One Campus Approaches Diversity Training With ‘Hard Data and Careful Thought’

Kathleen Wong(Lau) knows that diversity education has its critics.

Some believe that it’s designed to teach people to become politically correct, she says. “I say no, it’s not. It’s about people able to have good, honest conflict that’s productive.”

Ms. Wong(Lau) is head of the University of Oklahoma’s Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies, and designs and runs diversity programs for students, faculty members, and other people on the campus.

The university began the training this year as part of a broader effort by its president, David L. Boren, to create a more-inclusive campus culture. Plans for such changes predate the release last spring of a now-infamous video of white fraternity members singing a racist chant, but the fallout from the video accelerated the pace of action.

All freshmen and transfer students are required to take a five-hour diversity course. Academic departments and other groups, like fraternities and sororities, can also request training that is tailored to them. In her programs, Ms. Wong(Lau) blends demographic data, social-science research, and discussion. The goal, she says, is to build empathy for others’ perspectives and to develop skills to talk about complicated topics like race.

That kind of empathy is critically important, says Ms. Wong(Lau), because it leads to deep and meaningful discussion, which she feels is lacking on many campuses. Too often students and professors resort to platitudes or avoid talking about race altogether for fear of stepping on land mines.

“The first urge is to suppress it,” she says. “What I want to do is get everyone in to talk about it.”

Reams of data and research give her credibility with faculty members, Ms. Wong(Lau) says, and assure professors and students that she’s not out to blame anyone. Rather, she presents documented problems such as unconscious bias, in which, say, teachers tend to call on boys more than girls, as societal challenges.

She also discusses issues like “cognitive load” and “stereotype threat,” technical terms for problems with which many people are familiar, including the fear of falling into stereotypical behavior. The result, she says, is that we become emotionally drained and distracted when talking about sensitive topics like race, rather than open and engaged.

A Question of Identity

When speaking to students in her training sessions, she asks them to think about their identities. How many do we each have — religion, race, gender, sexual orientation — and when are they most important? What happens when a student is seen predominantly by one identity, like race, and not another?

Ms. Wong(Lau), who is also director of the National Conference for Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, often talks in those sessions about her own experience as an Asian-American. Her father came to the United States at a time when Chinese immigration was severely restricted. He and thousands of others purchased forged documents, known as paper names, to pretend that they were relatives of people here legally. Her surname is a blend of that paper name, Wong, with her original family name, Lau.

Students who have been through her training said it reminded them of how small moments can have a big impact. For example, if a student who doesn’t look like the stereotypical white Oklahoman is regularly asked by classmates where he is “really” from, he will end up feeling as if he doesn’t belong even if he spent his entire life in the state.

Everett Brown, a junior who has been through several sessions to train as a facilitator, says he doesn’t expect the course to work miracles, but he believes it gives people the skills to look at a situation from another perspective. “It’s really easy to be vocal and get your thoughts out there and criticize someone when you think they’re wrong,” he says, but it’s harder to be empathetic.

Mr. Brown is a member of OU Unheard, a student group formed last fall to highlight the concerns of black students on the campus. While he says the university has real work to do to bring more racial diversity to the campus and to support minority-student groups, he is optimistic about the direction in which the campus is moving. “I’ve heard people have that epiphany moment,” he says. “I’d like to think these conversations wouldn’t be had without the diversity training.”

Conflicting Fears

The burden of not knowing how to discuss prejudice can have lasting effects, says Ms. Wong(Lau), who has also led training sessions for police officers, government officials, community leaders, and faculty members and students on other campuses. She was recently asked to talk to an athletic team — she declines to identify which one or on what campus — after a couple of the players had been called a racial slur by someone on a rival team. Even though the offending player had been punished, the coach told Ms. Wong(Lau) that the team dynamic had completely changed.

What she found, she says, was a group of people who didn’t know how to talk about racism. “In this case the white students were thinking, ‘I hope they think I’m not racist,’ and the people of color were thinking, ‘I hope I don’t fulfill a stereotype of not doing well.’”

She encouraged the students to discuss what had happened — no one had actually used the word “racism” until she came in — and urged them to offer direct words of support. Afterward, she said, the team’s mood seemed to lighten.

In faculty-training sessions, Ms. Wong(Lau) talks about classroom dynamics and the role of the professor. She lets people know that, as she puts it, “mild things matter.” If a male student cracks a joke about women getting overly emotional and the professor just brushes it off, “other students will unconsciously get the message that this professor will not have my back.”

The ‘Me, Too’ Approach

Interaction may be so subtle, and students either confused or hesitant to speak out, that the professor doesn’t even know what signals he sent. One common problem Ms. Wong(Lau) sees is the “me, too” approach — attempting to relate to someone of a different race or background by saying they’re essentially similar. R. Bowen Loftin, the departing chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia, was criticized by a black student for doing exactly that when he talked to him about growing up in the South.

“We have been taught that, to gain social intimacy, you produce a message that says, ‘I identify with you,’” says Ms. Wong(Lau). That works if everyone in the group is actually alike. “But if you’re in the minority, somebody saying ‘I’m just like you’ marginalizes you because it erases the difference.”

Brian A. Johnson, director of Oklahoma’s Honors College Writing Center, participated in a recent session for faculty members in the college. The session, he says, was helpful because it enabled him to think through some of the issues he had been wrestling with in class. “I want to reach out to those more-quiet students” — some of whom come from different cultures — “and sometimes I struggle with why they’re quiet, and Kathy helped me see that,” he says.

While he doesn’t expect that training will eliminate prejudice, especially the kind so vividly displayed in the fraternity video, Ms. Wong(Lau)’s program, he says, “seems to have the ability to confront ignorance with hard data and careful thought.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.