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December 07, 2004
Editorial
Any member of the Hamline community can tell that the photos displayed on our website and admissions material do not always match up to the realities of our student body. It’s no revelation that the university’s promotional material over-samples students of color.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Hamline does need to recruit more students of color, and not just because it makes the university looks good, or because of abstract ideals of multiculturalism. As professor Colleen Bell points out, employers are actively looking for employees who can work across cultures. Once students graduate from Hamline and enter the workforce, they will come into contact with and need to work with people from a plurality of ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds. One of the best ways to prepare them for this is to have a heterogeneous student body, but the university won’t be able to attract a diverse student body if we don’t promote that image in our promotional material.
Yet at the same time, the university must be wary of creating a false impression of student life.
Are staged group shots of students hanging out together (students who rarely actually hang out together) an honest way to represent our campus?
Is it fair to prospective students of color to promote an image of Hamline as a diverse community that doesn’t necessarily agree with the reality they will face when they arrive?
Perhaps most fundamentally, is the Hamline campus as welcoming to students of color as its admissions materials are?
If Hamline truly wants to promote diversity on campus, it cannot just be a numbers game. Having X number of students from this background and Y number of students from that background does not make a diverse campus. Diversity and multiculturalism are about experiences, not numbers. If diversity is truly a goal that Hamline holds dear, all members of our community must take responsibility for it.
The administration has to provide adequate staffing and funding for MISA, as well as aggressively recruiting faculty and staff of color, as well as promote an environment that will retain them. Frequently, as Bell contends, “We lose good faculty of color because they’re asked to do the same thing over and over, because their competency is questioned.”
The faculty have to continue educating themselves in their disciplines, and find ways to integrate diversity issues into their classrooms. Students have to challenge themselves, and ask the difficult questions of whether our campus is a welcoming place for students of color. It’s not just the admissions department’s job to create a diverse campus č it’s everybody’s.
Posted by msveum at December 7, 2004 11:11 AM