Baron in the Trees

I didn't have much time last morning to blog about Jacob Baron's letter against promoting diversity in Dartmouth's PR campaigns, and so my remarks were fairly abbreviated, and someone called me out on it. Anonymously, s/he said:

Oh, come on. Take a breath before you write this stuff. Baron's column isn't all that well-written, but he has a point. Dartmouth spends a lot of effort advertising its "diversity" to get students to choose it over other schools, and his argument is that Dartmouth should match its PR campaign to its actual strengths, because it's not actually that diverse, and it undersells its other strengths in the process. Maybe he should work for Buzzflood if he's into second-guessing Dartmouth's PR strategy, but I suspect you've encountered many more idiotic Dartmouth students.

Also, where do you get the idea that diversity is "part of our mission, part of our reason for continued existence"? It's a good idea, and I suppose Dartmouth's mission of education and turning out future leaders is fairly broad in scope (i.e. not limited to educating rich white kids and turning out rich white leaders), but I don't think it's "part of our reason for continued existence."

I'm having trouble understanding the logic behind this.

Basically, he's saying that Dartmouth has low diversity relative to our peer institutions, so improving that through a targeted PR strategy foregrounding the diversity we do have and our commitment to improving it should be a lesser concern than identifying things we really do have our peer institutions beat on, like athletics, a vibrant non-Greek social scene for underclassmen, an intellectually engaged student body, fall foliage and other elements of natural beauty, school spirit (i.e. liquor + institutional inferiority complex + personal arrogance/general douchebaggery), and an undergraduate focus. This will improve our standing in the eyes of our targeted audience of applicants, for whom diversity is apparently less important than pretty leaves. (Of course, that means everybody, right? Who could possibly be more worried about diversity than the natural beauty of Dartmouth?)

See, PR for the College isn't just a real estate brochure. It is a statement promoting the type of College we hope our new applicants will, in part, create. It is as much a normative vision more as it is a description of our current state.

The natural beauty of the campus doesn't do much on the normative end of things. It is definitely not why we're here or part of our mission.

But that brings up anonymous commenter's second point—that diversity isn't a reason for Dartmouth's continued existence. I think it is. I think a commitment to ensuring, and not just laissez-faire hoping, that the student body comprises a real and not token diversity of socio-economic, racial, geographical, and cultural backgrounds, bringing together students of many talents and opinions—that is a reason for continuing to operate.

Dartmouth should be a diverse institution of higher learning. I can have a long discussion with you about the merits and virtues of diversity, or can point you to some books, but for the moment, I will just state axiomatically that Dartmouth should consider itself measured by how well it makes itself diverse year after year. This is not a separate struggle from the pursuit of academic excellence; it is not even merely correlated. True academic excellence for a college is dependent on diversity in our world of today. Without it, the broad enterprise of scholarship is hollow and half-formed, solipsistic, dull.