Opinion
Diversity Requirement is antithetical to Hamilton's promise
By Charles D. Dunst '18
September 1, 2016
Tags opinion
Beginning with the incoming Class of 2020, every matriculating Hamilton student will be required to take one diversity course within their chosen concentration. The announcement, made last spring, has been generally celebrated by the college community and by media sources, such as NPR, although its has been widely derided outside of progressive circles. In an attempt satisfy progressive students and teachers, Hamilton has essentially created safe spaces for these same progressives, limiting free speech and open discourse in the process. Furthermore, by failing to effectively define “diversity,” Hamilton has gifted its professors the right to radically experiment in a way which will affect the entire student body.
We all know that educators are overwhelmingly liberal. Students, included yours truly, are also largely liberal. It should be no surprise that as a result college campuses have become ground zero for progressive experimentation and indoctrination. Rather than grapple with ideas at odds with progressivism, many campuses have begun shut them out of the debate entirely.
In my two semesters at Hamilton, I have experienced fantastic open debate in both my History and Government classes. U.S. Foreign Policy allowed for an uninhibited and at times uncomfortable discussion about Israel and its relationship with the U.S. The conversation should be uncomfortable. As aspiring future government leaders, we shouldn’t and can’t be afraid to have these uncomfortable conversations. I support Israel, but I wasn’t triggered and didn’t rush to my safe space when a fellow student made it clear that they believed Israel to be a racist state undeserving of U.S. funding. I disagree, obviously, but this is not a microagression. My Conservative Thought class last year had unrelenting debate over the relevancy of John Calhoun’s racism to his works. He was a racist slave-owner, but that doesn’t diminish his philosophical and governmental contributions to our country. This open discussion, on racial biases and its effects, was one of the highlights of my Spring semester. It does, however, appear, that this open, often-non progressive conversation would not be permitted in a diversity class.
These diversity courses, rather than facilitate open conversations on race and bias, seek to define progressivism as truth — as a fact of life that all students must understand and agree with in order to graduate.
The resolution approving the proposal was passed 80-19 by the faculty, with one abstention. While not Hamilton specific, the Washington Times ran an article profiling professors and their political donations. Hamilton College History Professor Robert Paquette, who taught my Conservative Thought class, was the only one of the 47 liberal arts college professors who gave money to a Republican. 99 percent of these professors had donated to Democrats.
When I asked Professor Paquette for his personal thoughts on the diversity requirement, he responded with a long paragraph which I have trimmed to fit this article. He began by proclaiming that “Hamilton’s diversity requirement proves deeply troubling on multiple fronts. Frankly, Hamilton’s faculty has embarrassed itself, imposing on an open curriculum a requirement based on an ill-defined and highly politicized concept whose meaning was still being vigorously debated in faculty workshops as late as this summer.” Paquette and I agree that “the operative principle seems to be impose first; think later.”
Paquette echoed my personal thoughts on the point that Hamilton, by imposing a mandatory course in a field it has yet to effectively define, allows for the political — often deeply progressive — views of its individual professors to pollute the classroom in these mandatory courses. It feels as if the Hamilton faculty has decided that their personal interpretation of progressivism and race is fact and should be taught as such. The administration, in imposing this requirement, has essentially decided to hold progressive understandings of race and bias in a higher regard than competing conservative or moderate viewpoints. This attitude essentially labels progressives as morally superior while defining opposition as offensive, racist, or triggering. The problem is that many students and professors alike truly believe that their progressivsm is fact and is better than conservative understandings on the same topic. The college, rather than encourage an intellectual challenge to this position, has essentially caved and given progressive preachers their pulpit. If we want a truly diverse campus, we should want one where all viewpoints are taught on a fair playing field, rather than tilting the scales in favor of progressivism.
As Paquette added, “One might also have hoped that in contemplating diversity, this faculty would be a bit more concerned about the scandalous lack of intellectual diversity on campus.”
Furthermore, these courses are not only ill-conceived, but antithetical Hamilton’s claim of an open curriculum. This curriculum was instituted — if not to garner more applications to the school —to indicate a certain level of trust in each individual student’s wisdom to design their own academic plan. The curriculum allows students to pursue what they feel they need to learn; not what the school determines is important. The school has, however, continued to add exceptions: the Quantitative & Symbolic Reasoning, Physical Education, and Writing Intensive requirements come to mind. By adding another requirement, especially a course such as this, further limits the personal freedom Hamilton promises its students. Hamilton, after instilling this diversity requirement, has become deeply paternalistic, as it’s clear the school no longer trusts its students to design the education paths that they individually determine to be wise. It is deeply disturbing to see Hamilton advertise itself as a bastion of student freedom while limiting students educational choices – both in number of classes and in viewpoints determined to be “acceptable” on campus.
I believe that Hamilton students have some things to learn about race, religion and socio-economic differences. For sure, we do, as does the rest of the country. But by instilling a mandatory, major-specific, overwhelmingly progressively-taught requirement, the College deviates from allowing free argument around these issues. We need to have hard conversations about race without students reaching for their safe space or proclaiming that they have been triggered. Stating a fact-supported statement, such as “anti-Jewish violence is a bigger problem than Islamophobia,” shouldn’t be met with cries of racism and trigger warnings, but by a legitimate counter-point. By enabling progressive educators to lead classes indoctrinating students in their microagression-understanding of diversity, Hamilton infringes on both personal freedom and legitimate, open debate. This fatal miscalculation does not “prepare them (students) better to apply the expertise of their major in their post-Hamilton careers and lives,” as immediate past Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds puts it. Rather, this new requirement encourages progressive conformity and tolerates the inability to interact with scary ideas, thereby truly failing to prepare students for a real world which is often at times scary and uncomfortable.