Several POSOH team members from the College of Menominee Nation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison came together during the University of Wisconsin’s 2013 Diversity Forum. The Diversity Forum focused on diversity and educational achievement to engage statewide issues of academic achievement in higher education for under-represented groups.
Dr. Patrick J. Sims, Interim Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer, set the stage by performing a monologue from the play by Lorraine Hansberry called Les Blancs. It expressed complications arising from stereotypes, and their tendencies to oversimplify reality. Sims encouraged people to think critically about assumptions during the course of the forum, “I hope you will see things over the next few days that will challenge your assumptions of others.”
With the overall goal expressed, keynote speakers went about setting the stage.
“We’re producing graduates for a society that we can’t even imagine in the future. What’s that society? More equitable, more democratic, more economically sustainable…We want students to be visionary,” said Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, Director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. She emphasized placing student identity at the center of practice to move beyond what we all accept as learners and members of society. Faculty, students, and staff needed to be willing to engage in dialogue that is open to including conflict, and difference of perspective, over sensitive issues as well as being active listeners in difficult discussions that confront difference.
Dr. Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, sought to make visible the invisible on individual, institutional, and societal levels. He researches what he calls microaggessions, or “the everyday slights and indignities, insults and allegations, and put downs that … any marginalized group experiences in their day to day interactions.” Some examples include, but are not limited to, being profiled in a store, seeing peoples’ hands go to their wallets in an elevator, being told one speaks excellent English even though he is born in the United States, talking about minority people being “let” into higher education institutions. Individuals often feel the cumulative effects of these microaggressions, and this norm is damaging and dangerous.
When these ideas get applied to larger societal scales, the implications are even more dangerous, Sue emphasized. Though white male Euro-Americans only represent 33% of the population, this demographic makes up 80% of tenured positions in higher education, 90% of public school superintendents, 80% of the House of Representatives, 80-90% of the US Senate, 92% of Forbes 400 Executive CEO positions, and 99.9% of athletic team owners. “The power to define reality is reality itself,” he said. By first recognizing the negative and often unconscious assumptions about others that are often invisible in our society, it becomes possible to facilitate an alternative dialogue and create a different power structure.
Over 600 participants began to act on this stage through multiple engagement strategies, including an interactive human scavenger hunt, small table discussions, listening sessions, break-out meetings, lunch conversations, and an interactive hiphop/choreographed theater performance by an undergraduate internship group called “First Wave SOAR.” Several themes emerged as the forum challenged participants to ask many questions: what does diversity look like (mean) to me; how is it about me and not about someone else; what are the most urgent problems and how might we address them?
- Diversity is a resource. Inequity is a problem.
- There are many prejudiced tendencies and microaggressions built up over time that impact how people view each other as well as the unconscious assumptions people make about others.
- Power can be redefined by making visible the invisible and unearthing unconscious biases on individual, organizational, and societal levels.
- Identity is at the heart of diversity and it goes beyond boxes on a checklist, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. Understanding the intersections of identity on a personal level is more important than understanding a homogenized set of categorized boxes.
- Mutual learning and open dialogue are powerful tools in creating diverse learning environments.
For more information on the Diversity Forum, you can follow this link to the Daily Cardinal which outlines the workshop in greater detail.