Yom Kippur and Diversity

Evan Meyerson, today's D:

The one term utilized ad nauseam more than any other throughout freshman orientation at Dartmouth is "diversity." The College preaches "diversity" almost to a point of overcompensation while trying its darndest to use this diluted word as a grand sales pitch for prospective students. Lectures throughout orientation and beyond carry almost identical themes of growth and maturity through an acceptance and appreciation of differences. While the sheer quantity of activities centered on "diversity" may, in the long run, cheapen the term, it is difficult not to respect this attempt at encouraging a fully-tolerant student body. Yet as my third Yom Kippur in Hanover approaches, Dartmouth's heavily loaded emphasis on "diversity" seems nothing more than empty rhetoric...
According to Hillel, there are about 450 undergraduates at Dartmouth who identify as Jewish. This essentially means that approximately one out of nine freshmen who sat through endless sermons on Dartmouth's unequivocal embrace of "diversity" will experience no recognition of their own identity. Endorsement of programs like Project Preservation or even organizations like Hillel which support Jewish students on campus only carries so much weight once it is made clear that the most important annual event in the Jewish religion does not merit a day off.

Meyerson is in part correct when he says that the efforts to evangelize diversity to students cheapen the term, but unfortunately, he appears to be as much a victim of the cheapening of the term as he thinks he is of its inapplication.

The diversity taught here is diversity with a condom—diversity without consequences and without contact, covered, in fact, by a layer of "difference" that insulates us and obscures the reality of difference. We are led to think of diversity, ironically, as a uniform condition of mutual appreciation and tolerance. Diversity is not uniform—difference does not come in just one size or shape. Faithful religious observance is a difference that is fundamentally (no pun intended) distinct from, say, sex or nationality or income. Faithfully observing one's religion is a matter under one's control, which one can make choices about, and because of this, it should be administrated very differently from those elements of difference which are not controllable. However, I only want to address this diversity that is based on choice and affiliation. Diversity based on personally uncontrollable factors is very different and what I have to say next has no bearing on them.

The elective type of diversity is unfortunately often understood as a condition where all choices are equally appreciated and equally important and good and no one has to make a choice between two of those good and important things, where one is in fact prevented from making this type of choice because that might disrupt the uniformity and equality of their goodness. This ideal is in fact inimical to the actual nature of diversity, which depends on choice—the choices one has to make in the context of difference—one's own and that of others.

Meyerson complains directly that he will have to make such a choice—"Dartmouth is forcing Jewish students to choose between faith and scholastic success." My understanding of faith may be different from Meyerson's, but I am under the impression that living your faith actually consists in making these tough decisions, and that avoiding them is, in a sense, a dereliction of duty. But even more, Meyerson is asking very directly that the actual fact of diversity—the difference of fasting while in school—be obliterated, and done so in the name of diversity.

Religious observance is a choice, and sometimes a tough choice. That is exactly why religion contributes to diversity in a society. But homogenizing society's activities in order to make that choice less onerous does not in any way increase diversity. It continues its cheapening into a condition that avoids the consequences of its reality.

That said, I'm sure there is something the College can do to be more supportive of students who wish to fast, but without cancelling classes.