplars of such an institution’s admirable diversity are, more likely than not, also the daughters and sons of professionals: lawyers, scientists, business executives, physicians, politicians. I don’t say this without discomfort, given the ugly wave of anti-multicultural vitriol that has recently cast a pall across large swaths of the globe and the United States in particular. But when colleges tout their progressive institutional stance on diversity — or, rather, want you, as their representative, to do so — one has to wonder if they are doing so in part to deflect from the relative affluence of their student bodies.
R ecently, while teaching at a flagship public university in the South, I found that the students most likely to be identified as “diverse” often appeared far more comfortable with their academic environs than did those who had grown up firmly entrenched in the culture of the rural South. In some sense, this latter group struck me as the real minority group (and one that truly added diversity), given that they had worked their way into that flagship institution despite their often underfunded schooling, their noncosmopolitan upbringing, and even their accents, which on occasion now elicited self-consciousness.
Could it be that those of us who wear our diversity markers with a proud and even defiant air do so as a tacit or unwitting means of making amends for our own economic privilege?
But I am not drawing from personal experience alone. Much of my academic research has focused on ways of knowing distinct from those shaped by one’s intense immersion in an alphabetically literate culture. (Recall my grandmother, who, in spite of living into the 21st century, navigated the world without the written word — and so relied completely on those around her for oral acquisition of information, instructions, directions, and advice.) As for the even more demanding traits of “high” or “critical literacy,” these require years of tutelage and practice — and access to top-tier resources and experts who can help one build up “cultural capital.”
High literacy additionally comprises the sort of cognitive skills that elite colleges expect: dedication to parsing ambiguity, appreciating nuance, and recognizing multiple points of view, and, when it comes to writing, to using the sort of sophisticated sentence structure and diction one would rarely use in speaking. But, again, the acquisition of these skills hinges on a preparatory scaffolding that often begins in one’s youth. And then there is this related paradox: How, exactly, is any such institution expected to commit to, and genuinely promote, socioeconomic diversity, when a major goal of college is the jettisoning of that particular diversity from its graduating ranks?
How was I to answer a question about my feelings on diversity without having to trot out, prostitute-like my own diversity?
There is an additional, painful Catch-22 — and here I willingly hoist myself with my own petard. My scholarship on alternative ways of knowing — bound with my own personal ambitions — compels me to want to be identified with the most selective institution possible. Affiliation, after all, is one of the swiftest (and most brutal) ways by which one’s status as a contributor to the culture of learning is adjudicated. More importantly, such affiliation ensures access to exceptional resources, both material and financial, as well as to safeguarded time for the pursuit and cultivation of research.
So, if there is a potential duplicity — perhaps even a veiled self-congratulation — inherent in any elite college’s diversity question, it is not one that any prospective candidate would dare disrobe. Let us imagine, though, that I was to be interviewed tomorrow by just such an institution, and had decided to answer with complete candor when asked the question: “How do you feel about diversity?” Here is what I would have to say:
“I fully support diversity and your institution’s embrace of it. Of course, your institution’s diversity is no less exclusionary than it is inclusive. But, then, that is why I want so ardently to join you.”
Sheila J. Nayar is a professor of English, communication, and media studies at Greensboro College. She is working on a book on the nature of narrative before the written word.
