One of the things I struggle most with in examining diversity and it’s benefit to universities is the the question of ethnicity. Namely, of what specific value is an individual ethnicity to a learning environment? As an example, do we want more Latino on our campus because individuals from that pan-ethnic group possess cultural attributes that are distinct from a majority culture? In other words, do we have expectations that Latino students must “do ethnicity” when they arrive, otherwise their value is limited?

As Erik Kaufmann points out in a very interesting piece in Ethnic and Racial Studies, culture is an analytically distinct concept from ethnicity. In previous times, most people acted out the culture attached to their ethnicity pre-ontologically, in that they had no communal identity relative to other groups. But our global, networked society, suggests that cultural markers do not automatically become part of a meaning system.   I’m Cuban-American, but I live among no-one from my distinct ethnic group.  Kaufmann suggests that community is what transmits culture to members of ethnic groups.

So perhaps our role in the university is to provide these spaces for ethnic communities to transmit culture to ethnic groups via organizations like MeCHA or Black Student Union.  In the research I’m doing, I find that institutions are moving away from this type of boundary maintenance, instead seeking to make all clubs open to all students. An there’s a good argument for it. When you create a Chicano resource center or a Black student union on a campus, you are making the presumption that for students, culture and ethnicity are one in the same. There seems to be a fundamental illiberalism present in enforcing boundaries or encouraging boundary formation. Cosmopolitanists would say that our job should be to break up boundaries and make students global citizens.

Ok, fine. But if there are no boundaries, then is there  little purpose to ethnicity as a “value added” in the university learning experience?   As Michael Waltzer points out:

‘the distinctiveness of cultures and groups depends upon closure and, without it, cannot be conceived as a stable feature of human life. If this distinctiveness is a value, as most people . . . seem to believe, then closure must be permitted somewhere’ (Walzer 1983, p. 39).

Without boundary maintenance via a community in the larger project of transmitting values, what’s the point of ethnicity in the university? Social justice? Maybe. But if we’re going to make the case that ethnic diversity enriches the campus learning environment, we have to take the importance of boundaries more seriously.

More later 🙂