Edgar F. Beckham
Association of American Colleges and Universities
From "Charting Diversity -
Where Are We Now? Self-Assessment and Strategic Change"
February 18, 2000

Edgar F. Beckham: Thank you very much. I'm so pleased to be here at the University of Virginia and the great state of Virginia. I want all of you to know that recently I have developed a distinct preference for Thomas Jefferson as the father of my country because he had obviously contributed more to its diversity than we used to give him credit for [laughter]. I have only good things to say about this university.

I've entitled my talk "Developmental Discourse on Campus Diversity " and because I have just a few minutes, I want to jump right in. I call the discourse developmental for both personal and conceptual reasons. If I had more time, I would tell you the story of my own journey through diversity on campus beginning most likely with my arrival at Wesleyan University as a freshman way back in 1951. Wesleyan had about 750 students, all of them men, most of them white. I was one of three black freshmen but I wouldn't want you to think that that was the extent of Wesleyan's diversity. There was a black sophomore, too. I returned to Wesleyan in 1961 to teach German and was caught up in the ferment over civil rights during which Wesleyan realized its historical complicity in the systematic denial of educational opportunity to people of color and resolved over a period of several years to make an affirmative effort not only to recruit black, Hispanic and Asian students, but also to return to coeducation which had been abandoned in 1911.

I would offer the observation that while Wesleyan's action was clearly right, the University did not know fully what it was doing. It had to learn from experience and what it learned sometimes through what I have called edifying trauma, enriched it, made it a better and more interesting place, a place where students thrived on ambiguity and through participation in difficult dialogues over matters of division and oppression. I would like to say that through the ensuing years Wesleyan occupied a crossroads at which its institutional identity intersected with social history and where diversity served as a fulcrum for leveraging a renewed institutional self-understanding.

I wish I had time to tell you more about the lessons Wesleyan learned and their relevance for today's discussion. You see, I spent most of my adult life at Wesleyan and it has shaped my thinking about most things in profound ways. Wesleyan and my biological mother are among my favorite topics, but I have to forge ahead onto the conceptual landscape that I've been traversing since I left Wesleyan in 1990 and joined the Ford Foundation to coordinate its then new campus diversity initiative. My message to you today comes out of my experience at the Ford Foundation and out of my current work as Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The message is simple. If you want to value campus diversity as an asset, and put it to use as an educational resource, you have to manage the discourse on diversity strategically which means appreciating its multiple levels and its multiple meanings. A lot of people want a simple definition of diversity. You're not going to get that from me. Instead I want to start with a basic meaning of diversity, one that I would say operates at about its lowest level, that is, the meaning that you would expect to find in a dictionary. There is means difference, variety, little more, and there are some people who interpret that to suggest that campus diversity means the mere presence of people in the mix who can be described as being different from each other. Clearly this lowest level of discourse about diversity where diversity means mere difference is insufficient. By the way, this is the only level that permits of the notion of quantitative sufficiency. From here on in, you cannot ask the question how much diversity is enough, but I don't want you to reject this lowest level of discourse because diversity does mean difference. The point is that in addition to meaning different, it means more.

I reached the second level of understanding of diversity when I remembered the admonition of my eighth grade Ancient History teacher, Ms. Crain, who said, Edgar, if you want to know what a word means, start with the dictionary but don't stop there. With her admonition in mind, I put the term through some exercises and discovered that I tended to call things diverse that occupied a context that was potentially unifying. If I say that Americans are diverse, I'm not merely calling attention to the differences large and small, significant and trivial, among them. I'm also calling attention to the potential for unity among them. I'm labeling them all American and implying that that common identity may have meaning. A noted sociologist once said that groups are identified by their labels but defined by their social interactions. Labeling Americans as such does not yet define them. It merely identifies them. To define them, we have to look at history. That's what Wesleyan did when it rediscovered its identity at the crossroads with history. On the second conceptual level, diversity still means difference but it is difference in a context that is potentially unifying.

On the third level, diversity confronts history directly and takes on the additional meaning of social justice. That is perhaps a sad commentary on the way human beings have dealt with diversity throughout human history. We have usually used it to divide, to exclude, to achieve hegemony through the raw use of power to dominate and to oppress. We need to remember that diversity points us unerringly towards social justice and a critical examination of past oppressions and their continuing social consequences.

Now, if diversity is social justice is my third level of diversity (Michael, I'm sorry, I wasn't brought up a Catholic so I don't know how to stop at three), if social justice is my third level of diversity discourse, diversity as educational intention is my fourth, and hereto there is some tension. The Ford Foundation's Campus Diversity Initiative sought to encourage colleges and universities to value diversity as an educational asset and to deploy it as an educational resource. Diversity as a demographic descriptor was not enough. The Foundation asked what are the educational uses of diversity and how are you using it. Oh yes, and is it working? And how do you know it's working? Diversity as an educational intention operates in every domain of institutional activity; in recruitment and retention of students, faculty and staff; in campus climate and student interaction; in the curriculum and the professional life of faculty; and, at the highest level of an institution's sense of institutional mission. Nothing is left out.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities made the fifth level of discourse explicit in its Campus Diversity Initiative entitled American Commitments--Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning. Through American Commitments, AAC&U became the Ford Foundation's primary partner in campus diversity and the Association remains today the leading advocate of the linkage in concept and in action among diversity, democracy and liberal education. I might add that American Commitments has produced a wealth of resources for campus diversity, including a series of papers exploring higher education through responsibilities in the pluralistic democracy, a newsletter entitled "The Diversity Digest" that provides useful information about campus diversity strategies, a campus diversity web site co-managed by the Association and the University of Maryland and a continuing series of publications on campus diversity issues ranging from research on the impact of campus diversity on student learning to curricular issues to assessment of campus diversity projects.

I happen to think that the emphasis that AAC&U has put on the linkage between diversity and democracy is very powerful. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that one of the things that it points out to us is that diversity is, after all, a defining characteristic of democracy. A defining characteristic in the sense that what democracy does best is mediate difference. I'm not a political philosopher, but I want to suggest that without diversity there would be no need for democracy. Without diversity, democracy would be impossible.

And American Commitments has revealed a sixth aspect of campus diversity, namely diversity as civic competence. In this aspect, the pursuit of diversity is seen as integral to preparing students to engage their civic responsibilities with energy and skill. American Commitments argues that the tensions between democracy and diversity are generative tensions that can enhance our capacity to appreciate the delicate balance between difference and unity that is implicit in the term diversity. American Commitments also notes that historically while the tension between American democracy as reality and American democracy as ideal aspiration has led at times to destructive and oppressive consequences, but it has also propelled us forward toward a fuller and more inclusive realization of the promise of democracy. At a time when many observers are deploring the erosion of civic commitment and engagement among Americans and especially among American youth, the emergency of diversity as civic competence presents yet another conceptual vehicle for the pursuit by American higher education of excellence that is tied directly to grand social purpose.

Now, I happen to consider this connection that AAC&U has made revolutionary, especially given the fact that it was promulgated by the educational association most noted for its advocacy of liberal education. Liberal education has been traditionally promoted for its own sake. Indeed, many of its strongest advocates insist on separating it from purpose, from utility, from service to any higher cause other than perhaps moral fulfillment, but AAC&U had made a clear and emphatic statement that education has effects in real contexts and that we have an obligation, an ethical obligation, to craft educational practice that produces beneficial rather than harmful effects. AAC&U has also asserted that education has an obligation, a social obligation, to equip students with the skills to participate effectively in a democratic society.

Believe it or not, at the seventh level of discourse, campus diversity becomes a matter of management. Now, I've suggested that bringing diverse individuals together on the same campus through various recruitment strategies including affirmative action is just the beginning. I like to compare it to the difference between building a library and managing one. We know that even the best built libraries don't work very well unless they are strategically managed. What the Campus Diversity Initiative has taught is that demographic diversity can contribute much more powerfully to education if like a successful library it is creatively conceived, thoughtfully designed, and strategically managed.

In its final phase, the Campus Diversity Initiative introduced the eighth level of discourse by transforming itself into a public information project aimed at telling the American public about the diversity work of American higher education and demonstrating that that work was good for students, good for institutions, and good for society. It has been a highly active and quite successful campaign. When it conducted a national survey in the summer of 1998 of voter attitudes toward diversity education in colleges and universities, it discovered that most Americans, young and old, conservative and liberal, favor the work that American colleges and universities are doing to advance diversity as educational practice, and they think it is an advantage to have a diverse student body, so much so that they favor deliberate steps by institutions to increase their diversity. As one commentator put it, once again the American people have demonstrated that they get it even if their political leaders don't.

I'm going to skip over a couple of explanations of that because I need to get to my ninth and last level of discourse. And to do that, I want to return to the crossroads where Wesleyan saw its institutional identity intersect with social history. I want to argue that each individual has a crossroads, too, where identity and social history intersect and where each of us has an obligation to examine the intersection critically and craft its content and meaning.

Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine, a young German woman named Tina. Tina's 25. She's a student of art preparing to be an art teacher in Stuttgart. I recently had a conversation with her about her sense of responsibility for the past and quite specifically for the German past. Her parents whom I have known since long before Tina's birth, are staunchly opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, though neither of them was old enough to make an informed political choice during the Nazi regime. Although Tina lives on the morally right side of the ideological road, she still feels that she is obliged on behalf of her parents and grandparents to share the burden of the German past including the horror of the holocaust. As we have discussed this matter, Tina and I have explored the suggestion that she does indeed bear responsibility for the past though not for events that occurred so long before her birth. History doesn't just happen to her. She constructs it by engaging it, by deciding which elements of will enter and reside in her consciousness, by using it to inform her sense of self and place. If she chooses, as she does, to call herself a German, my suggestion goes, then she is obliged to explain to me what historical elements are part of her German consciousness, her German identity, what elements are absent, why and why not.

Responsibility for the past is the responsibility of the historian operating at the crossroads of identity, and social history. The historian who shapes his or her own historical understanding and influences ours by sifting historical data selecting from among them and organizing them into facts. One of my favorite historians who is, of course, at Wesleyan often reminds me not only of his good knowledge of Latin by telling me that data are given and facts are made.

I think there is an opportunity at this ninth level of discourse to include values that take us beyond the labels that I referred to before. Now, no either/or here. It's time for both/and. Remember, we need to operate at all nine levels of discourse. These levels of discourse are like disciplines. They ask different questions and they ask them in different ways. Let me illustrate by using two of them--diversity as social justice and diversity as educational intention.

Diversity as social justice may ask the question--what have you done in the past with the labels was unjust. How can you use the labels in the future to correct the injustice? The labels by themselves are quite adequate to that form of questioning, but they are not adequate to a form of questioning that would be offered from the vantage point of educational intention. To our educational intention, the labels by themselves tell us very little. I want you to imagine with me for a moment a conversation that I might have with someone who is my peer in terms of age and I might ask this person, this man, how he would label himself and let's suppose he said I'm an African American. I might ask him what has that meant to you in the past? By the way, when he says I'm an African American, I don't know anything about him. I know about the label. I know about the history of the label, but I don't know anything about him, so I have to ask additional questions. What has that meant to you in the past. And he might respond that his sense of himself in terms of label has gone through a number of transitions. He might tell, for instance, that he was once colored, that he became a Negro, and later he was black, and now he's African American and I might push since he's my peer. You see, I understand that and I might ask him what it was like to be colored and he might respond that he was only colored as a child and that it was a natural phenomenon like being born a boy. I then might ask but what's the difference between being colored and eventually being a Negro. Oh, he might respond, a huge difference. I was born colored and a boy. I aspired to being a Negro and a Cub Scout. Being a Negro took work. It required aspiration as did being a Cub Scout. Oh, I would feel that I'm getting to know this guy a little bit. I might push a little farther and I might even find out that it was his mother who invested him with these aspirations. I might even ask, well, you said Cub Scout. Why didn't you say man? You know, boy goes to man. Oh, you didn't know my mother, he might respond. Being there were three aspirations that I was absolutely required to entertain, being a Negro, being a Christian, being a man, being a Negro was considerably more important than being a Christian and far more important than being a man. It was like being a Cub Scout. He might add that his mother was a protofeminist.

You see, for educational purposes, in order for us to understand how this man might deliver himself as an educational asset to an institution, we have to know more than his label. We have to know how he has lived to label. That is to say, it is the lived experience that we want to bring into our educational environment.

But for me, as I've signalled, that's still not quite enough. As in the case of my conversation with Tina, I wanted to know how her social identity intersected with social history, with the social history of Germany. What's in it? What's not? Why? And why not? I'm sure you've read about the situation in South Carolina where people are protesting some of the uses to which the Confederate battleflag has been put. Perhaps some of you saw on television protestors carrying a sign that said your heritage is my slavery. Did you remember seeing that sign? I think, by the way, earlier in our conversation there was talk about Balkanization on our campuses. It's not our campuses that Balkanization is occurring, but this sign is an example of Balkanization of identity.

I want to leave you with two challenges. One is to keep the discourse on diversity operating at all levels simultaneously. And the second, to challenge all present and prospective members of the University of Virginia family and that includes applicants for admission to tell you about their lived experience behind the labels for their identity, to tell you about how that lived experience intersects with social history and to tell you what contribution the delivery of those intersections to this educational environment will make to the University of Virginia's pursuit of diversity. Were that to happen I could imagine another sign, a sign which would run the equation your heritage is my slavery in reverse and you know how it would read? My slavery is your heritage. Thank you.