BY AARON BARLOW

Students are treated differently dependent on race and class and disability and sex. That’s a truism, something educators have known for at least half a century. But it’s also a truism we’ve still failed to address effectively.

Why?

In part because of the way students treat us but mostly because we don’t make it a priority to listen to them.

Students approach their professors through the corridors of their experiences. No matter how open and inviting we might say we are, they see us as the momentary culmination of a lifetime of interactions. They stereotype us as much as we do them. When they love us, it’s partially because of teachers they have had in the past, both good and bad. When they hate us, the same. Yet we tend to treat each new cohort of them as unformed clay, imaging we are building relationships from raw material. Instead, we should be discovering how best to work with each by letting them lead us to understand them as individuals.

The diversity training that is supposed to help us appreciate the “other” helps academics overcome discriminatory attitudes no more than it does for people in business. And that is not at all, though it does seem to satisfy our overseers in both arenas. Not only does the newly mandated panoply of diversity training possibilities concentrate on us and our attitudes, forgetting that it is only through knowing our students and their backgrounds and attitudes that we really can overcome the barriers created by disability, by race, by sex, by class, but it almost completely ignores the individuals it sets out to assist. It rarely helps us see ourselves through their eyes and react positively to their vision.

Speaking with Pamela Newkirk for her book Diversity Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, filmmaker Misan Sagay pointed out that “People want diversity as long as they don’t have to do it. A lot of the times they want our physical presence, but not our voice.” Though diversity in academia is somewhat different from diversity in business, Sagay’s point applies equally in both places. In fact, in academia, it goes double. First, it relates to hiring and professional interactions—just as in the business world. Second, it relates to how we teachers interact with our students. The problem is, in all instances, diversity training focuses on “us,” the current employees and the teachers. It’s “our” attitudes that come into question, not the needs and beings of the diverse population “we” are expected to interact with successfully.

Sometimes we see things in terms of our experiences only, forgetting that there may be multiple paths for getting there and differing time frames, different ones facilitating differing strengths and needs in different people. We too often look to ourselves and our institutions for our maps, forgetting the students themselves and their individual needs and possibilities.

Stephen Kuusisto, in his memoir Planet of the Blind, recounts an incident in graduate school:

“I’m afraid that I need more time to complete an essay.” My voice sounds adenoidal. “It’s a question of research, really, I’ve read all the primary material. But you see, the trouble with my time of vision impairment is that I can’t read much at any one time.”…

“The need for additional time is not acceptable in graduate school.”…

“Well, it’s not really a question of acceptability, you know, like we’re in the admissions office or the Pentagon. I can’t see.”

“Then you really shouldn’t be here.” (104)

“You really shouldn’t be here.” It’s not up to us, this attitude conveys, to change but to the “other,” no matter what it is that makes them different. Kuusisto went on to become Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University, a prolific author and a noted poet. That professor of his, who couldn’t see beyond his narrow and discriminatory frame, has faded into the forgotten.

The problem with most diversity training is that it focuses on “us” almost solely, the “other” being simply something “we” need to deal with. “Their” possibilities, if they cannot meet our often arbitrary standards and “outcomes,” are mostly ignored.

Kuusisto was boxed by an unnecessary requirement and by the inability of his professor to see beyond his own experience. “I’ve got no sympathy for you; I did it the hard way and you can, too.” This ableist, sexist, classist, and racist attitude prevails—and (and this is a kicker) it is often found even within just the people who should lack it, people who had to struggle against ableist, sexist, classist, and racist forces themselves. For they, too, often forget to discover what it means to look through the eyes of the “other,” even an “other” superficially like them, and not simply through their own.

Diversity can’t be “trained” into anyone, not through an online course, not through a day-long seminar, and not through resolutions and required reading. A positive attitude toward diversity requires willing participation in a personal process of growth. I was talking to a fellow professor (Kuusisto, as a matter of fact) about the use of smartphones in the classroom. I was toying (for the first time in years) with asking students to put them away. Steve gently reminded me that I might inadvertently be putting an undue burden on students with certain kinds of disabilities—including dyslexia. He said it and let it drop. I thought about it and realized I was letting my frustrations lead me to backslide.

That was real diversity training. One-on-one with no pressure.

To really promote a truly diverse and equal campus community, one of the first steps each of us must take is to learn how to be wrong. This is something we professors are extremely bad at so it is a good place to start. A second step is to learn to listen with defenses down, another thing we professors, schooled so well in debate, are generally unable to do. We can participate in diversity training until we can recite our received wisdom in our sleep, but that doesn’t help when we come face-to-face with students and their disparate needs.

Administrators tasked with promoting diversity can do more than creating programs and events. They can start mingling with both students and faculty, getting out of their offices and listening. A chair who finds that a teacher is driving students to drop his/her classes, rather than confronting that teacher, can start exploring why, first by talking with students on their turf (certainly not in an office) and then with the teacher in an equally non-threatening environment. Questions will likely come up (on a campus like mine, at least, with an extremely diverse student population) that relate to diversity. These can be resolved, but only by listening fully, never dismissing anyone’s thoughts or feelings.

Teachers can do much the same, working with a student after trying to see the situation through the lens she/he provides rather than operating on assumptions and preconceptions about what it takes to succeed as a student. Not only is that diversity training, but it can  be reinforcing.

And that can be the start of real and effective diversity training process. As Newkirk maintains, for diversity to become a positive element of any community, everyone has “to really have a sense of what it is that we’re actually experiencing” no matter how different the “we” is from the majority. That can only come through open listening on a one-on-one basis.

It will not come through what has become, Newkirk points out, a diversity industry.