More than a year after creating the President's Office of Diversity, President Roderick McDavis is changing things again. In an announcement from his home at 29 Park Place, McDavis proposed a new single office to house all departments of diversity. This new office combines the multicultural offices, LGBT program center, Women's Center and Disability Services. Basically, unless you are a white, non-disabled, heterosexual male, there is a home for you under this new umbrella of diversity. The office will be led by a newly created vice provost position, which will be filled after a national search.
It is no secret that a major goal of the McDavis administration is to increase diversity at Ohio University. This seems like a positive step to achieve that goal. A unified office promotes cooperation among diverse groups and allows for the pooling of resources.
The only problem is that as the groups are combined, there is potential for some to get lost in the shuffle. Lumping several groups together that lack commonalities could put some groups at risk of losing individuality.
It would also be a shame to see the noble goal of promoting racial diversity overshadowed by a broader notion of diversity. The 810 black students that attended OU Fall Quarter composed about 33 percent of all non-white students, according to Institutional Research data. Whoever leads the new Office of Diversity would do well to continue emphasizing their recruitment; OU needs more diversity on this basic level. But, as McDavis has noted, diversity is more than just drawing urban and black students to campus. With that in mind, this is a positive development.
The new office likely won't change anything major about how diversity issues are handled at OU on a day-to-day basis. The only difference might be that these groups will be cooperating instead of competing for funds. Let's hope that cooperation leads to a real increase in diversity on this campus. Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Post executive editors.
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McDavis hopes to pool broad resources by combining diversity departments into office
