From Mark Bauerlein, Minding the Campus:
For all the approval of diversity thinking, though, it may have a downside precisely for the universities that proclaim it so forcefully. For what if, in raising racial diversity awareness and emphasizing the racial climate of the campus, a university raises sensitivities to racial difference at the same time? If campus counselors, diversity officers, and others administrators lead seminars, training sessions, and orientations that underscore racial elements in social interactions, they might also heighten the perception of racist attitudes in others and the attribution of racist motives to them. Minority students might feel less “acceptance,” now and then over-reading negative responses to them as race-based. Administrators want to improve the racial atmosphere in the institutions, but if sensitivities go up along with awareness, then the institution will end up with a lot more cases of race-based allegations than it did before—in other words, a worse racial climate.
This is the dilemma posed in an important essay by Steve Chatman, a researcher at UC-Berkeley, in the Spring 2010 issue of New Directions for Institutional Research , edited by Serge Herzog. Entitled “Working with Large-Scale Climate Surveys: Reducing Data Complexity to Gain New Insights,” Chatman pulls data from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey that distinguish “interpersonal and diversity skills, campus climate, overall satisfaction and inclusion, and individual characteristics [religion, income, race, etc.].” The data also include the respondents’ programs of study, allowing Chatman to break down student perceptions by major.
Here is what he found:
Upper-division area and ethnic studies students rated Climate of Respect for Personal Beliefs at 4.16. Humanities and social science students gave it a substantially higher 4.80, and science, engineering, math, and business students rated it even higher at 5.05. Obviously, field of study affected scores.
Chatman attributes the low climate scores in area and ethnic studies precisely to the instruction students receive in those classes. “Students in area and ethnic studies should have learned to recognize prejudicial communication and should be more sensitive to communication that might be prejudicial,” he writes. Whereas a math student might hear a remark and think nothing of it, an African American Studies student might discern prejudice and stereotyping. Does this mean that students in area and ethnic studies are more perceptive and accurate in their assessment of campus climate, or have they acquired in their classes a “warped lens” (Chatman’s term) that sees social life in overdone racial categories? Chatman even draws a logical possibility that might appall area and ethnic studies instruction, that is, that the climate in those fields is a lot worse than it is in engineering classes and labs. One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.
Chatman draws no policy conclusions, only calling for further research. But his findings certainly challenge the automatic assumption that more diversity sensitivity equals better undergraduate experience. It also introduces a needed critical element in the understanding of diversity itself. The term has acquired so much psycho-political freight that its usefulness for constructive discussion of higher education is practically zero. Such complications as those unveiled by Chatman are not a setback to rational understanding of campus social life. They are an advance.
Nothing here that I and others haven’t been arguing for years; but it’s nice to have data — well, additional data — available to back up what it would seem are rather commonsense observations.
(h/t IP, via Darleen)
Sometimes it seems as though the stuff taught as racial awareness is rather more like its own opposite. It doesn’t bother to investigate race as such, to see if there is some thing fixed or fixable (as a target towards which to orient); the teaching simply assumes a cloudy something [race] and scurries on to instruct in its political ideology (and hang the science, if science there be on the subject).
“Ti esti” questions aren’t in vogue.
But for the Left, this is a feature, not a bug.
Heh. Today, Glenn Beck is calling Obama “the slap-chop guy”: the face guy for a much larger and much older machine.
Is that racist? If so, I’ll have to start using “slap-chop guy” as my one racial epithet. It’s too funny not to.
Slap-chop-guy is a patterologist. Small step to another, isn’t it?
Does this mean that students in area and ethnic studies are more perceptive and accurate in their assessment of campus climate, or have they acquired in their classes a “warped lens” (Chatman’s term) that sees social life in overdone racial categories?
No. NO!
The devil, you say!
“the slap chop guy” sounds like a Chinese dude to me.
Control for bloop.
One way to try to eliminate this effect would be to control for bloop — we know among more general populations perceptions of the prevalence of prejudice vary between the bloops. So if the sample in the majors varies by bloop, we will see those more general population variances expressed by majors, and we may think they are explained by the major.
All I can say is, this Chatman person sounds like one huge effin’ racist. Talkin’ all racist-like with his racisty racism. Doesn’t he know that more diversity classes are the solution to every racist problem?
But, on the non-sarcastic side, there may well be something to the theory that people more likely to major in ethnic studies are already more likely to see racism encoded in everything around them.
bloop: Though it is common sense that if you educate people about something, they will become more aware of it.
That only supports your argument if you’re educating them about something that is true.
Maybe you should listen to Coast-to-Coast AM sometime and hear the result of people being sensitized to nonsense. You’ve got your numerologists who see meaning in all displayed numbers everywhere. They tell you that if you write the number 8 on a piece of paper and stick it in your wallet, you’ll get rich. They find meaning in the numbers on your odometer, the value of the date (5/12/2010 = 2), and advise people how to make decisions based on a mysterious numerical power.
You’ve got people who KNOW that the gubmint is hiding alien corpses in Area 51. Some of them hear coded messages in press statements. Others relate fantastic accounts of alien abduction. And others are probably lying to get on national radio, but they all live in a very different world from you and I.
When you tell pigmenty people over and over that White People may be nice to your face, but they actually want to keep you down, suddenly the most innocent remark or action takes on a sinister tone, regardless what White People actually want.
There is such a thing as inducing paranoia. Our huge frontal lobes permit us to see patterns everywhere and anywhere. If you condition people to see something that isn’t actually there, their brains will perceive it anyway.
Campuses would be a lot more harmonious if all they ever said was: “Skin color is cosmetic, and if you have cross-cultural misunderstandings, please deal with them amongst yourselves in good faith with forgiving hearts and thick skins.”
“If you condition people to see something that isn’t actually there, their brains will perceive it anyway.”
And vice versa:
So, bloop is a troll. Okey-dokey. Bye bye, bloop.
bloop is meya. bdam. soa. au.
und so weiter.
Meya/RD/soa/bdam/pfar/bloop is going for double digit mendoucheity.
I am offended by the name, “bloop!” Ahhhhh, I feel vindicated just typing the last sentence.
Perpetual outrage is rather useless. Perpetuating perpetual outrage is sheer douchenozzlery!
Jeff, As a catch-wrestling tattooed large-framed Jew, you should have a greater sensitivity to racial considerations.
Killer comment Bloop. Just absolutely killer. Greg Maddux in the mid-1990s good. Because calling DiCentra out on platitudes with a comment like that takes something….special.
“Greg Maddux in the mid-1990s good.”
Dallas Braden’s Mother’s-Day-Good is our new GregMaddux-watchword. 69 mph change with near pin-point location, Zeus’s Thunderbolt. Die Rays, die. Huzzah.
bloop is meya?
Crap. I thought we had a live one.
I would be shocked that people that search for grievances find grievances. Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH !!!
I am tired of actually producing something of value. In Obama’s America that’s just not the way to get ahead.
With this in mind I am going to start an organization. I’m going to bring together a group of people with the same ethnic background. I’m going to tell them that people of other ethnic backgrounds either hate them, or are not as good as them, have stolen something that belongs to them, or are responsible for pretty much everything that’s gone wrong in their lives.
Using repetition, historical revisionism, and pseudoscience I will ingrain in their minds that they are infinitely better and more pure than those who ostensibly oppose them just because of their genetic makeup.
I can’t decide whether to call my new organization La Raza or the Ku Klux Klan.
Decisions, decisions, decisions…
Is the Third Reich taken?
“Diversity is now code for the immutable nature of racial identity.”
-Jonah Goldberg
the communist party?
the jacobin club?
No, newrouter, the Communist Party is a paragon of openness and inclusiveness next to La Raza, so clearly that won’t work.
“The Klan” would work fine since it’s essentially accurate, but it has to much baggage attached to it at this point. I would have to do a lot of work, hire a bunch of PR guys, maybe that guy from the white house press conferences, I’m just not into the work thing anymore.
I think I need to hit on a name that is totally nonthreatening, and has the benefit of 50 years of liberal media PR behind it.
What if I called it the Democratic Party? I could pull together all those aggrieved groups under one big red flag, and begin my long march through the institutions on my way to destroying the very fabric of America, and American society.
Hi ho hi ho, it’s off to work I go! This can’t possibly miss!
Well since many of us are part Neanderthal, what do you expect?
joey hairplugs agrees:
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_soviet-archives.html
You mean that pointing out and encouraging differences will cause the student body to adhere to those differences?
It would seem that the old, clumsy, crude people a hundred years ago, those that pushed ideas and symbols of union were not quite so stupid, were they? They knew what they were facing. And the current divisers, they know what they are doing.
Bloop,
That was a metric I had not really considered.
Clearly, if I want to kill a few thousand I should go with the Klan, since that’s pretty much the limit of their competence, but if I want to kill a few hundred million, then it’s really down to the Communist Party since they’re the only ones that have a track record of success in eliminating this many “enemies of the state”.
La Raza is the wild card. I get the feeling that if they had their fingers on the trigger they would be more than happy to fill the killing fields with the bones of millions of gringos, but that’s just a hunch.
I think I’m going with “red brigade” because when it comes to filling the mass graves nobody’s ever going to compete with Stalin.
“Chatman attributes the low climate scores in area and ethnic studies precisely to the instruction students receive in those classes.”
No surprise there really; maybe it was the two semesters of 400 level race/gender/tribal baiting courses they are all forced to sit through-in order to distinguish who is “keepin it real” and who is “perpetratin'”…
The reason math/science/engineering rocks so hard is that they are spared all of the humanities coursework in order to fulfill the more esoteric coursework germaine to their discipline. Unless they were, you know, actually payin’ for college like me, in which case I got my money’s worth by taking the full load available every semester; I found the history, art history, philosophy, actual cultural courses (as opposed to the phony identity politics “cooture” ones) and comparative literature coursework to be a respite from the rigors of aerospace engineering.
But, make no mistake, even in the rocket science track there were those heard to complain, “I don’t see no one in that honors group picture that looks like me!!1!1!”; after all, it was in the people’s republic of Maryland…
But I used to get ’em good. Whenever I heard that complaint I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment, “you might, if you studied a bit harder”…
But, like, I’ve always been a knuckle dragger.
Right, because everyone knows that ensuring the right of citizens to keep and bear arms is the first step toward totalitarian mass murder.
Idiot.
You go Bloop (bad nym). So it’s good to know that diversity, as it is fallaciously practiced in the academy, should be replaced with evening prayers.
It is sometimes estimated that as many as 700,000 people may have been killed in the Civil War.
This is 1.5% of the low estimate of deaths in Russia under Stalin alone (Lenin was a piker in that respect). Against Pol Pot it gets a zero in front of the decimal point. The best guesses of deaths in Cuba as Castro “consolidated his position” come to roughly a third to half of that. It is slightly less than the number of Poles killed by the USSR after WWII, and about half the number of Czechs.
All the people, Americans and otherwise, killed by US forces (including the Confederacy, Hiroshima, and WWII “carpet bombing”) adds up to a little over a tenth of Stalin’s purges. Find another apologia.
Regards,
Ric
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For some reason, I have a hankering to learn Forex Trading. I’m not sure why, though.
Haunt me no longer, sockpuppet!!
#33 – “when it comes to filling the mass graves nobody’s ever going to compete with Stalin.”
The Ghost of Mao begs to differ.
meya/RD/soa/pfar/bdman/bloopy – What does you psychiatrist think of your, yet another, new personality?
FWIW – the only racial trouble I ever had in the Army was always just after the Equal Opportunity officer had come by to ‘raise our consciousness’, or whatever it was the powers that be thought such a putz would be doing.
Some of the things in the consciousness of my troopies needed to be ruthlessly repressed – there were some big nasty chunks in a few folks’ heads that you really didn’t want floating to the surface.
If you make me aware of racial diferences, you make me aware of racial differences. And being aware, I may be encoursged to do something about those racial differences. And that would mean – what?
Now substitute religious for racial (such as muslim) and then what?
What body-count do you want to beat, Mr. and Miss Academia Type?