As we head back into the seething abyss that is spring semester at UW-Madison, you can almost hear the creaks and moans of the administrative gears grinding back into full propagandist mode. Skyrocketing tuition? Overpriced textbooks? Sweatshop apparel? Not enough seats in the fantasy/sci-fi lit class? Not to worry, concerned students of Madison! We're going to increase diversity! Strap yourselves in for an ethnic studies course or two and prepare yourselves for the shock of seeing more than one minority student a day!
Now I am all for increasing access to the university for minority students. More minorities in the university system will lead to more minorities in business, architecture, engineering, education and thousands of other positions of importance in our government and economy where historically they have been sadly underrepresented. The problem I have with the ""rah-rah"" efforts of the administration toward increasing diversity is how they are planning to go about it.
The vaunted Plan 2008 certainly sounds good on the surface, but the focus and scope of well-intentioned programs such as PEOPLE (Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence), which creates summer programs to motivate minority students to graduate from high school and move on to college, are too narrow to have the necessary impact on UW diversity levels.
The plan suggests that UW students consider volunteering or that they ""be a friend to a student of diverse color,"" a statement so entirely PC and yet so laughable at the same time it makes me want to shake my fist in their general direction and forget about the whole thing.
What we really need is to get the student population involved in the diversity quest in a way that will work for everyone (and increase diversity while we're at it). Let's face it: College students want to get their school work done, find a job and, sometimes, terrorize State Street, depending on the time of year.
Volunteering and working in poor neighborhoods rarely fit into the tight schedule of homework, parties and, occasionally, sleep. So why not have the administration put their money (or in this case, their gigantic student resource) where their proverbial mouth is and start offering students a way to help out that won't interfere with graduation?
Historically, the most effective way to create change on a massive scale is to work from the bottom up. Imagine what would happen if the School of Education offered course credit for volunteer hours in schools with economically disadvantaged students, providing thousands of college students the opportunity to tutor kids as young as first and second graders to help them catch up to their wealthier (and generally Caucasian) counterparts.
How about the School of Business doing the same for students who help out in community centers? Or for the social work students who spend time in minority communities offering childcare and other services to parents working two jobs and who barely have enough time to see their children, let alone help them with homework? Heck, why not make it an option for all students to fulfill their ethnic studies requirement by participating in any of the above? Call it an Ethnic Studies Lab or something.
Directly involving UW-Madison students in the process of diversification serves two purposes: It allows students to feel invested in diversity development instead of apathetic toward it, and it gives the UW System a way to utilize the massive resource that we ourselves provide. So tune out the administrative moaning this semester and instead ask the simple question: When are you going to actually let us help you do something about it?
