Peter Likins UA President

I was surprised by the editorial from the Arizona Summer Wildcatās Opinions Board: "Diversity Efforts a Waste of Time."

The editorial says that the advocates of the diversity agenda "have not offered one reason why anyone should care." They conclude that "there is no reason to care" about campus diversity.

As president I must accept some responsibility for any studentās failure to understand why I feel so strongly about the importance of diversity to any university community. I need to do a better job of explaining why university leaders all over America are trying to create campus environments that better reflect the cultural diversities of the world in which we live. Our motives go to the very essence of the contemporary purpose of a university, reaching far beyond any political ideology. The assumption that "political correctness" defines the diversity agenda is a serious misconception that colors the negative tone of the editorial.

I do not know the individual members of the Opinions Board, but I will bet that they see their university experience as preparation for the life that awaits them after graduation. Very few undergraduates enroll here just to slake their thirst for the knowledge they gain from their textbooks; they come here for a rich learning experience that relies upon human interaction, hoping to prepare themselves for all of lifeās challenges.

The world our graduates enter when they leave our campus is a complex, multicultural arena in which they must perform effectively in the struggle for success. It is simply not enough for any student today to be satisfied with the formal, intellectual content of academic courses; such knowledge is necessary for success, but not sufficient. Our graduates will not live and work in the homogeneous environment dominated by white, male, English-speaking Americans that my generation entered upon graduation in the 1950s. They will live and work in an emerging new America, moving toward gender parity and a genuine distribution of opportunity and consequent power among citizens derived from the worldās cultures, races, languages and religions. Moreover, many of our graduates will live and work in the international arena, where Americaās multiculturalism will be of increasing advantage. Somehow our students must get ready for this new reality.

Every university president today feels a heavy responsibility for the creation of a learning environment that prepares all students for their future challenges. Our institutional legacy of white, male dominance presents an obstacle to the creation of an environment that works equally well for all students, and the legacy has made it difficult for most American universities to attract and retain women and people of color in nontraditional roles. If we are unable to break the old patterns in our faculty and administration, we not only discourage women and people of color from joining our community, we also fail to create a learning environment that serves well all our students, who desperately need to learn some of lifeās lessons that they will never learn from people who look like me!

As noted in the editorial, affirmative action was created "to remedy the effects of past discrimination." The civil rights movement in the 1960s was indeed focused on the victims of prejudice, whose plight had been ignored for generations. Forty years later, there are still victims of prejudice, and decent people are still motivated by a desire for equal opportunity and social justice.

However, the world has changed in the past 40 years, and so has America. The competitiveness of the global economy has tested our will to change and demonstrated the importance of outgrowing the culturally provincial thinking that was handicapping our development. We came to appreciate the importance of fully utilizing our human resources in America, recognizing that white males are a diminishing minority. We began to understand the pragmatic necessity of developing a more sophisticated appreciation of various cultures, both within an increasingly multicultural America and in the shrinking global village in which we all live. The diversity agenda developed a much broader base of support as we gradually realized that everyone has a stake in its success, not merely the victims of prejudice.

As ironic evidence of this transformation in the underlying motivations for the diversity agenda, it is American business organizations that are now pressing for change, driven in part by pragmatic considerations of global competitiveness. In the ā60s, the civil rights advocacy came from social reform advocates and government officials. How the world has changed!

Perhaps because I have participated in this evolving movement throughout my adult life, I am inclined to assume that everyone understands its changing nature, and appreciates the importance of increasing human diversity to all members of any learning community. I need to remember to explain the reasons for the high priority we attach to the diversity agenda at the University of Arizona, especially when addressing young people who have no living memories of these momentous changes in human society.