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Diversity on Campusreviewed by Ana M. Martinez Aleman - 2003 ![]() Author(s): David Schuman Publisher: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, Dubuque, Iowa ISBN: 0787283797 , Pages: 348, Year: 2001 Search for book at Amazon.com David Shuman’s second edition of Diversity on
Campus provides American undergraduates with encapsulated
information about the socio-political history of race, sex, gender,
and religion and its relationship to college life. Probing
questions related to these hotly contested issues abound in the
text, inviting the reader to reflect and self-assess around such
matters as same-sex relationships, racial distrust, and social
class privilege. No clear, concise and categorical
answers to these questions are given, however. The goal or
“moral” of the book, according to the authors is to
have students consider more closely and “think harder”
about difference, deviance, and the unfamiliar. In short,
Diversity on Campus is designed with a particular audience
in mind: the traditional American undergraduate endeavoring,
whether by inclination, empathy or more likely than not curricular
distribution requirement, to learn about “difference,”
about “identity,” about “ diversity” in the
context of college life---the ultimate goal being, one suspects, to
inform post-collegiate life in an American democracy. Thus,
the intent of Diversity on Campus appears not to be
heavy-handed or didactic but rather to enlighten undergraduates and
instill in them an appreciation for thinking broadly, deeply, and
historically about our sociality in multicultural America—or
as the epigraph’s invocation of Hannah Arendt counsels,
“to think what we are doing”. At first, the tone of Diversity on Campus and its
simplistic accounts disturb the experienced and scholarly
reader. We know that race, sexuality, religion, and class
aren’t the distilled and diluted phenomena that each chapter
presents. After all, aren’t town-gown relationships far
more complex than reflected in the movie, “Breaking
Away”? The author would agree and throughout the text
does remind the reader that all of the issues under the diversity
umbrella are a complicated and complex web of politics, history,
ideology, and belief. But the reader isn’t meant to be the
scholar of diversity, nor the critical race theorist, nor the
sophisticated and experienced student. Instead, the reader is
assumed to be that traditional undergraduate who has not given
focused and academic attention to the challenges brought to her
sense of self and her worldviews by non-Christians, non-whites,
non-straights, etc. This is a text that assumes the reader to have
had no (or little) opportunity to consider formally the ways
in which our society has and does privilege some over others,
systematically discriminates against some and not others, and
values some ways of being and legislates against those deemed
deviant. If my twenty years in the diversity
‘business’ can serve as an empirical test of this
assumption, David Shuman has correctly identified and assessed his
intended readers. For though there are certainly those
undergraduates for whom this book will read as elementary—a
Cliff Note version of critical studies—most of their peers
will need, learn and be served well by the text. The strength of any text resides in its ability
to deliver its message effectively to its intended
audience. In the case of Diversity on Campus, the
message is that life on America’s campuses reflects life
lived in America’s towns and cities, experienced within
families, among friends and co-workers, between strangers on the
subway and commuters on its highways. The American campus is,
according to Schuman, “as real as any other part of life. The
things that happen off campus are just different versions of things
that happen on campus. Each college is…subject to the
problems found in the surrounding society” (p. 1). As a
consequence, college students should endeavor to understand college
living as not free or isolated from pluralistic tensions and
demands but as one of America’s microcosms. Schuman
attempts to deliver this message using historical and philosophical
perspectives to view the diversity debates and tensions on campus,
fortifying the examination with evidence accessible to
today’s undergraduates: the case of Abner Louima,
Barbie Dolls and G. I. Joe’s, “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell,” and racial profiling. In particular,
the author chooses “the traditional American tension between
individualism and group identity” (p. x) as a means for
framing issues, for example, political correctness and gender
studies, hoping to bring to his readers the message that who we are
and who we think ourselves to be on America’s
campuses—our identity—matters greatly. The
implication is that it matters for living in the America outside
the campus grounds; that having a lesbian roommate may well require
the same sensibility as having a lesbian co-worker or that
proponents of a Western Canon may have much in common with
supporters of English-Only ballot initiatives. Diversity
on Campus, in my view, delivers this message well
enough. In my view, however, the text’s message gets a bit
confused at times by two interdependent elements, choice of example
and choice of language. At times, the author’s examples
don’t clearly underscore the intended message to have
students think deeply about complex social issues instead of
resorting to unthinking stereotypes and undemocratic action.
For example, in “Gender Issues” (Chapter 5)
Schuman’s summary of educational gender equity for girls and
women and sexual harassment on campus as social constructions is
undermined by its chapter sub-heading, “Hormones on
Campus” (p. 93). Does Shuman mean to suggest to the
reader that it will be an uncontrollable biology that
matters in the end? The discussion of sexual harassment is
weakened further by the re-assertion of
‘biology-as-destiny’ when we read, “Hormones are
active in all of us, and we know that both sexes have the capacity
to act foolishly, inappropriately, or illegally” (p.
97). Is the author suggesting to the reader that in effect,
he shouldn’t “Look closer” nor should he
“think harder” (p. 286) about sexual harassment because
in the end, his hormones ‘will make him do it’?
There’s a mixed message here and one of important
consequences for both college women and men. Another and perhaps equally subtle mixed message appears at the
end of Chapter 6, “Gender II: The Wider World.”
Here, the chapter concludes with an example of women living in
community. “A Community of Women” follows a
discussion of the ways in which “the role of women on campus
is a mirror of the role of women in society” (p. 99).
This discussion is informed by a framing of gender that
“invites us to see sexual roles as socially constructed
rather than determined by biology” (p. 99). Schuman
tackles gender inequality in the work place, progressive
legislative change designed to protect women’s rights, and
sexual assault as social phenomena reflective of women’s
status as a subjugated and dependent class. We read that her
history, past and present, is one in which her autonomy is
questioned. And then we read about nuns. The community of women that Schuman chooses as a model for
gender/women in the “wider world,” a model that given
what precedes it should illustrate the negotiation between the
autonomous, rights-wielding, reasoning woman and the wider
patriarchal world, is one whose qualities couldn’t be more
contested and debated and thus not easily understood. As a
model for women’s autonomy, the nunnery can be read as both
stale stereotype and radicalized separation. It is both
women’s life absent of the sexual negotiations with men
and women’s life under men’s
subjugation—they can’t, after all have the right to
“provide the necessary sacraments by themselves” (p.
123), the greatest privilege the Catholic God gives to men. The use
of the nunnery is “offered as a comparison” to the
relations between men and women that according to Schuman
“will always be subject to negotiation” (p. 123).
Thus, the message to his readers is what? That women in society,
like the sisters of St. Mary’s College, can freely determine
most of their lives but they will still have to live by men’s
rules? That women in America, like the good sisters, can certainly
self-determine but only just so far? Schuman is right to tell
his reader that the “world seems to be a different place for
men and for women” (p. 122) but how is using the example of
the nunnery as comparison a productive means to ‘looking
closer’ and ‘thinking harder’ about that
difference? Despite my reservations, Diversity on Campus by David Schuman (with Tuesday L. Cooper and Carolyn M. Pillow) can be an effective introduction to the complexities of identity and their social consequences for undergraduates. The text can enable them to “begin to sort out what [they] think about [themselves] and others, and why” (p. 3).
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