"Diversification was one part of the original plan for both migration of sophomores to West and the movement of selective houses," said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs, in the Nov. 1 issue of The Chronicle. "It's always been one objective."
Why?
Of all the speeches and letters by President Nan Keohane that I've either heard or read, not once have I come across a thorough justification of why diversity should be the Holy Grail of campus life. Seeing that Keohane has a doctorate in political science and has written in the field of political philosophy, I find that surprising; it seems like this issue would present a perfect opportunity for the president to use her knowledge and stellar teaching ability to relate a complex philosophy to our everyday issues and lives.
No matter. I think that there are two reasons why no one in the administration ever addresses the "diversity issue" in anything but the most superficial of manners. The first is that they don't have to--since no one questions the fundamental value judgments that are made each time such a policy is implemented, why should it even be defended? Unfortunately, that's a topic for another column. I'm guessing the second reason is that the push for diversity often runs smack against the students' basic preferences.
I don't have the data, but I'm guessing that some spirited research could easily point out the lack of congruency between the constant push for diversity and the student body's preferences. In fact, John Zimmerman and company at the Duke Conservative Union should have been all over this one a long time ago. If they haven't already done so, I challenge The New Sense or The Chronicle to use their ample funds to conduct a campus-wide survey on student attitudes about the role of diversity in housing selection. I'm almost certain that the results will be surprising to many.
What little hard data that I have seen so far is already surprising enough when put in its proper context. In the same Nov. 1 story, the president of the Asian Students Association said, "Asians get marginalized to [Trent Drive Hall] or they retreat to Central Campus." The graphic that stood right above her quote showed something rather different: according to data provided by the Division of Student Affairs, 65 percent of Asians live on West Campus, 26 percent live on Central Campus and only 9 percent live in Trent. Hardly sounds like marginalizing.
I'd love to be wrong on this one, but I imagine that if a properly composed survey of the reasons behind students' current living preferences was ever administered, the results would raise some eyebrows.
If such a survey has ever been done I haven't been able to locate it. If it hasn't, I sincerely believe that what we would find would expose the latest housing policy for what it is--an attempt to place the Duke undergraduate community into a specific philosophical mold that doesn't fit the campus circumstances.
And there's a name for this process--it's called social engineering. It treats the undergraduate body as test subjects in repeated attempts to create a utopia of multiculturalism and diversity. And to impose ideology-laden policies like the housing shuffle with hardly any public justification is not just insulting but also downright antithetical to the entire idea of a college education.
This lack of data and testing has always been perplexing to me. I've seen candidates run for student government positions with hopes of increasing diversity on West Campus. Yet when you ask them why black students flock to Central Campus each year in disproportionate numbers, all you ever get are loads of opinions and theories. Has no one thought of the simplest approach to all this--ask the students who live on Central Campus why they live there and whether they'd rather live somewhere else? And if it turns out that a sufficiently large number of minorities live on Central Campus because the selective groups on West Campus make them uncomfortable--not because they want to live with their friends or because they prefer an apartment with a kitchen to a stuffy dorm room--then there is a solid, practical reason for the housing shuffle. If the survey clearly establishes this causality, then the diversification will not be an instance of pushing selective groups off Main West for ideological reasons but, instead, an instance of responding to students' genuine concerns. And that will be easy to accept.
But if it turns out that this isn't the case, the Division of Student Affairs will have some explaining to do and will have to offer up a coherent argument on why it makes sense to impose diversity against the students' wishes. Either way, I'd love to hear it.
Marko Djuranovic is a Trinity senior and former health & science editor of The Chronicle.
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