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Thursday, May 26, 2005
You want to be careful about throwing around words like Orwellian and totalitarian... ...but in this case, Professor Michael Kellman of the University of Oregon has it right when he calls the just-released draft of proposed diversity mandates for his school "sort of an Orwellian, totalitarian plan." Under the plan, all faculty up for promotion, for instance, would have to be "evaluated on their 'cultural competency' - the ability to successfully work with people from all cultural backgrounds." It's fun to think about what this might mean in practice. UD envisions Peer Theater Workshops in which individual faculty members up for tenure would be placed onstage - the audience would be made up of cultural competency evaluators - and confronted with a variety of scenarios involving their being challenged by someone very different from themselves. Like, for instance, say we're talking about UD. UD is a woman. A white, Jewish, urban, middle-aged woman. What would happen if all of a sudden she was confronted by an Asian, non-Jewish, younger male? How would she react? How would she interact with him? What strategies of cultural competency would she draw upon? To what extent could she overcome her cultural determination in terms of race, class, gender, and age? Just thinking about it makes me nervous! But also kind of excited! It'd be incredibly validating to demonstrate to a roomful of cultural competency evaluators (and to myself!) that I truly can interact successfully with people who aren't exactly like me.... ************* Update: Julia Silverman must be enjoying this. She's the AP writer whose article about mandatory cultural competency tests for faculty at the University of Oregon has, within hours of its appearance, been picked up by 44 major news outlets. The number will grow. A fine thing it is, too, and not merely for Silverman's career. "You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are," says George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In a kind of reversal of "swine" and "truffles," you gotta have a press, bloggers, and a self-respecting faculty to show you where the Orwellians are. In this particular case, the Orwellians have been sniffed out very quickly. UD is impressed. ************ Update II: Shit! Things really are happening quickly. UD has already been up in front of her Cultural Diversity Tribunal. Despite strong efforts to convince them otherwise (here she is in action), UD has been deemed "too cosmopolitan" to interact competently with people from non-urban backgrounds. Here she is (UD's sitting right front, taking notes during a cultural competency training session) at the farm she's been assigned to for the summer, where she will "interact with the common people in an effort to enhance her cultural competence before the fall semester." |