Andoni Flores/The Mirror
What is diversity? Here at Fairfield, we hear a lot of talk about the steps the administration has taken to ensure that our school increases in an area that it has been lacking in for so long. Is diversity the number of students with different skin colors? Is it the number of students hailing from a foreign country? Is it the number of students who speak a different language, worship a different god or wear different clothes?
Diversity – especially at Fairfield – seems too often to be based on the principle that there exists a standard, a common ground, a group thought to be the “majority,” and that diversity is perhaps anyone who does not fit that standard.
We can all agree that at Fairfield this “majority” wears a North Face, lives in a nice, suburban house in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut or Long Island, is good looking, and was one of the smarter and harder-working people at their Catholic and private high schools. This “majority” is well-dressed, well-liked, and most likely will be successful in the future.
But is diversity simply trying to draw students who come from a background divergent from the one listed above?
My answer is no. Diversity in education, in the truest sense, is the concept that there are many students who hold many different interests, creeds, beliefs, religions and lifestyles, and not just on the concept of skin shades, languages and nationalities.
What diversity most certainly is not, is the concept that simply accepting and drawing students from the “not-Fairfield” demographic to place among a school so largely homogenous could make for a more diverse and understanding campus and student body.
Too often it seems that Fairfield wants to force diversity down its students’ throats; that shoving the terms “global citizenship,” “diversity” and “understanding” in our faces somehow makes us desire for and accepting towards new ideas. To truly foster a diverse environment, students must want to experience diversity in action, and not be shown or taught the definition of this concept.
There is a fine line between the administration parading the concept of a more diverse Fairfield campus, versus us, as students, actually desiring to experience this newfound diversity.
From my perspective Fairfield’s campus is caught in limbo between the administration’s blatant desire for students to accept diversity and the students themselves wanting to experience it. It is an interesting dynamic – on one hand, students see the lack of diversity on campus and may perhaps ask for more diversity. On the other hand, the administration is doing everything in its power to show that having a few token “different” students on campus is evidence of a Fairfield that is “changing,” “dynamic” and “diverse.” Simply seeing shades of skin walking on campus doesn’t make a campus diverse, especially when one can walk into the cafeteria and see self-discrimination; that students with like-colored skin all sit at the same table. That is most certainly not diversity and acceptance.
I truly believe that diversity is a trait that is not simply skin-deep. Diversity is not just having high minority enrollment, high numbers of international students, or high statistics of students being the first in their families to attend college. These are all facets of the concept of diversity, but they are not the only aspects of a diverse campus.
Diversity, true diversity, is more than the color of skin. It is the respect of different viewpoints, of different thoughts and of different worldviews. It is that which fosters an educational environment that preaches understanding and tolerance, acceptance and recognition. Perhaps one day, hopefully in the near future, Fairfield too may yet experience such a social dynamic, but in a natural and truly accepting way.
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