How To Be Accepting Of Diversity On Your Campus

By Timothy Hayes on September 28, 2015

If you are reading this, I have a 60 percent chance of guessing correctly that you are a white college student. Cross-reference that against the 57 percent majority of women in upper education and I can reasonably guess that I am talking to white women. Hello ladies.

Look at your college, now back to me, now back to your college, now back to me. Luckily your college isn’t me or else the whole population would consist of all too many white guys, a scene familiar to someone in college in the ’50s rather than today.

Instead, at your college you’re probably seeing a much more diverse grab-bag of people. The majority of them are still white probably and the majority will be women, but overall, the scene is not one flooded with white guys like world history, for instance. Diversity is here and it’s predicted to grow over the next decade. So if you’re not comfortable with that idea, strap in because it’s going to get crazy.

Diversity has been a long and consistent struggle in the American collegiate system since very early in our history. Up until the mid-1800s, no woman had ever been graduated from an American university in all their 150 years of existence. In 1862, that all changed with Mary Jane Patterson becoming the first woman ever to graduate a university. Early in the same century, Alexander Twilight became the first black man to graduate an American college.

(image courtesy of Drexel University)

In 1885, this striking photo was taken representing the entire foreign female diversity on American colleges. These women are (left to right) Anandi Gopal, Kei Okami, and Sabat Islambooly. The three obtained the Doctorate of Medicine in 1886, 1889, and 1890 respectively from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, for the next century these people were the exception rather than the rule.

Since the 1800s, progress has been made in short sporadic spurts towards a more inclusive system of higher education and college populations more representative of the nation and the world at large. The Civil Rights Movement pushed African-Americans into schools of all types in the ’60s and ’70s. Since then, race has become a hot-button topic concerning education.

If you score 34 on the ACT, take seven AP classes in high school, pass them all with 4′s and 5′s, but get passed up during college admissions because of the color of your skin, you’d say you were the victim of racism. Yes you would be, sort of. This is a common complaint against a little something called Affirmative Action. This is a little clause found in Executive Order 10925 and the Civil Rights Act that puts the burden of having a more ethnically diverse campus on the universities. This means that if a school seems to have low numbers of ethnic minorities, the Feds will step in to investigate.

Affirmative Action has frequently been thrown around as an example of reverse racism or white racism. Let me explain. Affirmative Action is a means by which disadvantaged peoples can go to university. This doesn’t mean that a black person or a Hispanic person is going to instantly have a better chance of getting to college. If anything, the statistics suggest that that is just the opposite.

The problem here is one of an unconscious privilege of the white majority being taken away. If you’re white like me, it may come as a shock to you, but you’re a whole lot better off than your ethnic minority counterparts. You are the majority at universities. You likely grew up in a better school district with more resources than your Hispanic classmate. Did you have to work a job in high school? Were you translating for your parents growing up? These are the problems Affirmative Action seeks to correct, for better or worse.

Diversity is here and on the rise. There’s just nothing anyone can do to thwart this (at least, legally). You may however, have some problems with this and they may have foundation in fact, as many complaints do. However, most complaints in life are from a lack of a larger picture.

Image by Oregon Department of Transportation via flickr.com

Diversity is largely a threat to majority power and thus, majorities seek to stay in power. There are a limited number of seats in universities and more and more often, those are going to minorities. This uplifting of lower-class people, however, does not mean that some people will end up at the bottom. Universities are expanding, increasing in size to accommodate larger populations. College education has been pointed to as a useful indicator of increased national GDP, increased standard of living and a more successful nation as a whole.

This push of people into college is not suggestive of some reversal of fate, but rather a new opportunity for all of us to cast aside our bigotry and look to how we can better serve each other. Diversity is not the loss of power of one group. It is the empowerment of all people through the American ideal of equal opportunity.

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