PHILADELPHIA
Higher education needs systemic institutional change in order for colleges and universities to become truly diverse and multicultural.
That was the one reoccurring theme that circulated during workshops and panel sessions of the Association of American Colleges and Universities Network for Academic Renewal Conference entitled, “Diversity and Learning: A Defining Moment,” held late last week.
“We came and did our personal changing and our personal learning at this conference. But now we need to take this back and do it at the institutional level,” says Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the office of education and institutional renewal for AAC&U.
Panelist Elizabeth Minnich, a senior fellow at AAC&U, urged those who work to improve college diversity to forge coalitions that serve as the foundation for lasting change.
“We are doing the work to which higher education in its noblest most rhetorically ringing terms is supposed to be doing. We are not the add ons. We are not the special guests. We are not only the resident troublemakers and correctors. We are the ones who understand and make part of our work that you can’t search for truth, [and] you can’t judge excellence unless [you have] equality and justice,” Minnich said.
But, “non-dominant groups [tend to] reinvent ourselves over and over and over again instead of, as they say, standing on each other’s shoulders, holding each other’s hands and building something richer and deeper. Let’s not let that happen in our slice of time and place.”
Not only should these connections be made horizontally across group lines, but also across the vertical hierarchal lines of the academy, said another panelist. Research institutions, historically Black colleges and universities as well as community colleges should all be abreast of what each other is doing to create diversity on their respective campuses, says Kathleen Wong, executive director and founder of the Women of Color Research Collective and an assistant professor in the school of communications at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
