Multiculturalism At An Impasse

Harrisburg, Pa.—Multiculturalists are continuously astounded that when they make racial “diversity” their holy grail, they rarely come anywhere close to achieving it. “Out of 45-46,000 at Penn State, nine percent are from minority groups,” graduate student Tenisha L. Tevis observes of the campus. This racial breakdown leads her to ask “Who is defining diversity?”

“How can a school that is 90 percent white say it is diverse?” she asks. “African-Americans are forced into group projects with students who don’t look like them while white students can avoid diversity,” she notes.

Tevis spoke at the state chapter meeting of the National Association for Multicultural Education. She offered an interesting solution to the impasse.

“We need a ‘Yell fire’ approach to diversity,” she said, noting that when a building is ablaze, its inhabitants lose interest in racial differences. “If you take off colors and labels, you create a fire.”

“For example, at Penn State, if you have a meeting of the Black Graduate Students Association [BGSA] nobody will come but if you have a meeting of the Graduate Students Association, black graduate students will come because we are a part of that.” Tevis is the treasurer of the BGSA.

Meanwhile, the games that administrators play to meet their own goals and timetables are not lost on astute observers like Tevis, who received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Cal State-Sacramento. “My biggest question is ‘How do you define diversity?’ asks Tevis. “When you go from one to two black professors at Penn State, they say that they’ve increased diversity by 100 percent.”

Tevis and a classmate are conducting a ten-year longitudinal study of freshmen education majors at Penn State’s main campus in University Park. In the study, which they may expand to include upperclassmen, they are asking such questions as “How do you define multiculturalism?”

That they would have to pose such an inquiry of a trend at least two decades in practice and many more in the making does not speak well of the effectiveness of the academic innovation. “Tenisha came to me and said, ‘I need a white woman to help me with this,” Emily Duvall remembers.

Duvall formerly taught special education. “There’s always that ‘othering,’” Duvall notes of their survey-taking experiences. “White people don’t realize that they have a culture and are part of diversity.”

“Is color something that can be socially constructed?” she asks. Maybe some questions answer themselves.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.