8/23: What I Accomplished Today

1. Finally figured out the last little problem with Arthur and fixed it. Arthur c'est finis. Praise be.

2. Converted my online 101 from the old interface version to the new one, updated its files, and fixed some little tweaky things that needed to be fixed. This took six or eight hours. Both of my online classes are done. Praise be.

3. We watched some TV, but I don't remember what it was. I didn't work on any Pogo badges because I was still working on 101.

4. Level 31 Human Paladin. Theramore for quests. Shady Rest and Highperch. Back to Theramore for turn-ins; dinged 32. Had to go back to Ironforge to train, since Darnassus doesn't have training available for Paladins. Flew back to the Feralis flight point and crossed southern Thousand Needles, mining and leveling my unarmed. Made it to Shimmering Flats and picked up quests. Went to Gadgetzan and flew to Ratchet for a quest; then returned to Gadgetzan. I'll do the Shimmering Flats stuff tomorrow.

5. A theme that has presented itself several times this week as we listen to all the speeches about starting the term is Diversity. I am a huge proponent of Diversity. One example I can think of is the English language itself (I just wrote this up for Arthur, so it's semi-fresh on my mind): one of the reasons for the richness of vocabulary and syntax is that it has drawn from so many sources. Diversity leads to richness, to ingenuity, to fresh, original solutions, to depth.

Having said that.

The primary problem I have with Diversity in action is that it is difficult to define. For example, I am a Caucasian homosexual female. Were I a math or science scholar, the "female" part would make me highly sought after. In some circles, the "homosexual" would make me a good person to hire. However, my particular department is Caucasian Female heavy. I haven't actually done the math, and I don't pretend to know everybody, or even to know everything about the people I do know, but off the top of my head, I know of three people aside from me who are gay. The full-time complement of the department is about50, I think, at least four or whom are gay. Now we're a Humanities department, I know, so we may skew higher than some. But does that make us an example of diversity or not?

More problems I have with Diversity: I was at a seminar a few years ago, and an African-American woman in our department made a comment to one of the speakers that boiled down to, "What business do you have to speak about diversity or to stress diversity when you are part of the empowered group?" Now in the first place, I thought that question was both rude and sort of stupid; by definition, if no one in the empowered group cares about something, it ain't never gonna happen if that group is truly the sole empowered group, so anybody who strives for diversity damn well better be prayin' that some people in the empowered group, whatever that may be, care about diversity as well. But the speaker said, "Oh, things aren't always as they appear." And it turned out one of her parents was full-blooded First Nations (I forget which; she was Canadian, and it was one of the larger Northern tribes, but I forget the specifics). So people who may appear to be Wonder Bread often have things going on we don't know, we don't have to know, it's not our business to know.

It is college policy that every hiring committee have someone who represents Diversity. (I think that wording is the stupidest thing in the world. It doesn't at all sound like a quota system if you're put on a committee for the sole purpose of Representing Diversity.) There was one hiring committee at which everyone looked like--well, me. And I mentioned to an administrative assistant, "Where's the Diversity Rep?" And she said that one of the members had a serious arm injury that qualified as a disability. Now I'd worked with this man three or four years at that point and didn't know he had an arm injury; he wore short-sleeved shirts and I'd never noticed it, and he didn't require any special equipment or accommodation, nor had I ever heard him say a word about pain or discomfort or difficulty of any sort (not that I necessarily would have). But this qualified him to Represent Diversity on a hiring committee.

I was in a parking lot once and saw a car pull into a handicapped spot. The driver got out, and she looked perfectly fit and healthy. Someone else coming out of the store noticed this and began to yell at her: "What are you doing, using a handicapped spot someone with a legitimate disability might need?" And the driver turned to her accuser and lifted the hem of her pant legs up to about her knees so that we could see that, under her fashionable, well-tailored trousers, she was wearing braces over her heavily-scarred knees.

So sometimes people can Represent Diversity, whatever that means, without that being visible. And I think that matters; I think it often looks asinine when we try to reduce Diversity to How We Look. (At heart, I think the differences that increase richness are differences in background more than appearance; people of similar appearances can have radically different backgrounds, while people of radically different appearances can have very similar backgrounds, and I would argue that the latter really doesn't constitute Diversity.)

On the other hand, we are (still technically) the Community College. Our student body is very Diverse in a "what-we-look-like" way--and I have no doubt that it helps student success if a reasonable percentage of the faculty looks like they do, if they can look at a number of people and say, "Well, that person succeeded, and he looks like me, so maybe I can, too." (However, I would still contend that it's less the Looks Like Me factor that plays here than the Comes From a Background Similar to Mine factor.)

I have had several friends sit on Hiring Committees. Several years ago, a friend was on a committee for which about 60 people had applied for what was probably going to be three positions. Of those 60, most could be eliminated by their C.V.'s or Letters; that left six to be interviewed. If I remember correctly from my friend's description, four were Caucasian women, one was a Caucasian man, and the sixth was an African-American woman. Two gave really wonderful interviews and teaching samples; three were bores; one was actively bad. Deer-in-headlights bad. Students-would-eat-this-person-for-breakfast bad. But the melanin factor won out. That can't be anybody's intention, for us to have to hire ninnies because of a random genetic trait. (Especially when, because of a random genetic trait, I can't provide Co-Vivant with Health Insurance. Do we value Diversity, or don't we? Do we even know what it is?)

Random thoughts that add up to nothing; again, these fragments have I shorn against my ruin.