2005-03-11 - 11:48 p.m.
“Your peace and quiet is criminal, when there’s injustice in your town...” - Ted Leo
Today was the Diversity In Practice Conference at my school. The title of the day was “Diversity: State of Emergency” and it was 6 hours crammed full with a keynote address, a panel discussions, break out workshops and a wrap up discussion at the end. By the end of the day I felt exhausted, I hadn’t eaten more than a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee (my own fault) and I felt totally drained. The conference did not make me feel hopeless, more that I felt so strongly the power of what the students organizing it were trying to accomplish- the power and profundity of trying to make an institution answer to your demands for real diversity, for real inclusion of faculty and students of color, for the prioritizing of ethnic, queer and gender studies, for the shifting of a tuition driven university away from a corporate model and towards a real commitment towards the students enrolled in it and the city in which it is located.
I felt so amazed because the conference was organized by students who are mostly first and second years with some juniors and seniors as well. They had the vision, talent, energy and analysis to put together a really smart and needed conference, but they also had the motivation to draw on the history of the college, inviting back Amit Rai, a professor I worked with who was recently asked to leave, and Dr. Barbara Emerson, who was the Associate Provost and over saw the implementation of the “construct” (as she called it) of the diversity initiative from 1994 to 2000, as well as two other former faculty, Dr. Sam Anderson and James Fisher. There was so much history in those rooms as conversations about race and culture, power and oppressed resounded through them. I saw a first year from my screen printing class there and felt heartened.
But more so I left the conference knowing and feeling just how much these students are up against if they want to (and they do) continue to educate and agitate for real diversity on the campus of the New School University, for a commitment to diverse curriculum, pedagogy, faculty and student body from the University administration. It means challenging head on many of the prevailing notions in our culture right now about education, achievement and race. In many ways the right (and the left) has been incredibly quick to discredit identity politics, to say that race doesn’t matter any more, so let’s take apart affirmative action and bring on the high stakes testing. The culture at large has gotten so much more conservative since when I entered undergraduate four years ago. In many ways these students who are freshman now are really living in the times that are a reaction to September 11th.
I am so glad there are students who are struggling, who are refusing to give up the fight or let these issues go just because they are not “cool,” because academia as a whole wants to retreat from hard questions of power, identity and histories of colonization. It’s a hard road to walk and one that will take so much attention to history, so much cultivation of community at school, so much stratgedgy and organizing, so much work. In many ways this is the real education that happens within these walls. Today moved me and pushed me. I felt good that after four years of awareness and struggle around the very issues that were discussed, especially the support, recruitment and retention of students and faculty of color, more ethnic, queer and gender studies classes and programs, changing the culture of this institution to one that is oriented towards justice and actually lives the ideals it espouses, I was still there, still participating, pushing, supporting this struggle in whatever little ways I can. I also feel a great responsibility towards the students who organized todays conference. I feel accountable to them, to the spirit they created today, to carry work around these kinds of issues forward after my graduation, as the real lesson of my education at Eugene Lang College.
So I will close as I opened, with the words of Ted Leo:
“But if you do everything you can, well babe, that’s more than a start,
Roll out and make your mark. Pull on your boots and march,
Then roll on and meet me where you’ll find me good and ready,
Sometimes it’s gonna hurt, sometimes you’re gonna deserve it,
but if you hold on to what you’ve got I know you’ll keep it steady.
So there’s no end to work, so there’s no end to murk...
And how’re you gonna save the world, when the world ain’t ready?”
