Sun 1 May 2005
Here is a comment that might very well be applied to the Williams Diversity Initiatives:
So what is the problem with corporate or liberal multiculturalism, as practiced on our campuses? Simply put, it does not address the question of power and structural inequality. Differences are not differentiated; the sources and causes of these differences are never discussed, interrogated, or articulated, leaving the impression that they are just “out there.” They materialize somehow, outside of any context. No historically or socially constructed categories of inequality or systems of hierarchy, racism, or institutional discrimination are specified. In short, corporate and liberal multiculturalism consigns the “other” to recognizable standards of difference but fails to question the power relations that define for the “others” how and why they are different.
That is, the “managing differences” model of diversity does not seriously question the status quo. The “ethnic” remain peripheral, and only those at the center of privilege have the power to elude the stamp and odor of multiculturalism; they are not on the laundry list of “differences” that need to be managed. This myopia has blinded institutional leaders to the changing nature and dynamics of American diversity and reduced all “others” to the same difference. Thus the diversity project as we know it on our campuses is complicit in perpetuating the racial order as historically constructed.
Who said it? Hint: The speaker was directly involved in the Ward Churchill tenure decision.
Don’t know? It’s Evelyn Hu-DeHart, one of the expert visitors that will be commenting on the Williams Diversity Initiative. How much is Hu-DeHart getting paid for her three days of work? Your alumni donation dollars at work.
The Record reported that
The two visitors who will be at the College from May 1-3 to help the College draft additional recommendations are Kimberly Goff-Crews, dean of students at Wellesley, and Evelyn Hu-Dehart, professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in American at Brown.
Dyseptic right-wingers would be hard pressed to keep from sniggering at the notion of two females with hyphenated last names evaluating “diversity” at Williams. I predict that Goff-Crews and Hu-Dehart will say that Williams needs to do much more on the diversity front. Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?
Best introduction to Hu-Dehart’s role in the Ward Churchill fiasco is here. Interesting background reading here and here. Source for Hu-Dehart quote here.
May 1st, 2005 at 9:41 am
Hu-Dehart’s quote at the beginning of this post, read as a standalone quote, is pure psychobabble. Since the words are big, if you can’t make sense of it, you begin to think that you’re unable to understand her profound thoughts. But nope, she just can’t communicate.
Having now read all four listed citations at the bottom of the post, I realize she isn’t consistently opaque in her writings. Let’s just hope that the report she writes for Williams can be understood throughout so the community can get some value out of it. Otherwise we’ll still be scratching our heads about diversity.
May 1st, 2005 at 10:32 am
Overlooking your snide comment, David, about hyphenated-last-named women (though I’m personally not a big fan of this — if women are concerned about losing their idenities, they should just keep their last names, as lot of women, including my friends, are increasingly doing — I think we should err on the side of live-and-let-live with such minor issues that are none of our business. But I digress…), I am slightly perplexed by your description, Guy, of Hu-DeHart’s (albeit long-winded) remarks as incomprehensible “psychobabble.” Really, the woman’s words are not that hard to understand (in fact, they are simplistic compared to some of the theoretical issues of narrative I’ve recently been reading in my classes) — and, in fact, make a great deal of sense. In our still PC-painted era, the issues of inequality are raised without actually examining their root causes and the underlying power dynamics that inflect them.
Although this woman may hail from Wellesley (which, it seems, is something that makes her touchy-feely and light-weight in your eyes) and vocally burned her bridges leaving her previous employment (never a productive thing to do), she does have a point (although not a novel one). And while this may be costing the College a ridiculous amount of money, just think about some of the architectural disasters (cough-Sawyer-cough, not to mention the really quite ineffective Venturi-Scott-Brown spatial examination of the campus, as well as the climatically inappropriate plans for the new Baxter Student Center) that the College has thrown money at without receiving really useful results. So while healthy skepticism is good, Williams tends to engage in self-reflexive activity a little too much, and with not enough distance to be able to do it well, so while these external diversity experts may be as clueless and ineffective as the alcohol culture consultants that came earlier this year, we should at least give them a shot — and then we can praise or debunk them as appropriate (trust me, I enjoy enganging in ripping-apart-criticsm of undeserving, time-wasting people as much as the next person — but this is not something that should be done to people before they show their true colors in action).
Granted there’s a bit of a conservative (and, I dare say, masculine) bias on this blog (which is not bad in and of itself; in fact, it’s a breath of fresh air sometimes — and this is coming from a person with center-left views); but it would be great if we could explore touchy, opaque issues like this without descending to condescending side comments that denigrate the opposition without having to actually think about and critique its analysis in a useful and respectful way — not to mention that it would be really useful to encourage includion of actual dissenting views on the issue without making people feel so uncomfortable that they feel that have to resort to anonymous comments.
May 1st, 2005 at 10:42 am
Anonymous, if you feel that Hu-DeHart’s comments are understandable, please translate them for me, without resorting to, “They say what they mean.”
May 1st, 2005 at 11:47 am
Anonymous claims that “there’s a bit of a conservative (and, I dare say, masculine) bias on this blog.” Perhaps. People like Derek Catsam, Diana Davis, Jeff Zeeman, Eric Smith, David Nickerson, et al are charter members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. (And don’t even get me started on some of our other authors/commentators like Aidan Finley, David Rodriguez and Sam Crane. Sometimes this place is like George Bush campaign headquarters!)
Snide commentary aside, it is probably true that, if we could categorize the main posts on some left/right spectrum, the median value would be more to the right of say, the typical Williams faculty club conversation. But is it really accurate to categorize EphBlog as “conservative” within the spectrum of US politics. Libertarian, perhaps; conservative, no.
Leaving aside these snide comments for a moment, Anonymous puts it better than I ever could when she writes:
I agree! But we also need to be interesting. We also need people to want to read us, to want to participate here. Who would want to read an author who never wrote anything that anyone anywhere would ever find offensive? Not me.
Moreover, my side comment might have been “snide,” but it was also, you know, truthful. I claimed that “Dyseptic right-wingers would be hard pressed to keep from sniggering.” If you don’t think that this is a true statement, then you don’t know many dyseptic right-wingers. It may be impolite to point out that such sniggering goes on. We might all wish to live in a world in which one’s choice of last names causes no judgments to be made. But that isn’t the way that the world works now.
But, back to your point, I struggle with the trade-off between saying what I really think and creating an inclusive community in every post. (The first draft of this post featured the phrase “nutty left-wing fruitcakes.” I deleted this, and similar commentary, precisely because I want EphBlog to be an inclusive community. [And because that's lousy writing. -- ed.])
On one hand, I try to write with verve and humor. I also write what I think. The combination of the two will inevitably lead to some snide commentary, some condescension. How can it be otherwise? On the other hand, I also want EphBlog to be as inclusive a community as possible. I want Ephs to read what is written here — by me and others — and comment on it. So, I appreciate you taking the times to point out that, in this case, I might have struck the balance differently. Your opinion matters to me.
Anonymous goes on to write:
I agree! In the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess that you are not anonymous to us, Anonymous. Indeed, any regular of EphBlog would recognize which EphBlog regular is most likely to produce such thoughtful commentary (along with smart architectual references). Which is, of course, why I went to such lengths to recruit you in the first place . . . ;-)
Indeed, I’d like to suggest politely that by maintaining your anonymity in this thread, you contribute to a climate in which people like you feel the need to be anonymous. You make it more likely that my daughters will, in their turn, think that polite women do not participate in such public debates. Is that the message you want to send to the female Ephs (no use of “EphBabes” today!) that come after you?
May 1st, 2005 at 4:04 pm
What does “dyseptic” mean? I can’t find it in the dictionary. I broke it up and get “dy” (two) and “septic” (putrefaction). Please help.
Thanks.
May 1st, 2005 at 4:11 pm
I think he meant “dyspeptic,” the adjective form of “dyspepsia.” It’s someone who’s ill-mannered due to poor digestion — it’s being a sourpuss because your heartburn is getting to you.
May 1st, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Oops! Another question: Is “underlying power dynamics” a euphemism for some group? What group? Do they “inflect” racism and if so, how? Is “inflect” the right word or would “promote” be more precise? Why does anonymous enclose so many points in parentheses? Are they all digressions?
I tell you, this “newspeak” makes it very difficult to understand some of these blogs and scholarly speakers. Opaque. Now that seems to describe well what I’m reading and hearing.
May 1st, 2005 at 4:25 pm
No kidding, Guy? It was a spelling error, repeated several times? It crossed my mind, but I thought it unlikely.
Thanks.
May 1st, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Since Anonymous is either too busy or unable to translate Hu-DeHart’s words into plain English, let me give it a shot. (By the way, Hu-DeHart is the one from Brown, not Wellesley.) I read her 206 words as meaning, “College administrations give an inch by creating Ethnic Studies departments, but then do not go the mile. They cripple such departments by underfunding them and making sure that meaningful research about the impact of ethnic and racial differences is not performed.” (While I’m sure there are subtleties to her argument that I’m glossing over by compressing her statement by 80%, my statement leads to an action question: “OK, so what steps do we have to take to go the mile?” Remember, the ultimate goal here is a change in behavior, not proving how profound your analysis is.)
So why didn’t she say that? My point is that while blathering on may prove that she has a Ph.D., there are a number of constituencies reading the report (alumni, Trustees, parents, students thinking of attending) who want to understand her points the first time, without having to read and re-read the report three times.
Once again, that’s why I said I hope she’s clear about her findings about diversity. That way, the college community can spend its time trying to fix things, rather than spending its time trying to figure out what she “really meant.”
May 1st, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Lauri, well it does happen. And sometimes someone gets it in their mind that the word is spelled that way and they keep on using it. When I was a life insurance underwriter we all took courses on illnesses and medical terms so we could understand the medical records we had to read. One of the terms we learned was “MI,” short for myocardial infarction — in layman’s terms, a heart attack. However, one of my collegues took to calling it a myocardial infraction — and since we thought it was so funny, we never corrected him.
May 1st, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Thanks, Guy. Good posts! To comment on the MI, an arrhythmia would be an infraction. I thing MF better described a heart attack, as in myocardial felony. I get your point, though.
May 1st, 2005 at 10:29 pm
Thanks to Guy for heling me with my selling. Those damn ees are easy to forget!
May 2nd, 2005 at 12:52 am
Well, this has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but I’m pretty appalled that I was mentioned in the same breath as George W! As a self respecting fiscal conservative/social liberal (political moderate? even I don’t know what to call myself), I would never associate with that man.
May 2nd, 2005 at 10:44 am
I’ll offer a slightly different translation of the first paragraph from Guy. I read the two paragraphs as basically saying ‘colleges don’t question/address the causes of racial and ethnic difference in our society. Instead, they arbitrarily create categories and view people who fall into them as interests that need to be balanced or collected. The result is that colleges and corporations simply perpetuate and reinforce existing inequalities (and ignoring those who don’t fall into the proscribed categories), rather than get at the root cause.’
Judging the utility of the quoted paragraph is an exercise left to the reader. I agree with anonymous that Hu-Dehart’s prose is crystal clear when compared with much of the existing theoretical literature on race, inequality, and identity. That isn’t to say that an average person will be able to comprehend it immediately. Academic disciplines generate their own vocabulary, which is efficient for those in the know, but make the work less accessible. I don’t think other fields are any different. My election work brings me into contact with consultants frequently, and boy is there a lot of jargon that strikes me as useless. I can’t understand my mechanic either, but I have a feeling that the incomprehensible phrases refer to concrete parts of my car and techniques for installing and maintaining those parts. Score 1 for mechanics and -1 for consultants (and anyone else who wants to “operationalize a consensus building paradigm”).