Dear readers, please play with your own lovely interpretive apparatus when I say:
Diversity's value is predicated on the notion that difference of opinion has value. Further fundamentally differing value structures stemming from specific and varied experiential environments, conditions and beliefs are each legitimate. Diversity is a celebration of potential - one that acknowledges that when one set of ideas intersects with another, there are possibilities other than conflict - there is for example the possibility of a hybrid or innovation, the birth of new possibilities. These are so much sweeter than the rotting meat of one contender vanquished.
Challenges are met with solutions, and solutions are most abundant wherever there are new possibilities, new perspectives and a growing array of options. This is why we must foster a community that embraces all races, respects all cultural traditions, welcomes all expressions of gender, investigates every cosmology and never dictates spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. A university can choose to reside on such a sacred soil, or it can impose an ideology, employ a single rubric, maintain a paternal superiority and suppress dissent by overt force or damming indifference. Medical Science, journalism and spiritual beliefs save lives and ecosystems, literature, chemistry and history tell us who we have been-the tales of our good and troubled times. Athletic play, aerospace engineering and psychological research explore the frontiers of our body, whilst economic statistics, linguistics and art reveal who we are and who we might become.
An education is neither vocational training, nor ideological indoctrination - it is an active state in an environment where gifting minds exchange our collective bounty and invent new treasures. Thus a brave university is a fortress sheltering diversity, and a marketplace of exploration - here shall our expeditions become equipped? Each vision-quest and the collective trajectory piled high with the possibility of a brighter future... I know I wrap my concerns in a felt blanket of metaphor, for this is nearest to my native tongue of object making, and I am choosing to share, not made to speak.
Not because we face budget cuts, but thereby prompted I pledge to take seriously the accountant's ledger - will she pledge to protect this theater?
Duane McDiarmid is an associate professor of sculpture and expanded practice.
4 Opinion
