Untitled Document

James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia

April 5, 2007--"Diversity is for Everyone"--Harris Sussman

I heard you were having a diversity-is-for-everyone party. I brought T-shirts and pins & I'm looking for the pinata room. I'm trying to learn your theme song for the karaoke tonight--be the change, cha-cha-cha, be the change cha-cha-cha...

They told me I’d be talking during dessert, so I was going to sing a medley of diversity songs…
You’ve Got to be Taught, from South Pacific
National Brotherhood Week, by Tom Lehrer
There is a Brotherhood of Man, from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Stick to Your Own Kind (A Boy Like That), from West Side Story
And my favorite, I’m My Own Grandpa…
but Daniel heard me warming up and begged me not to…Maybe some other time…

The big question of course is whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable…botanically it’s a fruit but the Supreme Court in 1893 said it’s a vegetable—and that pretty much tells you where we are with diversity today.

I keep seeing the phrase Be the Change—it appears more than 180 times on your web site--it has been one of my favorite slogans for many years—“you must be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Gandhi.

I was pleased to discover that you have the Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence here. Which is certainly one of the best ways of making the world safe for diversity. We could discuss diversity through looking at ahimsa and satyagraha, concepts I learned when I was 15 from Martin Luther King who got them from Gandhi.

So you have a Gandhian frame of mind…I resisted the impulse to wear my loincloth and sandals, out of respect for your digestion…but do we listen differently to a speaker who wears a sari, a burkha, bluejeans, or bow tie?

Speaking of your web site, the word inclusion appears 801 times, diversity 2630 times, multicultural 1370 times, tolerance 366, diversity council 317, and Dukes about 5000 times

I have been thinking what to say as your lunchtime palate cleanser...I want to say some things that we don’t say in ordinary groups…Talking about diversity is like a poetry reading, with a specialized language.

Someone told me that I’d be preaching to the choir. That would be nice. It would mean you have a vested interest in taking things from today into tomorrow. So I want to talk to you as the leadership team for diversity in this university.

What is the diversity in this room? Too much to tell. That’s why I like to talk about diversities & you've increased your diversity by having me here.

Wave your hands if you’ve ever felt uncomfortable at JMU--wave your hands if waving your hands makes you uncomfortable

I hope I say some things that you might not have been talking about---What would be the point if I said things you’ve already heard?

I went to a little college where there was a sign on the front lawn with a quotation from the founder—“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”…you can’t get that out of your head, your conscience…

what I think we mean when we say diversity is a lot of things we don't say—we mean people being together in ways we may not have experienced or be prepared for…we mean the development of a self-regenerating culture or environment of coexistence without murdering each other...we mean come one come all to the experience we're having...we mean the addition of others is a multiplier effect that we welcome even if it is unsettling...we mean that diversity is a desired & desirable state whose ramifications we need to learn and work on together...

there is much more that we don't say and we boil it down to saying the word diversity as if that will express it...anytime we are exposed to art or music we are deep into diversity…are you with me?
you don't have to take notes. This is being recorded and an extended annotated version is posted on my website, sussman dot org slash jmu.

Diversity does not automatically mean community or conflict...it's beginning the mixture....some people like to say it's a stew, salad, gumbo, bouillabaise, where flavors mix in a lot of ways--diversity is getting the ingredients assembled...then you've got to let them play with each other…

Here are some facts about our life…we're closer to 2021 than to 1992....
People are completely different in some respects and completely similar in other respects.

Diversity doesn’t stand still, it's always different –--what’s your tolerance/appetite/curiosity for the diverseness of diversity?

The fastest growing groups in America are: millionaires, people who go bankrupt, wounded soldiers with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, older people with Alzheimer's and dementia, children with autism, people who are obese, people with nonbiological parts of their body, people whose first language is not English...the effects of this will be with us for 30 or 40 years and longer....

The demographics of the next generation have already happened—I try to keep track of everyone who has been born in the world, so I know who’s going to be around for the next 50 to 100 years…

The US has 4 1/2% of world population. 95 ½% of the world is not American. 85 1/2% of the world is not white.
In the US, babies with two white parents become a minority of newborns in 12 years. It’s the end of the white ages in America.
people with mixed cultural heritage are the fastest growing group in the US. My Chinese Ashkenazi Persian Russian family is becoming the norm…
people over 60 are the fastest growing part of world population.
more species, cultures and languages will become extinct in our children’s lives than in the past 65 million years.
In every major US university, people speak more than 100 languages.
The US has the highest percentage of citizens in jail of any country in the world.
Half of all babies born in the US since 2000 will live to be 100.
There are more farmers in China & Hindus in India than all the white people in the world.

In Europe, the Muslim birth rate is three times the non-Muslim birth rate…

That’s diversity: (deal with it.) Enjoy your dessert.

I had this fear that I would be just about to tell you the secret of the universe and I'd be given the signal that it was time for a bathroom break before the next session. That happens to me a lot. So I thought I'd at least tell a few of the semi-secrets.

Diversity is not only for everyone, it is about everyone. Diversity is normal. Diversity has not been intellectually honest. It frequently stops short of significant insights or information. It has dealt in generalizations and stereotypes. Diversity has clustered and aggregated people. It’s aggravated them too. Diversity has been divisive. Sometimes it’s afraid of its own shadow….

a campus should be at least as much of a kaleidoscope as people's families...

If we are serious about believing that diversity is for everyone, it means we’ll have to change our approach. There are emerging diversities and ignored diversities.

If you’re using 1964 EEO statistical categories you should say so and you should have a good reason for using sociological baselines from 43 years ago, not just that the government does it... the trouble is, many diversity presentations don't realize that's what they're doing, so they lose credibility and validity in a world that is configured in new ways....

Diversity has been a term for acknowledging the brutal dissonance in our democracy, a generic euphemism for the ways we might encounter and interact with unfamiliar others. It was a way to talk about desegregating ourselves after we were supposedly desegregated. It is built on pain and open wounds, so it has always seemed facile to me to start off with celebrating diversity.

The first step is to admit you’re part of an institutional system and to be accountable for what happens in it and what it does to people.

15 years ago I was leading a group at AT&T in New Jersey. One of the many VPs said a woman asked him what she should do about sexual harassment, and he said he didn’t know—I told him as an individual he didn’t have to know but as an officer of the company he did.

If you personally want to learn more about other people, that’s great, but as members of this university you are protectors and ambassadors of some principles and values, so you must advance diversity.

As Americans, when we say "with liberty and justice for all" that should cover it--why would we need diversity consciousness-raising? If it hasn’t sunk in after repeating it so many times, why do we think a one-time session that comes across like a pep rally or indoctrination will do the trick?

If you believe diversity is for everyone, you better be sure everyone got the memo. And then you better make sure they all practice what you preach. This isn’t so easy, organizations have found out.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Workforce 2000 report which fueled the diversity training movement. I have seen many diversity managers who have a bone to pick with white males and it comes across in the sessions they conduct. They hire diversity speakers who ream out white men, read them the riot act, then they criticize white men for not volunteering to be on the diversity task force.

Let's get it together so we can look at the critical issues facing us--it is inadequate to talk about diversity without a larger frame of reference—we should be looking at the big picture. Human rights are different from human wrongs. Otherwise diversity is confined to a conceptual ghetto, it sounds like a fad.

What is your model of large system change? One theory is to wait until the current people in power die. That hasn’t worked. There seem to be clones to take their place.

You can try to change the mentality of one person at a time or change the infrastructure, the support systems, the operating systems and the house rules. A hostile environment is maintained by internal and external forces.

Let’s say there are 150 people in this room, if you all greet each other individually, that's 11,175 handshakes; it would take awhile…let's all say hello out loud now—I just saved you a lot of awkward encounters, but that deprived you of a lot of opportunities for meeting…

There are probably 25,000 people immediately involved in this university every day, several times that mediately involved...in a large system, there are a lot of nooks and crannies, a lot of linkages…there are a lot of diversities that are diverted or kept under wraps, that people don't know about, that aren't public or publicized…often it isn’t safe to be who you are in public, so you create an avatar who shows up for you…

you don't have to reach and convert each person separately-- we paint a line down the highway and say drive on the right, we let the line do the talking without concerning ourselves with each person's attitude about where to drive...

you could have programs for 150 people at a time-- it would be quite a project --including people who don't care or are defiant –the model is cult deprogramming or boot camp; even then you couldn’t be sure what the results would be…

--so the bottom line is you have to change the system and let the new system handle the people who come through it --you need to retrofit or re-engineer institutional processes and structures.

Michael Hammer has an article in the new issue of the Sloan Management Review on measuring and managing—it says there are “two keys to successful performance management-- an emphasis on end-to-end business processes and a focus on the drivers of enterprise results, the cross-organizational sequence of activities that create all customer value.”

There is an extensive literature on this. We design and build institutions differently for a social system of equity and mutual respect than for one of oppression and domination.

Even when people do some sort of diversity awareness training, it has not led to widespread significant change in how organizations function...that's why people get impatient and frustrated and cynical.

There are still innumerable situations in which women are belittled, dismissed, discounted, disparaged, or disrespected, not to mention harassed.

The National Science Foundation has a program called ADVANCE to help universities change how women are treated—so far, it has spent $100 million and has produced some lessons institutions can learn from…

Dr. Jerome Groopman’s new book is How Doctors Think. He says that within 18 seconds of a patient describing symptoms, the doctor interrupts. (I have noted that many teachers answer their own questions within 6 seconds; if they waited 7 seconds, they would get responses.)
Dr. Groopman talks about snap judgments, anchoring, groupthink, and diagnosis momentum—it made me think of diversity programs I’ve seen over the past twenty years.

Terms like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and socio-economic status do not just refer to those variables of other people, the non-standard, the deviant, the outsider, the least-represented, they refer to those variables of all people, of everyone.

But diversity is not consistently inclusive in its terminology or its data reporting. In talking about the smallest numbers, we often leave out the largest numbers. This is like looking in a shattered mirror. When a diversity reference is made, it should add up to 100% of the people. That's one thing “diversity is for everyone” means. Every column of numbers or bar chart or pie chart should represent the total, not just the fraction of the trait being discussed. Otherwise there are some glaring omissions. I often see slides that show 11% --with no reference to the other 89%. Put them in. It's like when you count people and leave yourself out--the analysis is incomplete.

Diversity work can be like massage. Have you gotten or given a massage recently? If someone presses on your neck or shoulder with even slight pressure and it hurts, that means something is not doing well, you have a tight muscle or twisted fascia. Diversity is giving deep tissue massage to the institution. There is a period when it hurts, but then you get to where even stronger pressure doesn't hurt. I know some people would prefer to give a few karate chops. Some feel we should leave it alone, it will take care of itself. But they’re wrong; it won’t.

What’s the hardest part for you? Where do you lose your way? What’s holding you back? What are the taboos? Is it gay or lesbian people? straight people? Is it people with foreign accents? people with body piercings? Religion? We need to work on the painful parts.

I keep modifying my definition of diversity—it's not just asking how white you are--it's looking at how you limit yourselves, how restricted and restrictive can you afford to be. The great challenge is to forge social cohesion out of such a patchwork. In 1911 John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

My provisional definition for today is diversity is dynamic pluralism that is sustaining and sustainable.

I was 18 walking along a street in Harlem in New York City and I saw Malcolm X . I walked up to him & we talked and he basically said I should work with my people. He was killed less than two years later, at age 39.

The next month I was at the March on Washington. After Martin Luther King gave his speech I walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he was standing alone & asked him what he was going to do next and he said he was going over to meet with President Kennedy.

A few weeks later I was at the funeral of three of the four girls killed in a bombing in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. King gave the eulogy.

Two months later, President Kennedy was killed. He was 46.

In 1968, Dr. King was killed. He was 39. Yesterday (April 4) was the 39th anniversary of his death. I joined the staff of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to work in the Poor Peoples Campaign in Washington. While we were at Resurrection City on the Mall, Robert F. Kennedy was killed. He was 42.

Now here I am at a program which declares that diversity is for everyone. I get the feeling my life is going in very slow motion. What makes this such a struggle? Why should it be difficult and dangerous to work for dignity and democracy?

You are pursuing this on many fronts. You pretty well covered things in your January 2004 Commission report. What have you learned in 3 years? Or since your Commission on Community and the Diversity Day in 1997?

2 years ago my wife and I started a project to assist blind students in Russia. We are now the best and most effective project in the US doing this work. We’re also the only one. So I know something about benchmarking and best practices.

I’d say you should not be looking only at other universities or the private sector or the greater Shenandoah Valley, or the commonwealth of Virginia, or the United States, but at the world you and your loved ones will be living in for the rest of your lives...and that means leaping into the unknown and unprecedented…how do you prepare people to live what hasn’t been lived before?

There must be some very powerful forces working here. And there are.

Before Virginia’s racial integrity act in 1924 there were at least dozens of generations of caste system, exclusion, slaves, serfs, outcasts, and abuse.

Our social systems and mechanisms and immune systems are old and well-established. "Second-class citizens" have existed for centuries--exiles and refugees have been around for thousands of years. Institutional inertia is ingrained, embedded, entrenched to a degree people don't appreciate, they underestimate its breadth and depth.

There is research that the differences in how people perform has little to do with innate ability, it is how they are treated. The differences in who succeeds has to do with the support they get, how the prevailing systems assist or stifle them.

Diversity asks us to be more informed and intelligent not just about people but about the conditions in which people live. Diversity asks us to be answerable for difficult questions.

To our surprise we find organizational structures and processes that are inadvertently biased, attitudes that are unconsciously biased and lead to undervaluing, marginalizing, inequities, as Prof. Nancy Hopkins at MIT points out.

This kind of discrimination is endemic. It's the background radiation of the institutions we work in. There’s a lot that is known about this. Working on diversity/freedom/equality is a full-time job. On top of your full-time job. One person cannot do it. It takes a concerted effort. We underestimate the impersonal discrimination and oppression. People take it personally. Take it to another level. Look at how it molds institutional and systemic behaviors and biases; a toxic environment contaminates everyone.

So diversity for everyone means Institutional change. Institution-wide. Institutionalized. Not fragmented or compartmentalized or outsourced. The mandate is we’re all in this together--Let’s fix it.

JMU Vision 2008 has been out for awhile --who has Vision 2028? some of you have been here awhile; I saw several 35-year service awards.I see how much you’re doing--I’m glad to hear about the diversity conversations that have been going on. I see how much needs to be done--I urge you to do it.

many places find that they are putting in a lot of effort, but it is not enough, or it is not yielding the results they want and need. Can we approach the issues differently? Take the graduation rate gap. I’ve looked at your numbers. If all the capabilities and synergies of the university were applied to this, how long would it take to cut the gap in half?

in order to have the results you want later, what do you need to do now? part of the answer is simple and part is more complicated...too complicated for lunchtime...
the simple part is, do more, do other things, connect the dots, do a more comprehensive analysis, raise your sights, recognize the stakes have been raised. Most places are in an early transitional phase... is there a sequence, a progression, stages of diversity development? You need to figure out your own. I can tell you this: diversity work is not linear.

Bill McKibben recently wrote, "climate change is a problem with a very high procrastination penalty--a penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction." --That is to say, the longer we put off dealing with it, the worse the consequences get. Indeed, put it off too long, and there may be nothing we can do.

Translated into university terms, it means that if you want to see meaningful change in your lifetime, the pace of change must be greater than you thought, are comfortable with, than sounds reasonable or convenient. Al Gore's work is called An Inconvenient Truth; in order to do something that matters, we have to inconvenience ourselves, push our tolerance for doing things differently, our institutional metabolism, our sound barrier, our comfort zone....

goals or benchmarks should be much more ambitious than they are, timeframes for milestones should be shorter and faster--and you must be in for the long haul. Diversity is not a problem to be solved. It’s another name for living in the world.

If your diversity council meets once a month, it should meet once a week; if it meets for three hours, it should meet for a three day retreat; if it reads ten emails it should look at ten web sites...
You can play with diversity--in fact, you must--you can't limit yourself to one approach...we need artists and scientists of diversity, poets and statisticians, athletes and chefs...

You don’t have to introduce diversity to people. Wherever they turn, there it is. As you know, Harrisonburg public schools has the highest % of Low English Proficiency students in the state-- 38%. This year’s pupils come from 64 countries and speak 44 languages at home. They are your benchmark.

You need to be institutional neurosurgeons--yes it really is brain surgery —it is both delicate and decisive. There is such richness in looking at diversity-- it invites us to explore so many areas near and far-- all disciplines and departments are involved in this.

It depends what your diagnosis is...if you think you need to change one person at a time, diversity training doesn't come close. If you think diversity is for everyone who has contact with this institution, then you must change the institutional points of contact so that everyone is affected. (you can run but you can't hide)—the entire territory must become a Safe Zone….

I have called diversity a liberation movement, I talk about the multiplier effects of diversity...it is exponential, quantum, fractal and compound, combinatorial, multidimensional...I’m always looking for the right words…

I don't want anyone to feel left out.... but with the best intentions we can operate diversity in ways that leave people out...that is why your theme, "Diversity is for Everyone" has to be more than a slogan. My pin says, I Am A Person of Difference, and it is open source, anyone can wear it....and you've got to believe people when they do. You can't tell someone who she or he is. You've got to find the interpersonal space, the intercultural space, & the institutional space that you both can occupy.

In an open system Diversity takes care of itself--in a controlled system, you have to do something major—change the rules, raise or lower the water in the locks. Diversity is the natural order of things only when it’s not blocked or suppressed…

“Diversity is for everyone” in another sense—there’s something for everyone to do—Some can formulate a poetics of diversity. Some can do research on comparative diversity. “Diversity is for everyone” to deal with, to participate in, to enjoy, to benefit from, to figure out, to work on together…It’s a given, a gift…

How about some new resolutions?....mine is that we should gear our teaching to where our students will be when they’re our age, not to where we were when we were their age....

…or as Gandhi said, "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

I thank you for your attention….

*********

References for Harris Sussman talk, April 5, 2007, "Diversity is for Everyone"

Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books, March, 2007

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19981

Nancy Hopkins, MIT

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D07E5D91E3DF93BA15750C0A9669C8B63

Ben Barres on gender issues

http://lists.powerblogs.com/pipermail/volokh/2006-August/006998.html

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/march1/med-women-030106.html

Research on implicit assumptions, inadvertent bias