Jay Bergman: Diversity's More Than Skin-Deep
[Jay Bergman is professor of Russian history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain and president of the Connecticut Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars.]
In American higher education, "diversity" is the reigning mantra administrators and faculty invoke to impress on students the virtues of admitting and promoting certain "underrepresented" minorities for the unique perspectives they purportedly bring to issues ranging from racial profiling and discrimination to astronomy and physics.
Only by doing so, the argument goes, will universities produce graduates capable of prospering in an America that is increasingly multicultural. According to Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, diversity is more important to a university than studying Shakespeare and mathematics.
But the fetishization of diversity based on skin color and ethnicity has had the effect of blinding us to the more profound and powerful forms of diversity - those based on what people think as opposed to how they look - that determine so much of what happens in the world. The atrocities that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists commit in the Middle East are not only repellent to most Americans but incomprehensible to them because our colleges and universities are not educating students about the kinds of diversity - in al-Qaida's case a religious fanaticism alien to even the most militant religious sects in the United States - that matter most.
Another kind of diversity too often ignored is that reflective of the distinctive cultures nations and nationalities produce. As a Russian historian, I begin every semester telling my students that the Russians, while obviously sharing certain universal human traits and aspirations, are in many ways not like us. They are the product of a profoundly different national culture and history. They simply don't see the world the way we do....
In sum, what Americans are witnessing today in Russia is the reassertion of a national culture that predates the Soviet Union and whose origins are traceable literally hundreds of years into the past. In its rejection of the individualism that is at the core of Western Civilization; in its stark equation of liberty and anarchy; in its assumption that territorial expansion is the principal criterion of a country's moral and political health; and in its paternalistic notion that the Russian people are children and therefore lacking the rationality and maturity to share in governance, this culture is almost diametrically the opposite of our American one.
It would be a grave mistake for those in Washington entrusted with the formulation and execution of foreign policy to ignore this fundamental truth.
And it would be just as serious a mistake for colleges and universities in America today to continue to confine their concept of diversity to the holy trinity of race, gender and ethnicity. It is an obsession that blinds them to the diversity of national culture and history - a diversity that helps to explain much in the world today that would otherwise be strange and inexplicable.
Read entire article at Hartford Courant
In American higher education, "diversity" is the reigning mantra administrators and faculty invoke to impress on students the virtues of admitting and promoting certain "underrepresented" minorities for the unique perspectives they purportedly bring to issues ranging from racial profiling and discrimination to astronomy and physics.
Only by doing so, the argument goes, will universities produce graduates capable of prospering in an America that is increasingly multicultural. According to Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, diversity is more important to a university than studying Shakespeare and mathematics.
But the fetishization of diversity based on skin color and ethnicity has had the effect of blinding us to the more profound and powerful forms of diversity - those based on what people think as opposed to how they look - that determine so much of what happens in the world. The atrocities that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists commit in the Middle East are not only repellent to most Americans but incomprehensible to them because our colleges and universities are not educating students about the kinds of diversity - in al-Qaida's case a religious fanaticism alien to even the most militant religious sects in the United States - that matter most.
Another kind of diversity too often ignored is that reflective of the distinctive cultures nations and nationalities produce. As a Russian historian, I begin every semester telling my students that the Russians, while obviously sharing certain universal human traits and aspirations, are in many ways not like us. They are the product of a profoundly different national culture and history. They simply don't see the world the way we do....
In sum, what Americans are witnessing today in Russia is the reassertion of a national culture that predates the Soviet Union and whose origins are traceable literally hundreds of years into the past. In its rejection of the individualism that is at the core of Western Civilization; in its stark equation of liberty and anarchy; in its assumption that territorial expansion is the principal criterion of a country's moral and political health; and in its paternalistic notion that the Russian people are children and therefore lacking the rationality and maturity to share in governance, this culture is almost diametrically the opposite of our American one.
It would be a grave mistake for those in Washington entrusted with the formulation and execution of foreign policy to ignore this fundamental truth.
And it would be just as serious a mistake for colleges and universities in America today to continue to confine their concept of diversity to the holy trinity of race, gender and ethnicity. It is an obsession that blinds them to the diversity of national culture and history - a diversity that helps to explain much in the world today that would otherwise be strange and inexplicable.