Diversity University

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Author: Kevin Batton

In recent weeks, the plethora of impassioned opinion articles and letters to the editor has instilled a sense of deja vu in regular readers of the Weekly. Arguments about the purpose and merits of having a multicultural residence hall appear at least once a year in this paper, and have been since the initial founding of a multicultural hall in 1988.

Shortly after Bell-Young was deemed Oxy’s first multicultural hall, a student wrote a letter to The Occidental complaining that this experiment in consciousness-raising was not a success. Taking on a satirical devil’s advocate persona, the student mockingly congratulated his peers for inadvertently inhibiting harmony within the student body. “This sort of campus association has not only bred a type of collective elitism among its members . . . but has bred a kind of angry apathy among other students,” he wrote. “The term ‘Multicultural Dorm’ is one of the most amusing euphemisms for ‘internment camp’ that I have yet seen, a beautiful paradox for an institution which claims that its diversity is the key to its education.” As these same arguments could easily be attributed to the critics of Oxy’s current multicultural residence hall, Pauley, it is worth examining how the diversity movement and the notion of a multicultural dorm developed at Occidental, in hopes of understanding why the issue of multiculturalism nineteen years ago is still relevant today.

Occidental has been concerned with diversity for its entire existence, although the definition of “diversity” has been contingent on the social situations of the era. Oxy’s first engagement with such issues came in the 1910s in the form of a debate over co-education. Then-President John Willis Baer, taking the idea of Occidental as “Princeton of the West” to heart, proposed to the trustees that the College, which had been co-educational since its inception, reinvent itself in the image of East Coast schools and serve men only, possibly sharing faculty with a separate sister campus for women. As recounted in Jean Paule’s biography of Baer, the motion was approved by the trustees on March 28, 1912, and it was resolved that Occidental would admit no more female students than they already had. The resolution faced an enormous negative reaction from the student body and many alumni, who protested against the idea. The student newspaper ran a “protest number” with editorials using terms couched in the spirit of a progressive movement: “Like other great reforms, the [coeducation] movement has not escaped the stage of reaction. It has its critics . . . [But] I make for co-education a very strong claim: I believe that it produces a finer type of manhood and womanhood than that produced by the system of separate education.” Needless to say, the backlash led Baer and the trustees to vote again and restore co-education to Occidental College.

Racial diversity movements as we know them today are much younger, being products of the social changes of the 1950s and ’60s inspired by the Civil Rights movement. This is especially true for Occidental, which until the mid-eighties was rather slow in adopting progressive policies regarding student and faculty diversity. This is not to say that there was a lack of awareness of such issues on campus-a 1960 demonstration by students and faculty supporting black student rights in the segregated South and the student-led movement in the early eighties demanding the college’s divestment from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa support the contrary-but rather, until the mid-eighties, little was done to make Occidental demographically resemble the city around it or the United States at large.

In April of 1982, Oxy President Richard Gilman established the Ad Hoc Committee on Minority Issues, a body made up of students, faculty and administrators, as well as staff and alumni, in order, according to The Occidental, to identify and recommend solutions to “problems which face Asian, Black, Latino and Native American members of the Occidental community.” This was more or less the first time the administration took it upon itself not just to remove existing institutional obstacles that inhibited minorities’ utility of Occidental’s services, but also to positively attract and accommodate minority students for the end-in-itself of diversity. The committee’s report, which was approved by the student senate and the faculty, stated goals such as increased recruitment among prospective minority students, ideally one-third of future incoming classes, and increased minority representation in the faculty.

By 1987, minority enrollment was such that 25 percent of the student body was of color. 1988 saw the beginning of Dr. John Slaughter’s presidency, and it was under him that the college began to internalize diversity and make it an explicit part of Oxy’s mission. As Oxy’s first Black President, Slaughter was serious about the social value of a diverse student body, and he demonstrated this on Oct. 6, 1988 in the op-ed section of the L.A. Times, where he wrote, “the decline in the college-going rates of blacks and Latino students, is of particular importance in California, where the relatively low entry of these students into higher education has major societal implications. Given the growth in the population of black and Latino youth compared to their white counterparts, the future of California depends to a large extent on how well and how urgently we address this deficiency.”

The early years of Slaughter’s tenure became a kind of golden age of diversity on the part of the student body. When the idea of a multicultural hall was announced in 1987, so many returning students applied to participate that the residence staff had to change their original plan from Chilcott Hall to the larger Bell-Young. The RAs and residents of Bell-Young’s inaugural year as the multicultural residence hall called themselves “the D.R.E.A.M. Team,” with the acronym standing for “Dedicated to the Recognition, Education and Acceptance of Multiculturalism.”

It soon became clear that all the activities and programs planned by the residents of Bell-Young would interfere with the comfort of the hall as a residence, so the administration agreed to the creation of a separate Multicultural Center in 1998. Formerly an off-campus student residence nicknamed the “Sepia House,” the Intercultural Community Center was created in 1988.

The brand of diversity to which Occidental currently subscribes had its origin at this point in its recent history. Statistically, the diversity of the student body and faculty has improved in the last decade. Oxy’s website currently describes the student population as being 49.5% of color. But numbers are only half the issue.

Former President Slaughter, now President and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering Inc., recently published an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News about how words associated with the affirmative action programs he supports-words like ‘diversity, justice, and fairness’-“have lost their cache and no longer serve to unite.” Slaughter deplores the decreasing enrollment of black freshmen in California universities, and believes that new enthusiasm for proactive racial policies must be encouraged if we are to avoid being left “weakened and divided at a time when cohesiveness and purpose are required.”

It is beyond the scope of this article to debate the affirmative action policies Slaughter is promoting, but few at Oxy would disagree with his endorsement of student diversity and cohesiveness as a virtue in itself. In the last ten years Oxy has admirably worked to make the student body more diverse in terms of statistics, but if arguments about the multicultural hall are still being rehearsed perennially in the pages of the Weekly, then perhaps we are no more cohesive than in 1988.

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