COUNTERPOINT: Efforts to promote diversity are becoming redundant


Luke Phillips | Daily Trojan

American culture’s contemporary emphasis on diversity is well-placed, and the institutionalization of diversity through various programs at universities made sense when they were put in place. But things change, and it’s hard to envisage what comes next.

It goes unspoken that diversity is an integral component of the human experience. And yet, militant activism pushing for more diverse numbers at institutions has been on the rise.

Anyone who takes perhaps a 10-mile journey anywhere in the world will see the internal diversity of any society unfold before their eyes — diversity of living situations and built environments, of political economies, of social classes, of religious and cultural customs and often of ethnicities. A quick drive from the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Figueroa Street up to, say, downtown Los Angeles’ Union Station, is our local (and a particularly vivid) example of this modern fact.

So if humanity is diverse by nature, then surely the cultural, ritualized celebration of diversity by modern Western society is a good thing. And so must be modern Western society’s institutionalization and advancement of diversity through loose quotas, identity group representation and media, and the reshaping of narratives to reflect human diversity. Right?

On the outset, yes. If a society’s culture and institutions are not reflective of and responsive to the basic facts and truths of the human experience, as experienced by its members, they’ll be an odd fit. Diversity of identities tends to be one of those truths, wherever you go. Given that pretty much every society (but postwar coastal America, especially) is somewhat culturally and intellectually diverse, and that many are somewhat religiously and ethnically diverse, it makes sense that in many societies — especially ours — people have dignity and representation afforded to different groups, with “unitary” institutions mostly being based on whatever compromises and common interests those groups could come to when such institutions were created.

There’s a consequence to this, one that is neither good nor bad intrinsically. The institutionalization of particular values and compromises and matrices of dignity reflect the times in which they were created, and the identities of the particular groups involved as those identities were conceived at the time.

But some apparent facts complicate this. Identities of various kinds of groups evolve over time, with technological, demographic, cultural and economic trends constantly shifting: Individuals are never simply part of one group, but are always members of at least two or three if not a half-dozen or more, and can even transition between groups over time.

The fact that people can alternate and slide between different groups, and that groups themselves are constantly changing, renders a problem for the institutionalization of values. How can institutions and cultural values particular to certain historical moments or experiences be relevant further down the road, when situations have changed and individuals have diverged? The left-leaning refrain about the American Founding being irrelevant for having been conducted by “dead white men” is at least partly valid; Thomas Jefferson himself suggested that “every constitution … and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”

To bring it all back to the modern American university campus, that citadel of the cosmopolitan civilization encompassing the coastal urban metropoles of the globe, consider for a moment that our current university system’s institutions and customs are all merely a few decades old. American culture’s contemporary emphasis on diversity is well-placed, and the institutionalization of diversity through various programs at universities made sense when they were put in place. But things change, and it’s hard to envisage what comes next.

It goes unspoken that diversity is an integral component of the human experience. And yet, militant activism pushing for more diverse numbers at institutions has been on the rise.

Anyone who takes perhaps a 10-mile journey anywhere in the world will see the internal diversity of any society unfold before their eyes — diversity of living situations and built environments, of political economies, of social classes, of religious and cultural customs and often of ethnicities. A quick drive from the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Figueroa Street up to, say, downtown Los Angeles’ Union Station, is our local (and a particularly vivid) example of this modern fact.

Art by Elizabeth Gu | Daily Trojan

So if humanity is diverse by nature, then surely the cultural, ritualized celebration of diversity by modern Western society is a good thing. And so must be modern Western society’s institutionalization and advancement of diversity through loose quotas, identity group representation and media, and the reshaping of narratives to reflect human diversity. Right?

On the outset, yes. If a society’s culture and institutions are not reflective of and responsive to the basic facts and truths of the human experience, as experienced by its members, they’ll be an odd fit. Diversity of identities tends to be one of those truths, wherever you go. Given that pretty much every society (but postwar coastal America, especially) is somewhat culturally and intellectually diverse, and that many are somewhat religiously and ethnically diverse, it makes sense that in many societies — especially ours — people have dignity and representation afforded to different groups, with “unitary” institutions mostly being based on whatever compromises and common interests those groups could come to when such institutions were created.

There’s a consequence to this, one that is neither good nor bad intrinsically. The institutionalization of particular values and compromises and matrices of dignity reflect the times in which they were created, and the identities of the particular groups involved as those identities were conceived at the time.

But some apparent facts complicate this. Identities of various kinds of groups evolve over time, with technological, demographic, cultural and economic trends constantly shifting: Individuals are never simply part of one group, but are always members of at least two or three if not a half-dozen or more, and can even transition between groups over time.

The fact that people can alternate and slide between different groups, and that groups themselves are constantly changing, renders a problem for the institutionalization of values. How can institutions and cultural values particular to certain historical moments or experiences be relevant further down the road, when situations have changed and individuals have diverged? The left-leaning refrain about the American Founding being irrelevant for having been conducted by “dead white men” is at least partly valid; Thomas Jefferson himself suggested that “every constitution … and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”

To bring it all back to the modern American university campus, that citadel of the cosmopolitan civilization encompassing the coastal urban metropoles of the globe, consider for a moment that our current university system’s institutions and customs are all merely a few decades old. Broad-based access to higher education via the GI Bill, Pell Grants and student loans came at the tail end of the New Deal. Specific recruitment of ethnically diverse student populations is a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the intellectual movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Modern universities’ enshrinement of cultural diversity in particular, and their less explicit enshrinement of socioeconomic diversity through commitment to financial aid and opportunity, is in some ways a legacy of the mid-20th century when these institutions were recrafted to better serve and reflect a mass middle-class democracy of increasingly diverse sub currents.

But it’s been a bit longer than 19 years since 1944 or 1965. Domestically, inequality has grown since the 1980s. Cultural and ethnic trends — like the increasing share of the American collegiate population claiming ancestry from two or more races, or the rise of secular values — are complicating the older version of the diversity narrative.

At a cultural level, it seems like the universities are adapting, but at an institutional level, it remains a question whether hard policy questions of quotas, identity group representation, official narratives and similar adaptations will follow smoothly, or with fits and starts.

In any case, the continued diversity of the human experience — in all its forms — is fascinating to observe and experience.

Luke Phillips is a senior majoring in policy, planning and development. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Wednesdays.

2 replies
  1. Vince Tagliano
    Vince Tagliano says:

    It’s time for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction – America needs unity, clarity and direction far more than diversity, chaos and cacophony.

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