Required for All New Students: Dialogue 101

U. of Oklahoma

New students at the University of Oklahoma are receiving a dose of diversity training designed to help them talk more comfortably about race. The mandatory Diversity Experience Trainings, which began last fall, are part of a series of changes made on the campus after a video of fraternity members singing a racist chant was made public, in March 2015.

Kathleen Wong(Lau), who leads Oklahoma’s Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies, designed the five-hour training sessions, which students attend in small groups. They’re based on an intergroup-dialogue program developed by researchers at the University of Michigan and replicated at several other colleges. The first half of the session introduces students to basic principles of respectful dialogue; during the second half, students practice such conversations.

During the training, students pair off and learn a skit that covers what someone might actually be thinking during a seemingly polite conversation. “Someone might ask, Where are you from? And I say, California,” Ms. Wong(Lau) says. “Then they might ask, Where are you really from? What they want to know is your race or ethnicity.” Each student within a pair then has to present the other person’s perspective to the rest of the group.

It’s not easy to pack information that could fill a whole semester into a few hours, Ms. Wong(Lau) says, but it’s important for students to gain such skills early in their college experience — ideally, she adds, in a structured environment, like a course or training session supervised by a faculty or staff member. “You need to remember that for many of these folks, they’re away from home for the first time, where they might have had people around them all the time who understood them,” she says.

Members of the university’s College Republicans have spoken out against the training. They say students have complained to the group about the “uncomfortable” content, and have expressed concerns that the training sessions, instead of teaching about diversity, are forcing them to be “politically correct.”

But Ms. Wong(Lau) says that when she held the sessions for the first time last fall, she noticed how engaged Oklahoma students were with the material. “Freshmen feel a real responsibility to not misrepresent a person,” she says. “That carefulness, that’s exactly the type of critical thinking we want in human interaction — especially when we’re working with people from diverse backgrounds.”