After being called out by the media as the least diverse of the California State University schools and having two incidents of students wearing blackface on campus, the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is actively trying to redeem itself as a progressive institution.
In April, a photo of a Lamba Chi Alpha fraternity member wearing blackface was photographed at a party during a Cal Poly multicultural weekend celebration. University President Jeffrey Armstrong received significant backlash from leftist students for not expelling the student, despite the student’s constitutional right to free speech. A few weeks later, a new photo of a white student in blackface emerged on a fraternity group’s private Snapchat, prompting Armstrong to denounce these “vile and absolutely unacceptable acts” in a video address to the Cal Poly community.
Now, the university is trying to demonstrate that it’s taking action to tackle its “diversity problem.” Last month, Cal Poly released its “Diversity Action Initiatives”, a document which “details existing and future strategies, tactics and initiatives focused on improving diversity and developing a more inclusive culture on campus.” Unfortunately, some of its goals are more for show and unlikely to result in a more “inclusive culture.”
Cal Poly hopes to pre-empt future incidents by requiring pre-enrollment diversity training for new first-year and transfer students. Wherever you look, diversity training has an undeniable record of failure. As the Harvard Business Review points out, “this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out.” Social scientists have discovered that “people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy.” This kind of training is more likely to cause culturally insensitive people to mock the training when university officials aren’t present than become more culturally adept students.
Officials are also considering a “Core Pre-Orientation for Black, Latino/a and Native American students.” By doing so, the vice president of student affairs hopes to enhance “a sense of belonging among the students prior to WOW.”
Does the university not realize that this kind of orientation only singles out these specific minority groups and labels them as unicorns before they even become immersed in campus life? If the administration is trying to encourage students to value diversity and inclusivity, wouldn’t it make more sense to fully integrate students of all backgrounds rather than separate them?
Not to be accused of playing a game of rhetoric, the university is planning to spend a nice chunk of change to suggest it is putting its money where its mouth is. Cal Poly will spend $150,000 in California State University funding for a cluster hire of up to 10 faculty positions that focus on diversity and inclusion in a variety of scholarly areas throughout Cal Poly’s six colleges. With tuition so high for Cal Poly students and course availability so restricted, most students would probably prefer that the school invest in additional class openings rather than mandate them to take additional, diversity-related classes in their field.
In the same vein, the university is reviewing its general curriculum as it evaluates the “implementation of teaching related to diversity and inclusion within each General Education subject area.” How does diversity even relate to calculus or organic chemistry? Isn’t this what humanities classes are for?
The university hopes to hire diverse faculty using cluster hires every other year and claims it would do so in a Proposition 209-compliant manner. Proposition 209 prohibits California state government institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, most notably in public employment and public education.
How is this possible unless the university is solely considering intellectual or other less visible forms of diversity? Moreover, aren’t other teachers going to feel a sense of resentment knowing that certain professors and lecturers were hired simply because they came across as “diverse” in the interview process?
To ensure that visiting students are not turned off by Cal Poly’s whiteness, the university is likewise counting on the students who have some of the most personal interactions with prospective students: Poly Reps. Poly Reps are student ambassadors who provide campus tours. The university has started providing “additional trainings and facilitation around privilege, inclusive language and diversity at Cal Poly” to the Poly Reps and has even included implicit bias training for the program’s recruitment committee. Is the subtle suggestion here that Poly Reps are turning away diverse students by not sounding “woke” enough?
Cal Poly has plenty of resources at its disposal to create a more inclusive, respectful campus. Unfortunately, these “Diversity Action Initiatives” are not going to solve the issues facing the university today or in the future.
Cal Poly should be encouraging students to respectfully engage with students they disagree with, and yet, both times when a big-name conservative, Milo Yiannopoulos, spoke on campus, the school sponsored expensive “alternative” events for students to attend so that they could pretend he wasn’t there. While this might have been a wise campus security move, it only reaffirms Cal Poly’s true diversity problem — that it would rather have students remain in their silos than encounter and understand different perspectives.
