The CIDE Report: Diversity or Bust

by J. Lawrence Scholer

The Student Life Initiative Report proclaimed the "end of the Greek system as we know it" and heralded the arrival of a brave, new social system at Dartmouth. The Report, released in the winter of 2000, drew hundreds of student protesters and caused the cancellation of Winter Carnival. The newest addition to Dartmouth’s family of initiatives, the Report of the Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity does for a liberal education what the SLI did for the traditional social system.

The newest Report comes after over a year of deliberations by administrators, select faculty, and select students. In April 2000, the Trustees called on the administration to form a World Cultures Initiative Committee designed to examine campus diversity. One month before the release of the report in June 2001 the committee changed its name to the Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity, a more apt and less ambiguous title according to the Committee. Thus far, the Report has generated little fanfare, perhaps as a result of its release at a time when the majority of Dartmouth students have left campus.

The Committee regards diversity as an educational absolute; it does not consider that diversity is anything less than an academic panacea. The Committee undertook the writing of this report with the assumption that "the academic and social benefits of diversity are not in dispute." The Committee’s investigation of diversity at Dartmouth seems to rely solely on emotional observations and testimonies.

The June 2001 report calls for deliberate action on diversity and its absence apparent at Dartmouth. The report suggests "a boldly conceived, broadly instituted, and highly visible plan to increase diversity." The Committee defines diversity as "a broadly inclusive term embracing race, ethnicity, religion, nation of origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, socio-economic status, work affiliation with the College, etc." Yet nowhere else in the Report does diversity of age, religion, nation of origin, or work affiliation arise. The Report even admits to its own shortcomings with regard to adequately defining definition and admits to focusing on racial and ethnic diversity to the exclusion of other diversities.

Significantly, nowhere at all is intellectual diversity mentioned.

The Committee, one of the few Dartmouth institutions cited in the report as being diverse, had as its chairs Jim Larimore, Dean of the College, and Melissa Zeiger, Associate Professor of English.

The goal of the Committee is to manufacture an atmosphere of "interactive diversity" and "interactive pluralism" among all students, heedless of any current campus conditions, be they social or academic. The Committee even extends it reach off campus into the Upper Valley where they seek to advance "diversity initiatives aimed at improving the quality of life in the Upper Valley."

The Committee realizes that many members of the community may not accept their proposals at first. However, the Committee compares implementing diversity to the integration of computers into the curriculum, suggesting that over time dissenters will learn to work with and even love diversity. "We are asking the reader to imagine what the campus might look like if an analogous set of strategic measures related to diversity existed," says the Report.

The Report outlines the "rationales" the committee used the draw their conclusions. The first: "It is the right thing to do." It goes on to explain patriotically that Dartmouth can best serve this country by gentrifying its students. "Dartmouth’s potential for promoting [social] mobility could be more fully realized than it is at present," the Report says, bemoaning inequality in the US as being the result of education and healthcare inequities. The Report further explains that, although many Dartmouth students matriculate expecting to from close friendships with "diverse students," few actually do so. The College, thus, needs to "foster greater cross-cultural interaction and learning." The Committee also believes that Dartmouth’s racist, sexist, and homophobic image in the media damaged the College and swayed enrollment of diverse students.

The Committee arrives at twenty-two recommendations for implementing diversity after twenty-seven pages of text. The recommendations range from changing the College mission statement to providing easy access to fashion options popular with minorities. The report does not offer advice on fulfulling these recommendations. It only states that they are necessary.

The Report makes three "major" recommendations to improve and create diversity: revise Dartmouth’s mission statement, appoint a high level diversity officer, and establish a Council on Diversity.

The committee fears that the current mission statement is too benign and "laissez-faire" when it comes to implementing diversity. It does not make diversity a "primary objective." Bringing a diverse group of students together is not enough, the College must force the students to interact as well. The Report says, "The communal practice and well-being of all members cannot simply be taken for granted" after a diverse student body has been created.

The Report’s discussion of campus social atmosphere bemoans rampant victimization on campus of women, minorities, and gays. "To hear—so personally and so repeatedly—from students of color, women of all races, and gay, lesbian, or bisexual students who felt hurt, unvalued, and ultimately less important to the mission of the College than others was searing indeed," says the report. The report never specifically mentioned incidents on campus, but drew obvious references recent events, describing a "steady, pernicious flow of incidents."

Gender presented another problem, and the Committee came to the conclusion that Dartmouth is not yet a co-educational institution, that its campus is still male-dominated. "Co-education, then, in its philosophical as well as practical sense is a yet to be fulfilled promise at Dartmouth," said the Report. Sexism makes the task daunting. Committee members even described relations among men and women as the worst they had experienced past or present.

Fraternities and sororities were not initially a primary target of the Committee’s deliberations, but the Committee has worked into its report a few shots at the Greeks. The Committee accuses CFS membership of being disproportionately affluent and white and claims that their creates a campus where social spaces are controlled by men, leading to a campus fearful of intimidation and possible sexual assaults. "We are concerned that CFS organizations in general may not be doing as much as they can and should to confront bigotry, sexism, and sexual violence and foster greater awareness and appreciation of diversity," states the report.

The Committee concludes that its goal of reinventing Dartmouth cannot be accomplished without implementing diversity into the curriculum. Though the original World Cultures Initiative was to leave curriculum out of its "mandate," the Committee found that "no diversity initiative at the College can be fully successful without integrating issues of diversity into the classroom."

The Committee’s insistence on altering the curriculum stems from the desire of students "to see more courses that encourage discussion, analysis, and debate the issue of diversity." The Report states, "Many students spoke with joyful enthusiasm about courses that had been intellectually and emotionally challenging and ‘pushed them to the limits of their thinking.’" No such courses, however, are described or named, making elucidation of this point difficult.

The Committee also urges more funding for such courses and suggests that faculty might be offered incentives like release and research time to "create new courses and/or integrate a focus on diversity into existing courses." The Committee pushes for increased funding of Dartmouth’s "interdisciplinary Academic Programs," programs like the Women’s Resource Center and affinity-based housing. According to the Committee, the Academic Programs provide an intellectual and physical refuge where women and minorities "felt most at home." Others, however, consider such programs to be divisive for the community.

Like the SLI, this Report manages to elevate Dartmouth to the heights of a research university. The Report describes how Dartmouth lags behind "peer institutions" when it comes to funding diversity-based curriculum. Says the Report, "The Committee noted that many of our most competitive peer institutions have increased and formalized their commitments to these areas of study through senior faculty appointments and the creation of new departments and programs (i.e. The African American Studies Center at Harvard, the Radcliffe Center for Women’s Studies at Harvard, Columbia’s African American, Asian American and Latino Studies programs, Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Asian American Studies at NYU, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles)." These schools are all urban-situated research universities with far larger student bodies than Dartmouth’s.

Dartmouth college President James Wright has already announced the "immediate implementation" of the CIDE report’s three major recommendations. Curricular changes, each the realm of a different department, will be more difficult for the College to enact directly on the report’s recommendations.

Similarly, the Greek system, overseen by the Office of Residential Life, will likely not be directly affected by the Report, though the Report’s conclusions may be put use in the College’s ever-increasing crackdown on independent houses.

The Report formalizes the College’s long-standing policy of half-baked diversity, in which differences in point of view or ideology, both crucial in academic practice, are superceded by the importance of differences in skin-color, crucial in supposedly self-evident, but never-identified, ways. In attempting to paint a "diversity crisis" the CIDE overlooks the great diversity and tolerance already present in Dartmouth’s student body and faculty. The strength, for example, of Republican, Democratic, Green, and other political parties on campus and the frequency of debate between these parties’ members indicate extensive diversity in personal philosophy and great respect for minority views (even though the administration itself doesn’t always share this respect).

That the Report overlooks entirely the type of diversity most relevant to academic study and debate is a fatal flaw. And that this flaw has been uncommented on by the College’s administration indicates an ultimately detrimental disregard of Dartmouth’s historical mission.