As I reflect on this year at Boston University and in higher education nationally, the theme of diversity and inclusion dominates my thoughts. In the fall, groups of students around the country raised our collective consciousness about how many of them do not feel safe or heard on their campuses, including our own. Demands by students have resulted in many promises for greater representation, better services, and more equitable treatment. One important area where activists are pushing for greater diversity is among the faculty.
Indeed, faculty diversity is a critically important topic, which BU is tackling head on. Throughout the year, BU’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity and Inclusion has explored the state of racial and ethnic diversity in our faculty ranks, and we will soon receive their final report to guide our progress toward inclusive equity. The College of Arts & Sciences is uniquely well placed to lead BU in diversifying our faculty, and we must do so with respectful, thoughtful care to build a community that fulfills our mission—producing transformative education and new knowledge for a better world.
There are two main forms of faculty diversity, both of which need continued cultivation: diversity of background, experience and identity; and diversity of thought. The arts and sciences bring diverse disciplinary perspectives to the study of human experience and the natural world. There is deep epistemic value in this diversity of approaches, and bringing them together provides opportunities for triangulating evidence and seeking truth. Diversity within disciplines among individual scholars and scientists is equally important.
A broad college assembles an expansive palette of diversity on many dimensions of thought and background: ethnic community differences; the different bodily and social experiences of diverse sexes, gender identities, and sexual orientations; and the differences that racial identity makes to our experiences and sources of identity and value. But unlike disciplinary diversity, which is definitive of CAS, to ensure these other forms of diversity we must make concerted efforts to be inclusive.
Diversity of thought within the community of scholars forms the basis for our claims to objective knowledge of the world. Individuals from different communities express ideas and beliefs that guide their divergent ways of life and challenge ways that dominant groups live and perceive. Individuals with different experiences and beliefs add ideas to the collective mix from which scholars sift and winnow the best and most promising. Individuals from diverse groups challenge each other to delve deeper into ideas to explain their foundations and implications. Such challenges are the basis of learning, sometimes justifying our view but sometimes persuading us to change our views in light of new evidence or insightful interpretation. As an institution of higher learning, we depend upon diversity to succeed in our mission.
We must not be fooled into thinking that this project of diversification is easy and that our generation is the first to think of it or try to accomplish it. Diversity of background, experience, and belief enhances the quest for knowledge by providing critical perspectives on our assertions and assumptions. This makes embracing diversity both difficult and essential. Difficult because it is hard to hear that one’s deeply held assumptions are partially or even completely wrong or, worse, that they are tainted by ugly biases that we consciously abhor and repudiate but that unconsciously guide our daily actions and harm our colleagues and fellow human beings. Also difficult because we as academics are trained to be critical of ideas that strike us as false or off point, making scholars often conservative and suspicious of new ideas. Yet essential not only because we as humans are morally bound to find ways to treat each other fairly and with respect, but also because diversity is a source of new ideas and perspectives.
So how do we encourage diversity and create a community of learners who can function optimally to further our mission to create deep and valuable knowledge? Attention to raising the numbers of individuals from diverse, underrepresented groups is essential to being accountable to our commitments to diversity, but the numbers will rise only as an outcome of a sincere and concerted search for valued colleagues. Not only must we employ best practices to forge new networks among different communities, and adopt evaluation procedures that eliminate opportunities for implicit bias to pervert our judgments, but we must also expand our notions of what scholarship in our disciplines is about and looks like.
And this is the most difficult task of all: to see the value in diversity while retaining our critical perspective on claims to knowledge so that we hire and promote the best, untainted by either bias or by condescension. Every faculty member we hire must contribute to our communal quest for learning and knowing and meet a standard of excellence that can be externally validated. Our professional responsibility to challenge ourselves, our theories, and our disciplines meets our personal responsibility to meet others with dignity, respect, and recognition of the value they bring to our collective enterprise of teaching, learning, and knowledge creation.
To diversify the academy we must open our hearts and minds to difference while we maintain our critical perspective on all knowledge claims. Honest and sincere evaluation must be pursued objectively with humility and respect. This requires self-reflection on one’s evidential and procedural approaches to validating claims, and risking making the wrong choices. It requires listening, questioning one’s own thoughts, and building a community of mutual trust and trustworthiness in which such questioning is valued and respected. Yet, this has been the project of the Enlightenment, which holds out hope for progress through honest objective and critical evaluation of new ideas, a project that the arts and sciences pursues as its guiding beacon.