"Diversity." People at Yale beat this word to death. We supposedly have diversity at Yale: African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, etc. But how significant is this diversity?
What truly makes a community diverse is the interaction among ethnic and religious groups. The Yale Administration promotes the perception that it is sensitive to different cultural voices. Because of the advent of political correctness in the admissions process, diversity glorifies Yale's reputation: reputation means more applicants.
The Administration has organized several programs to address minority concerns. Just take the specialized freshman pre-orientation program, the Preregistration Orientation Program (PROP). It began in the early '70s when Puerto Rican students requested help in adjusting to the Yale environment. Since the mid- and late-'70s, all minority groups have been included in the program.
PROP primarily focuses on the social and cultural aspects of Yale and also organizes workshops for academic improvement. One of the main workshops hones participants' writing skills. Many minority students in the earlier years of PROP came from families where English was a second language, so the goal of the workshop was to teach and improve these students' writing.
Why, though, have PROP participants been singled out to have these writing workshops? Why not Freshperson Conference participants? An existing implication may be that minorities cannot write well enough because they are minorities. I am sure that there are freshmen out there who are NOT minority students and who also have no clue how to write their first philosophy papers on Plato. Non-minority students should be included in these writing workshops.
Another important oversight in the PROP program is its failure to include international students. International students comprise 4.4 percent of Yale's undergraduates, a considerable portion of the population. What distinguishes this minority student body from those who are minorities in America? True, the international students have their own orientation program, but discussion about ethnicity is almost non-existent. Dean Valeriano Ramos, who is in charge of the PROP program, comments that many minority students in America come from inner-city schools, where they are often the majority. Therefore, these students are not very familiar with lifestyles beyond their neighborhoods. PROP organizers worry that the unfamiliar and often threatening Yale environment might jeopardize minority students' self-esteem because they are away from the ethnically homogeneous settings in which they grew up. PROP tries to prepare minority students for adjustment to life at Yale.
How ironic that PROP does not include international students! I wonder how many come from homogeneous societies and have difficulties with Yale's diversity. Certainly if you are Taiwanese, Nigerian, or one of a multitude of other nationalities, then you can sympathize with these difficulties.
I believe that my argument for including international students should be extended even further - all incoming undergraduates should have access to an orientation program that emphasizes life on a multicultural campus. Currently, even minority students have incomplete access to PROP because of budget constraints. Its organizers randomly send applications to only some minorities, and if they receive more responses than they can fund, they further narrow the number of participants from the pool of applicants.
PROP is not supposed to segregate minorities: after all, it is trying to integrate these freshmen into the Yale community while helping them to retain their ethnic identities. PROP defeats its own purpose by singling out a select group of minorities.
Diversity can exist in the purely superficial sense of fulfilling quotas of ethnic minorities, but of what significance is diversity if everyone in this environment is ignorant about others' backgrounds? PROP has the fundamentally good idea of dealing with ethnic issues. But addressing ethnicity selectively, only to certain minority groups, defeats the purpose of true diversity. Yale currently has the mindset that, like food groups, there are only three distinct categories of Yale students: white, minority, and international. The University feels that it has to approach these three categories individually. As long as this mindset continues, diversity is a facade at Yale.
Shu Shin Luh is a freshman in Ezra Stiles College.
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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