UT (Univ of Texas) president proposes required diversity class

Houston Chronicle ^ | 5/11/04 | TODD ACKERMAN

[truthandlife]

The University of Texas at Austin would appoint a senior diversity officer, require a cross-cultural course and rearrange statues of Confederate leaders under a new proposal that aims to fix strained race relations.

The recommendations, announced Monday by UT President Larry Faulkner, are a response to a report submitted in January by a task force on "racial respect and fairness." The task force was formed in response to incidents of racial insensitivity at UT.

"We'd like to position UT to be a more positive agent in developing students' knowledge and skills so they can work across cultural boundaries in a complex society," said Faulkner. "I believe many frictions come from ignorance, discomfort and a lack of skills in perceiving differences."

In all, Faulkner's proposal included 10 recommendations.

Faulkner said he expects to name the senior diversity official over the summer. Most of the other recommendations will require further steps before implementation, such as board or faculty approval.

The incidents that led to the recommendations include the egging of the Martin Luther King Jr. statue on the 2003 national holiday, fraternity parties at which members wore black paint on their faces and mocked black images and stereotypes, and accusations of racial profiling by a UT policeman who asked a black member of student government to show his identification in the student union.

The incidents brought more than 300 UT students, most black and Hispanic, to a forum hosted by Faulkner in 2003. The same night in College Station, Texas A&M University President Robert Gates answered questions from about 200 students, most minorities, who expressed similar concerns about not feeling welcome.

In an 18-page letter to different UT communities, Faulkner invited feedback on whether the diversity officer should be a vice president, vice provost or associate to the president. He also called for a university council on inclusion and cross-cultural effectiveness that would be central to recruiting "a top quality diverse faculty."

The push for a required cross-cultural class comes more than a decade after racial incidents on campus led to two failed attempts to require courses. One would have focused a required freshman composition class on sexism and racism. Another would have required undergraduates take courses on U.S. minorities or Third World or non-Western cultures.

Both proposals were defeated amid cries of "political correctness," the then-fashionable criticism of conservatives that liberal professors wanted to indoctrinate students according to their ideology.

"This requirement will not tell people what to think," said Faulkner. "It will be a chance for students to learn about a culture not their own."

Under Faulkner's plan, students would choose from a variety of cross-cultural courses rather than be required to take a specific course. Acknowledging it would be impractical to tack such a requirement on to the current list, Faulkner said the courses need to be crafted as part of an overall curriculum review, a process that is expected to begin in the fall and take about 18 months.

UT's statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee present a different kind of challenge because "many from all races interpret (them) as displaying a kind of institutional nostalgia for the Confederacy and its values," said Faulkner.

Faulkner called for a group of specialists in history, art and architecture to examine the arrangement of statues. He said a solution might be to group Davis and Lee with President Woodrow Wilson, as sculptor Pompeo Coppini intended, "to prove that in World War I both North and South were solidly welded in one great nation."

But Coppini's plan was underfunded, and architect Paul Cret's reconception distributed them in a way that left each an isolated representation, with no underlying theme.

Other recommendations in Faulkner's proposal include an honor code that promotes greater civility and respect; more aggressive strategies for recruiting more diverse faculty, stuff and students; deferring the freshman rush period in fraternities and sororities to the beginning of the spring semester; and oversight of the UT Police Department, including greater attention to the training for a diverse community.

Faulkner said that though the response so far has been "overwhelmingly positive," he expects criticism of the proposal from both sides.

"I expect some people will say it didn't go far enough, and some will say it's not an important topic," said Faulkner. "But I've spent a lot of time with it, and it's my best shot at what I think the university should be."

[DLfromthedesert]

How about a course in basic manners instead?

[Gefreiter]

Naku,
You're right, you're right. I guess I don't worry about it, in so many words. It's just another one of those 1500 things you deal with in a day that'll piss you off that much more, particularly when dealing with the larger hypocrisies within higher ed.