As part of the fallout from the alleged attack on Daisy Lundy last February the University of Virginia administration has been considering a proposal to require a multicultural requirement for all students. Another proposal that has been floated (see a list here) is making “multicultural sensitivity camps mandatory for department chairs and supervisors.” Yet another is to make the image of Thomas Jefferson, a white slaveholder, less prominent as a symbol of, well, Mr. Jefferson’s university. The list goes on.
Finally, some UVa students have organized a group to resist what they regard as guilt-induced groveling, and they have presented their views here.
Charging University administrators of stifling free thought with the possible imposition of a diversity training exercise, the newly-formed Individual Rights Coalition unveiled itself yesterday under the auspices of protecting freedom of speech on Grounds….
The IRC was formed initially in response to the University Board of Visitors’ announcement in May that it planned to discuss the implementation of a Web-based diversity training system that all students would be required to complete prior to class registration.
“We felt that there wasn’t any organization on Grounds that would pursue this issue -– that it would just go through without any discussion,” IRC Executive Director Nathan Royster said. “The marketplace of ideas is something of a joke here at U.Va.”
Daisy Lundy, now president of the student council, has been leading the charge for the new diversity requirement.
“While I’m always excited to see student activism, I think this group may be misled about the course,” Lundy said. “The actual intent is to provoke thought rather than prevent it.”
….
“The purpose of this course is to educate U.Va. students on different perspectives about issues,” she said. “It’s more to provide students with all the information needed to make decisions.”
Regardless of whether the proposed new course requirement is intended to provide information or provoke thought, the fact that some feel a need for it would seem to be a severe indictment of the existing, and extensive, university courses that deal with issues of race and ethnicity.
Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Lampkin says the protest is premature. “They’re responding to something that hasn’t even been developed,” Lampkin said. It may not even be mandatory, she added, but then she also stated that “[w]e do want all students to be exposed to it.”
Sounds like an inoculation against un-diverse thoughts.
UPDATE – Erin O’Connor has more on UVa, and as usual what she says is worth reading.
UPDATE II – Ali Ahmad, a third year UVa undergraduate, has an impressive letter in today’s Cavalier Daily about his experience volunteering at a table handing out material about the new Individual Rights Coalition. Even more than the shouts of “You guys are doing a great job of being white supremacists,” he writes,
[w]hat really concerned me was some of the prejudices of those students kind enough to stop by and have a calm discussion with us. Perhaps most distressing was the insinuation by an African-American girl that we were obviously four rich white kids (because who else could be volunteering for the IRC) and that our opinion on mandatory diversity training was somehow illegitimate. The idea that the only diversity that matters is skin color is anathema to everything about tolerance that I’ve learned from my parents, my religion and my years spent in public education. She looked at us, and because our skin color wasn’t different enough to distinguish us from one another in her eyes or from people who have made ugly racial slurs to her, she assumed our motivations were discriminatory.
She never stopped to think that one of us at the table might be a Muslim, another a Catholic. Maybe one of us was gay. Maybe one of us pays for her entire education with financial aid grants. Maybe we were a unique and diverse group of people, perfectly capable of expressing an opinion on mandatory diversity training, even in her warped view of free speech.
“‘They’re responding to something that hasn’t even been developed,’ Lampkin said.”
Well, once it’s developed, it’ll be too late, duh!
At some point during this matter, someone is going to accuse the Individual Rights Coalition with racism. It’s completely inevitable and entirely obvious that anyone who opposes reeducation camps, excuse me, diversity seminars will get this accusation flung at them. If it doesn’t happen, I will be very impressed by their maturity.
The best solution to this problem is smaller class size in the college as well as increased group work. Classes that fling a ‘diverse’ group of people together and force them to work with one another. Of course, this would require money and most class work is individual studying and not as conducive to group work. I doubt the college would do what it needs. The system at play in the Engineering School and Architecture School is ‘diverse’. These other plans are tiny bandaids on a gaping wound.
Also, I don’t have access to demographics info on the College, but I sincerely doubt it is as ‘diverse’ as they think it is. I wonder what the racial break down is.
Aha. For the Class of 2003: (the title of the page must be wrong; it says 2007)
“The percentage of students identifying themselves as white Americans declined slightly, from 68.3 percent to 66.6 percent. The percentage of African Americans also declined slightly, from 9.6 to 8.8 percent. Asian-American students — the largest ethnic minority in the entering class — increased their percentage from 9.7 percent to 10.1 percent. (An additional 6.3 percent — up from 4.9 percent — are listed as “unclassified/unknown,” many by choice. “A growing number of multiracial students don’t want to be placed in one box,” Blackburn said.)”
Almost 70% is white.
“For we shall be unafraid to follow the truth regardless of where it shall lead.” That’s one of the many Jeffersonian quotes that I learned when I was a student at UVA. As a UVA alumni, I can tell you that UVA stopped being Mr. Jefferson’s University many years ago.
During my first year, part of first year orientation included First Year Forum where participants were encouraged to openly discussed issues yet it was clear that a “correct” viewpoint and attitude were being promoted by University-trained facilitators. Two years later, First Year Forum was replaced by Grounds For Discussion, which was a more entertaining, albeit an equally indoctrinal, version of its predecessor. In the years since they moved orientation to the middle of summer and debated endlessly ideas such as UVA 101. If these administrators are as concerned about providing students with a liberal education as they are about teaching them to be polite to blacks, the University would have regained its #1 spot years ago!
I am encouraged that right minded UVA students are finally beginning to speak out in favor of individual thoughts but I fear that their efforts may be in vain. University administrators praise student self governance, that is as long as the will of the populace does not conflict with the adminstrators’. Whose idea was it to ban first years from participating in fall rush? Certainly not the Inter Fraternity Council’s.
Ultimately the way to defeat this diversity initiative may not be via petitions but to arm student participants with the intellectual ammunition needed to turn this “diversity exercise” into a genuine discussion. Students and administrators need to understand that the years spent in college should be a time of expanding one’s mind and that the role of the Universitity should be to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity instead of providing them with a boiler plate of University sanctioned beliefs.
“(the title of the page must be wrong; it says 2007)”
In this context, a ‘class’ is typically designated by the year in which they are supposed to graduate on the four year plan — students starting this Fall will graduate in 2007.
And what does the future hold regarding all of this?
Interestingly, census data shows quite clearly that if current immigration and the fertility of immigrants (they have more kids) continues as now, the US will be a majority non-white nation some time not long after 2050. One way to look at this is to note that since whites still earn the majority of income and pay the majority of tax, they are financing their own dispossession as the demographic majority in America. This is especially ironic in lieu of affirmative action, which affects white children adversely; most immigrants are immediately de facto and de jure members of the protected classes created by affirmative action programs.
But diversity is good. Anyone who voices doubts about current levels of immigration is a racist or a xenophobe. You better get used to this, because this is the extent of most popular discourse on it.
And I see no big change on the horizon.
If the University of Virginia wishes to teach multiculturalism will such courses include the meaning of Christianity; the results of affirmative action and state sponsored groups in other societies; conservativism; morality as taught by religious groups. Or will it be a racial pander fest led by a bunch of idiots who have no experience outside of academia?