“Our students will learn to celebrate a broad collection of voices when they start hearing a broad collection of voices.”

Hold a Conversation

Can you imagine leading a conversation about this story? Where? With whom? What kinds of questions would you pose? (See How to use the questions for reflection for one approach.) Please email your questions to us or post them in the comment box for our consideration. If you use them in an actual discussion, let us know how the conversation went.

Transcript for We’re Not There Yet

The way I would describe Valpo’s campus is a little bit, um, sort of not the real world. And so you have a, a sense of being, uh, away, of being set off and protected. It matters a lot, and I think mostly it’s a good thing, um, but I think it can sometimes be a bad thing. I think that the period of college needs to be transformative. And I think this campus invites that for the most part, um, but we want to be careful that it invites us to move out into the world. And I think we’re not always perfect at preparing students for that next step out into the real world

I suppose diversity can be defined in a, a lot of ways. That is, uh, diversity of experiences is one thing. Diversity of viewpoint requires diversity of the people speaking the viewpoint. Um, we’re better than we once were about diversity in our student body, but we have a ways to go. Our diversity in our faculty is the most important piece in getting to uh, diversity of, of the viewpoints expressed. And we’re not there yet. So we look at numbers and we, and we, we are manipulative about the way we use those numbers. So the fact that we have so many women in nursing and so many women in education, uh, doesn’t alter the fact that our theology department, our physics department, our math department, our chemistry department, our engineering department, our business department is heavily male. Uh and all of those departments are heavily white.

Diversity is voices. And our students will learn to celebrate a broad collection of voices when they start hearing a broad collection of voices.