Cancellor Gee, left, with Vanderbilt students.

For administrators to become cynical about diversity is quite possible in today’s world. Administrators can find themselves – ourselves, as I must include myself among my peers—worrying most about the look of our institutions, and our own “look” and reputation. We want to appear morally advanced and more cosmopolitan (how often do those two categories cohabit?), more socially acceptable, more immune to criticism. This type of cynicism can lead to well-publicized, probably well-intentioned blunders such as guidebook photo-doctoring. The ridicule we incur for such blunders is deserved – we should be lambasted for our cynicism, for our shallow thought that only considers the appearance of diversity and forgets its why.
Colleges and universities should concentrate on the “why” of diversity. We must consider that our livelihood rests on our cultivation of a wealth of ideas, and acknowledging such a truth impels us to create a sense of theories and worldviews in dialogue with one another. We are enriched by the exchange of ideas, and truly different ideas emerge from different sites of origin, be those sites cultural, economic, racial, or gendered. Hindu scholar Swami Nikhilananda has written: “A thoughtful person prefers to live among other thoughtful persons, for the clash of thought stimulates new thinking.”

Opposition and questions force us to consider and refine our own precious theories and notions. We are made to accommodate, to defend in a more effective manner, or to enhance our theories according to what has been given us by others. This forced evolution cannot happen on a campus where no debate occurs, where all students are members of the same club and discussion degenerates into a mutual-admiration party.

That said, I have no wish that such exchanges be antagonistic or argumentative. Students should feel safe in their differences, in their points of view. Discussions need to be cognizant of the larger community and need to work to cultivate it. The university community should not lose sight of intellectual exchange, for that community helps enable such exchange in the first place and prepares students for their emergence into an increasingly heterogeneous and complex world.

A university does its students a disservice if it does not equip them to work, think, and live with and alongside individuals who differ from themselves, whose worldviews may be unlike any those students have ever known. We must instill in our students an awareness that the world is made up of people from heterogeneous backgrounds, and the only way that fact will become a reality for many students is for them to be physically present to people from outside their own demographic categories. However, this relationship of difference need not be confrontative—a university should also encourage a sense of students’ belonging to each other, as partners in one another’s development, as allies in the great world.

A university environment should encourage all students to overcome their prejudices and fears to enable a dialogue of ideas. At Vanderbilt we are exploring the transformation of our campus into a system of residential colleges. We want to give students who might not necessarily choose one another the opportunity to live and learn and work together. Their experience may not involve just the time they spend in the classroom and the library and the laboratory, but the rest of the hours of their days. If a student sees a peer on a day-to-day basis and is involved in the pedestrian facets of her colleague’s life, she becomes less likely to project her fears and prejudices onto that peer, to transform him into an “Other.” She becomes, then, more apt to listen to his points of view. She has the chance to expand the sympathies of her mind. Theory can never be an adequate substitute for this kind of expansion, which occurs more easily in a living and learning environment that allows difference to (after a certain point) be taken for granted.

Vanderbilt is also extremely proud of our service learning programs, which encourage our students to act and to serve within sectors of the community that might otherwise escape their notice. Our service learning students have worked as victims’ advocates and as bilingual volunteers. They have worked in clinics and intervention groups and shelters. They are encouraged through their service to see the “whys” of the world they live in, to learn respect for those who need their service. The population of the world is various and diverse in many ways that cannot be captured on a campus. Service learning extends our students outward and exposes them to differences that enable their minds to become more mature and developed.

Nikhilananda also wrote: “If only one religion remained in the world, religion would be dead; variation is the sign of life, and always will be.” So it is on our campuses – if only one idea remains, our purpose is in serious peril. Variation – true diversity — is the most reliable sign of intellectual life that I know.