And how do you know when you have it?
By Gordon Brown
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2005
Speaking at a Lawrence convocation in 1997, Henry Louis Gates Jr., director
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
at Harvard University and later a Lawrence trustee, told his audience:
"Multiculturalism is not a magic cure-all, but — like democracy — it is better than the alternatives.”
Lawrence’s “Statement of Community Values,” drafted
by the President’s Committee for Multicultural Affairs, says:
"Every member of the Lawrence University campus community is welcomed in a spirit that acknowledges and assures the dignity of all. Diversity within our campus enriches teaching and learning, promotes core values of a liberal education, and establishes a community in which all members may fulfill the mission of the university."
Multiculturalism — defined as “a social or educational theory
that encourages interest in many cultures within a society rather than in
only a mainstream culture” — is one kind of desirable diversity.
Does achieving the goal of “diversity within our campus” mean
only achieving a multicultural or multi-ethnic student body, faculty, and
staff, or are there other kinds of diversity, also desirable?
Diversity of experience and perspective
“In
admissions we have particular yardsticks that we use to measure diversity
on a campus,” says Steven Syverson (pictured, right), dean of admissions
and financial aid, “but most often we are judged — in terms of
what is visible to the public — as if ethnic diversity and geographic
diversity are the primary factors.
“
It seems to me that what we’re really looking for is the experiential
diversity that’s going to make life at the college an intellectually
stimulating conversation between different people with different perspectives.”
As a rule of thumb, he says, one question asked of every applicant should
be, what are they going to bring to the discussion when they sit at that
Freshman Studies table.
Syverson, who has been at Lawrence since 1983, was previously director of
admissions at Pomona College.
“Experientially,” he says, “Lawrence has a wider range
of diversity than Pomona did, at least when I was there. Pomona had much
greater ethnic
diversity, and we would talk about its geographic diversity and how it was
great for a Californian to get to know a classmate who was from New York — but,
basically, its students were suburbanites from major metropolitan areas.
They tended to be affluent and, although they were from all across the country,
the reality is that, for the kids growing up in a suburb of New York or a
suburb of Chicago or a suburb of Phoenix or a suburb of Los Angeles, down
inside, an awful lot of their aspirations and values were very much the same.
“Now, obviously a New Yorker is different from a Southern Californian,
but when you get down to the core values, they’re really the same.
On the other hand, if you take a kid from Bowler, Wisconsin (population 343),
and
a kid from Lake Forest, Illinois; they only live 200 miles apart, but they’re
coming from different universes in terms of the experiential factor, the
perspective on the world. That’s a Lawrence kind of diversity.
“One of the frustrations for me,” Syverson says, “is that
there isn’t a way to talk very effectively, in the guide books and
in terms of national attention, about experiential diversity.”
In a letter to the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education in
2002, Clinton Foster, Jr., ’96, assistant director of admissions for
multicultural recruitment, wrote:
“Race is a very small part of what constitutes diversity…. If
I said nothing more than ‘I am a black American,’ would that
tell the whole story about me?
“Diversity of thought, perspective, and understanding is the key to a rich
and vital college community,” Foster continued. “Yes, one aspect
of diversity is our disparate cultural and socioeconomic upbringings, but
we have the ability to go beyond our social clothing — those images,
ideas, beliefs, and perceptions that create barriers among us.
“The ability to understand each other and ourselves will gain strength
only through practice, and that will not come if we develop cookie-cutter models
for the types of students we want at institutions of higher learning,” Foster
concluded.
Diversity of ethnicity
Which is not to say that efforts to attract, enroll, and retain students
of color are not part of Lawrence’s admissions modus operandi and
part of its definition of diversity.
In recent years, Lawrence has undertaken an assortment of formal programs,
lasting for varying amounts of time, with varying degrees of success.
Minority students in the Old World Industries Scholarship/Internship Program,
from 1986 to 1999, in addition to receiving financial assistance from the
college, worked during three of their four college summers for OWI, a Chicago-area
company whose president, alumnus and trustee emeritus J. Thomas Hurvis, ’60,
originated the program and supported it financially. Some of those scholar/interns
went to work full-time for the company after graduation.
From 1989-1992, Lawrence hosted students from high schools in Chicago,
Milwaukee, and Racine in the Young Scholars Enrichment Program, a three-week
intensive
exposure to English, math, and science taught in the summer by teachers
from their own high schools.
LEAP2000, from 1994 to 1999, created in collaboration with many of the
major corporations in the Fox Cities area, was a program that guaranteed
students
of color who enrolled at Lawrence a summer internship with one of the companies,
a list that included Kimberly-Clark, the Fox Valley Corporation, Aid Association
for Lutherans (now Thrivent Financial for Lutherans), BankOne, and Northwestern
Mutual Life. A number of students worked for the companies after graduation,
which was part of the corporations’ interest in the program — an
effort to diversify the local workforce.
Other programs have included a biology project with teachers from the Oneida
and Menominee tribal communities and a cooperative recruitment effort with
other institutions of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. The latest
special program, now in the planning stages, is College Readiness 21, sponsored
by the Wisconsin Foundation for Independent Colleges, Inc. (WFIC), a cooperative
effort to encourage students of color to attend college and, ultimately,
to graduate, not unlike Lawrence’s Young Scholars Enrichment Program.
Two current efforts that are wholly Lawrence programs are the Heritage
Scholarships and the Millennium Scholars Program.
Heritage Scholarships ranging from $5,000 to full tuition are offered to
exceptional high school seniors and transfer students from distinctive
and diverse cultural backgrounds and are designed, Foster says, to attract “outstanding
students and future leaders who will help to make a positive impact on
the Lawrence community and our global society.”
The Millennium Scholars Program is a project of the Office of Multicultural
Affairs, an on-going effort that offers special opportunities for student
development, including mentoring, skills-building through internship placements,
assistance with graduate and professional-school entrance and career placement,
and encouragement of civic engagement and alumni networking.
Support for students
As a component of the support for students as individuals and student life
campuswide that is provided by the dean of students office through the
campus activities and residential life programs and the counseling center,
Rod Bradley, assistant dean for multicultural affairs, is charged, with “enabling
and enhancing the positive effects that an ethnically diverse student body
can have on the development of all its members.”
The Office of Multicultural Affairs, consisting of a director, a Diversity
Center programs coordinator, and three undergraduate assistants, is a prime
mover on campus programs and events that deal with issues related to diversity
in all its aspects. Its mission, Bradley says, is “to help provide
the resources necessary for all students to express and explore culture
and identity and to act as a catalyst regarding academic, social, and cultural
support for students.”
The office seeks to provide a forum by which issues of culture and identity
can be broadly addressed on campus and in the surrounding communities;
it collaborates with university departments and with organizations within
and
outside the Lawrence community to offer programs, services, and other activities,
including such major campus events as Pride Awareness, African American
Celebration, Identity Forum, and Women’s Heritage.
In addition to housing the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Diversity
Center, a near-campus house, provides a gathering place for student organizations
that address issues of culture or identity, including Amnesty International,
the Black Organization of Students, Downer Feminist Council, GLOW (Gay,
Lesbian, Other, or Whatever), the environmental group Greenfire, the Jewish
students’ organization
Hillel/Chavurah (Circle of Friends), the Latin American Students Organization,
the Panhellenic Council, and the Spanish/Hispanic student group, ¡Viva!.
Another kind of diversity
Sharing some of the attributes of both ethnic diversity and geographic
diversity is what one might call multinational diversity. In recent years,
Lawrence
has made great strides in terms of attracting and enrolling students from
other countries, another positive way to create experiential diversity
on campus.
In the late 1980s, the college started being consciously more
proactive
in seeking students in this category. Prior to that point, Lawrence could
claim no more than between two and three percent international students
each year, mostly language assistants who stayed for only one year. Today,
some
10-12 percent of Lawrence students come from more than 50 countries, a
fact that has led to recognition in the two most recent editions of U.S.
News & World
Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” rankings. In
2004, the magazine ranked Lawrence seventh among all liberal arts colleges
in percentage
of international students enrolled.
Diversity itself
The answer, therefore, to the question, “What is diversity?” is
that, at Lawrence, diversity is…well, diverse. There’s ethnic
diversity and geographic diversity and diversity of perspective and experience
and diversity of personal identity and many others — and they all are
part of a continuing effort to achieve what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
has called “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student
body.”