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November 14, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

   This letter, though stimulated by a local issue, has I believe broader implications. The local issue is my university's tireless harping on "diversity," as though an institution of higher learning has no higher aim than to "design for" and "achieve diversity." Not only is our chancellor fully behind this aim, she has created a new position—a vice-chancellorship for diversity and climate—to promote it.

   Now, I have always been impressed by the lack of diversity on campus. As I look at the students streaming through it, I am struck by how they are all about the same age, height, and weight, how they all swing their arms and walk with the same vigor. What a striking contrast to the people on State Street, which is adjacent to the campus. There one finds a human zoo of young and old, tall and short, fat and slim, rich and poor, robust and sickly, panhandler, student, shop owner, sanitation-truck driver, coffee addict, and so on. In other words, what the university strives so hard to achieve and fails is already a reality on State Street. How come? Answer: State Street is inclusive—everyone is welcome—and the university obviously is not.

   What to do? The university invents a new slogan, "inclusive excellence." But that, as a UW student Jim Allard points out, is an oxymoron (The Badger Herald, November 6, 2009). A university cannot be both inclusive as State Street is inclusive, and excellent, for excellence implies a standard, and a standard necessarily includes some and excludes others. Our chancellor, however, manages to avoid the word "standard" in her definition. To her, excellence consists in the "forms we choose to include one another... dynamically interact, appreciate and learn about each other." Suppose George W. Bush or Barack Obama offered this definition of excellence in his push for better literacy and numeracy among the young, won't America's cognoscenti laugh in disbelief? How, then, to explain the deafening silence on campus?

   I think I now see why. "Inclusive excellence" is what makes for the undoubted superiority of American universities. When carried out, it means that not only the unqualified and the poorly motivated are admitted, but also the weirdos of society such as the mathematical nerd, the socially awkward astronomer, the wayward political scientist, the IQ expert, the authority on Korean chamber pots, and such like. Society can be authoritarian and intolerant, as we all know. By her insistence on the virtue of inclusion, our chancellor ensures that heterodox and impractical scholars remain a part of our community. This is her real concern. The emphasis on skin color may well be just a ploy, put in place to pull the wool over the eyes of the politically correct.

   The concept "inclusive excellence" is also necessary to ensure that academic disciplines do not rule out certain subfields from the desire to be fashionable. In psychology, for instance, there is a tendency to favor cognitive science over social psychology, not because social psychology has run out of good ideas but simply because it is no longer in the limelight. Likewise, in geography, there is a tendency for its social theorists to look down on its narrative-inclined colleagues. Our chancellor, in her wisdom, urges that disciplines be  inclusive rather than exclusive, that their members "dynamically interact" and so "appreciate and learn" from one another rather than—as is increasingly the case—cast one another into outer darkness.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu