This week, UT has been celebrating its commitment to diversity with Diversity Week. This core value of any progressively-minded university is important, but we as students often ask at times like this whether UT really is diverse.
This campus is lucky enough to have students, staffers, administrators and faculty members from a wide range of backgrounds and orientations, but how often are students forced outside of their comfort zones in an effort to improve their understanding of the world and its peoples and, in so doing, develop a sophisticated worldview? With our current multicultural course requirements and vast array of liberal arts class offerings, many students at least have the opportunity to broaden their intellectual horizons. Because of this, the threat against a dynamic humanities here at UT takes on a whole new disturbing dimension.
UT's strategic plan recognizes the importance of diversity, but the actions of UT's administration in recent days seem to work against this stated goal. Instituting a "mass-customization" of course offerings for students and a focus on the eight to 10 core course classes shared by a majority of students can only hinder the ability of students to embrace diversity and to challenge themselves intellectually. A more limited landscape of course offerings given the paradoxical veneer of "mass-customization" will not only rob students of the ability to challenge themselves and to transform their way of thinking, it also fails to encourage faculty members to develop new classes and academic programs. Why do new research or develop a new curriculum or syllabus if the work will never be used in the classroom?
Under this new plan, students become the very creations of a mass-production academic assembly line that Jacobs wishes to avoid. Jacobs claimed that a multiplicity of programs with the same goal throws the mass-production educational system into chaos and therefore all such programs should be combined. According to Jacobs, their combination - somehow - as present under the extreme student centeredness paradigm would allow for "mass-customization" for students in their educational pursuits.
The need to treat every student according to his or her particular academic needs is significant, but how is such a "plethora of programs" designed to offer students an accelerated program of study, for example, opposing a highly-customized education? The combination of these and other programs decreases students' options and discourages competition among programs to produce the best results. Removing programs also poses a bureaucratic nightmare for UT. Students only need to look at Rocket Solution Central to see how well combining programs on this campus works.
Additionally, any serious promotion of diversity on campus is going to necessitate a strong sense of one's history to understand who one is and what part of their society or intellectual makeup needs to be changed and challenged with diversity. UT's administrators have been doing anything but encouraging a strong sense of history for its students by letting the history department languish without a chairperson for three years and with such a low number of history professors.
UT administrators must rethink their treatment of the humanities if diversity is to be seriously promoted here.
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