PRESIDENT'S PERSPECTIVE
photo by Michael Sipe
Diversity never more salient
Increasing numbers of speakers have been building intellectual excitement and engagement among students, faculty, and staff at UVM, and many of those speakers have deepened our understanding of diversity as a foundation of academic excellence.
The diversity of the human family has never been more salient than today. We know that whether we focus on preparing students for leadership in America’s diverse communities and workplaces or for global citizenship, we must foster multi-cultural competencies to ensure that, with respect to the differences that can rewardingly complete us or destructively divide us, our graduates are sensitive, appreciative, and intelligently informed.
The trustees of UVM recognized diversity as essential to academic quality in a Board statement issued three years ago, “Why Diversity,” drawing on the rationale of the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court found a compelling state interest in “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body” (Associate Justice O’Conner, for the majority). At UVM, we have been bent on ensuring that students have those benefits.
Consider, for example, five speakers who have been on campus this spring. In early April, the Aiken Lecture Series presented two speakers in a single evening, Lawrence Susskind (MIT), an expert in conflict resolution who has worked with numerous parties, including the United Nations, and Jerome Ringo, the first African-American chair of the board of the National Wildlife Federation, who told of his journey from employment at a chemical plant in Louisiana’s cancer alley to leadership as an advocate for environmental justice on behalf of the marginalized groups in whose backyards such plants are typically sited.
In mid-April William Darity (Chapel Hill and Duke) lectured on the case for reparations for Americans whose ancestors were slaves here; Dr. Darity is one of our James Marsh Professors at Large (for a full description of the exciting Marsh Professorship Program, please go to http://www.uvm.edu/president/marsh/).
At Patrick Gym in late April, you could have heard a pin drop as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel spoke about the necessity of giving voice to those silenced by genocide and of bearing witness to the atrocities under way today as populations commit mass murder against each other. Afterwards students emailed me to say what a life-changing experience Wiesel’s lecture had been.
So was the Commencement address in May by United States Congressman John Lewis, who spoke at a seminal civil rights gathering at UVM in 1964, the year before he led the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge between Selma and Montgomery as the twenty-five-year-old national chairman of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), inspiring, a week after the bloody attack on the demonstrators by Alabama law officers, President Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” address to Congress and paving the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These speakers have invigorated the intellectual life of the campus and have inspired us at a time when UVM is cultivating diversity with an intense commitment to re-sults. This year faculty members have been hard at work to implement the University’s new six-credit diversity requirement. Our new living/learning community Global Village has been a resounding success. Through the good work of faculty, staff, and students at UVM’s ALANA Center, students of color were once again retained at a higher rate this year than the overall student body—and they now represent 7 percent of the student body compared to 4 percent some dozen years ago.
This fall, more than 15 percent of the students coming to the Honors College will be students of color—of the 130 Honors College enrollment deposits, twenty-two come from ALANA students. Speaking of excellence and diversity, we can now say not only that diversity is a building block of academic excellence but also that academic excellence in turn has become a key building block of diversity at this rising University.
—Daniel Mark Fogel
(for UVM staff)