Producing difference

Our University's interest in minority and women students and faculty is to be commended. There is much we can do to develop a campus culture in which the historic exclusions and biases of race, sexuality and gender do not hold sway. Nevertheless, institutionally produced difference is not one of the ways to mitigate the effects of exclusionary habits of history.

Individuals should certainly come to Duke and anticipate that they might discover good reasons to identify and work with each other. If culture and ethnicity, or gender, or sexuality is the impulse of the association, then these are associations appropriately produced by an individual's desire. The Black Student Alliance or Mi Gente or groups of women faculty who self-organize would be supported absolutely and appropriately by administrative structures. But they would not be "produced" by these structures.

Duke's institutional practices must move past the time when it is the machine that generates, produces and frankly assigns those distinctions. What would be the practical effect of a review of our "diversity" policies and programs? Duke could do the following:

1. Reassess the ethic of presidential councils that organize their memberships via the assignment of race or gender.

2. Reconsider the impact of recruitment weekends that force institutional ideologies of race onto students who have not yet even had the opportunity to meet each other.

3. Confront the result of how race-based scholarships for some produce other scholarship communities that have little diversity.

4. Ask why administrators would turn over major activities of one recruitment weekend to a group of students while another weekend, for high-achieving students, is deeply (and in my judgment, appropriately) managed by student affairs and admissions specialists.

Frankly, BSA invitational weekend as well as black student orientations where students meet black faculty and participate in black cultural events (like step shows) seem an odd introduction to a university that anticipates and hopes for a culture of inclusion. Why wouldn't we imagine that all pre-frosh might benefit from these faculty introductions and cultural events? It seems as if the institution anticipates that these particular students' cultural and academic universe might be best determined by their race. We know them this well? What admissions-based intelligence leads us to this determination? Frankly, such institutionally produced, racially assigned programming does not quite match the vision of inclusiveness we broadcast as our desire.

It is not easy to be a child of the 1960s and to realize that the 21st century demands some careful and frankly unpopular reassessments of the strategies of diversity and inclusion. But it would be na've to believe that the strategies of two score and more years past need no reconsideration.

The courage of our conviction that inclusiveness is an appropriate institutional desire means that we review the practices we have developed and relied upon to produce difference. Should we work affirmatively and aggressively to recruit students with a variety of backgrounds to campus? Absolutely! Do we force an association that is our own racial imaginary for that convention of pre-frosh? Not any more.

It seems to me that Duke could do a marvelous job of recruiting highly desired students with a weekend that brings them all together, in their artistic, creative, high-SAT, leadership, stellar community-work glory and introduces them to a Duke that would celebrate them for these accomplishments. I have no doubt whatsoever that this constellation of students would be diverse, inclusive and an absolute joy to watch interact with each other.