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Sunday, June 05, 2005

DOES THIS SEEM WEIRD TO YOU?

University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer’s response to the response of faculty and other observers around the country to the creepy diversity draft his “70-person work group” came up with …

Wait a minute.

Seventy persons??

It’s like that scene in Wayne’s World when the slick radio producer takes Wayne and Garth out to dinner and puts this too-good-to-be-true contract in front of them to sign and Garth suddenly looks at the camera and says “Wait a minute… Does this seem weird to you?”

This seems weird to me. A “70-person work group.” Seventy is a lot.

(And - a small point, but - what is a work group? When I Google “work group” I get nothing. Google thinks I mean “working group,” which may be what this newspaper means (I don’t know whether the U. of O. called the group of seventy a work group). The only context I find for “work group” is that of chain gangs. In an article in Slate, a writer reviews Justice Scalia’s comments in a case involving mistreatment of a prisoner working on a chain gang. Scalia reminds counsel that the prison’s policy was to leave prisoners tied to a post "only until they are ready to go back to the work group.")

Anyway, Frohnmayer “is in the process of appointing an executive working group of eight to ten people to conduct [a] review this summer.” “Working group” is more like it, and it’s encouraging that the university has put ten to work on this instead of seventy. But - does this seem weird to you? The working group will review the draft…the draft which was, dammit, just a draft, as Frohnmayer keeps saying in the article:

“What is it you [critics of the plan] don't understand about the word 'draft?’”

Nothing! I understand the word “draft.” But if your institution has produced a draft document that in its extremism has become a national scandal, maybe instead of appointing a committee to review the draft, which will merely delay diversity efforts (“Appointing the executive working group to review the plan and recommend changes will slow the process, Frohnmayer said, but given the response to the original draft he said it's clear that more time is needed.”) you could do what people often do with bad drafts. You could throw it away.

Frohnmayer likes the language of the draft, however, especially the phrase that got everybody so angry, “cultural competency”:

' Cultural competency, Frohnmayer said, is a straightforward concept.

"To me it means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others," he said. "A good teacher is always open, I hope, to ways to increase teaching effectiveness."
'

Does this seem weird to you? If it’s a straightforward concept, why does Frohnmayer talk about it in a circuitous way?

For instance, I thought “cultural competence” referred to professors, who would, under this plan, be tested on their cultural competence before being promoted. Yet as Frohnmayer now defines it, cultural competency seems to refer to the difficulty some students may have being competent in the traditional classroom.

As far as professors go, Frohnmayer seems to be describing not their cultural competency but their pedagogical competency -- their ability to perceive what sorts of students they have and pitch their instruction accordingly.