The article "Colleges Find Diversity Is Not Just Numbers" in the Nov. 12 New York Times completely misses the point. First, the article -- which focuses on Dartmouth -- insinuates that the current administration has undertaken a radical program to snatch Dartmouth from the 1950s. Second, the article makes Dartmouth sound like a racist and backward institution where the diversity rehab programs have yet to disabuse students of their "isms." We contend that the necessary structures for integration, which the article was nominally about, exist on campus already in the form of DOC trips, freshman housing and the Greek system at large. Moreover, we could not expect the Times to capture the essence of campus social interactions in two days.
The article lists Occidental College in Los Angeles along with Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Haverford, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke, Stanford and Swarthmore as leaders in the diversity movement but asserts that "Dartmouth has a lot of work ahead of it." It cites an internal report of the College that describes how minority students at Dartmouth "felt damaged by the climate at the college" and mentions the infamous "ghetto party" four years ago as justification for the claim. We ask how the article can assert that diversity leadership and the climate for minority students is any better at any of the schools it lists. Are Harvard students more sensitive and caring than Dartmouth students? Do other students from diverse backgrounds interact more often at Stanford or Maryland? Can Mount Holyoke be a "diversity" leader even though it does not enroll men? We do not have the answers, but apparently the omniscient New York Times does.
More importantly, the article reports that some students feel that the whites on campus are insincere. Says one student, "The white students are friendly in a superficial way, but when it comes to emailing you Saturday night to go out, they don't." What one of the authors reminded the reporter was the fact that everyone is superficial to people whom they don't know; racializing this human characteristic brings in unnecessary guilt. Battle is right: there is superficial interaction among the races. However, that begs the question: why don't more people from the "races" know each other?
One author of this editorial, John Stevenson, shared with the reporter that a more complex dynamic than racism was occurring. To drive home his point, he used an illustration from "The Future of the Race," a book co-written by Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the book the authors share the story of the brown bag party, a practice before desegregation. A brown paper bag was stuck on a door and anyone darker than the bag was denied entrance to the party. It has been replaced in some corners, they intimate, by an opposite test, which in Stevenson's mind was not that much of an improvement: those who are not "black enough" are shunned. What he suggested to the reporter was that the dynamic of group solidarity limited the potential for integration and it was these discourses that the College needs to address with their ever-expanding social programming. There is a program that regularly addresses these issues: DOC trips.
The New York Times article suggests that DOC trips are no longer the focus of the College, having been supplanted with diversity-oriented social programming during orientation. On the contrary, by involving nearly the entire freshman class and grouping people together based on a common interest, the trips remove students from a world of social constructions and self-imposed barriers and thrust them into a world of strangers. The fondness with which we refer to our "trippees" attests to the success of the program. The article glosses over the importance of DOC trips in giving incoming students the chance to bond and meet others from diverse backgrounds. Clearly "hiking up mountains and sleeping in huts" must be for cavemen, not sophisticated and diversity-sensitive students.
The article's presentation of the general meaning of diversity on college campuses is much better than its comparative analysis of Dartmouth and other schools. The reporter makes the important point that "Diversity Is Not Just Numbers" and is even brave enough to offer a definition of diverse communities as "communities in which students and others spend time, work and play with people unlike themselves -- ethnically, ideologically, politically." The reporter realizes that diversity is meaningless unless people with different backgrounds and beliefs actually interact.