Diversity: More than a Simple Equation
Admitting students of color and encouraging them to enroll are just parts of the diversity equation at Rice. An equally important factor is providing a welcoming environment.
Nobody knows this better than Catherine Clack, former director of the Office of Minority Affairs and now director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, who teaches diversity issues to incoming freshman students during O-Week.
“What bothers me most,” she says, “is that we’re teaching the same things over and over again. In every group of new students, there are some who are resistant to learning about diversity without realizing that students of color have to learn to live and work in diverse environments without the luxury of opting out.”
Defining Diversity
Clack says, though, that the climate has gotten considerably better during the last two decades. “I listen to students complain,” she says, “and I understand and empathize. But at the same time, I’m thinking, boy, do I remember what it was like 30 or 40 years ago. And I’ve had minority alumni come back and talk about how amazed they are at some of the transformations that have taken place here.”
Clack has spent those two decades building programs that give students the confidence to speak out when something is wrong and to suggest alternate ways for people to look at those who are different from themselves. Typically, she gives the credit to others. “From a national perspective,” she says, “Rice is in better shape than a lot of other schools, and I chalk that up to some very sharp students and to people who have made an effort to solve problems on campus.”
Oddly enough, one of Clack’s greatest challenges has been to define what minority and diversity mean on the Rice campus. “When I started the Office of Minority Affairs,” she says, “the administration was interested in having an office that concentrated on the academic, emotional and recreational needs specifically of African-American, Mexican-American, American Indian and Hispanic, if that meant Puerto Rican, students, and that’s it. The only cultural programming we had on a regular basis was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, sponsored by the Black Student Association.”
Clack wanted to do more, but getting things moving wasn’t always easy. “When we began doing outreach to the gay community in the late ’80s,” she says, “critics said that opening diversity programs to everybody would dilute what my office was doing in terms of its stated minority objectives.”
But Clack knew that getting people involved and giving them the sense that they have a personal stake in changing the environment at Rice and elsewhere was the right approach; she just had to start off modestly. “People don’t want to be hit over the head with diversity-related issues,” she says. “The response is automatic defensiveness. The best way to expose people is to use more subtle ways to encourage change.”
Clack started hosting what she called the Heritage Series: regular small cultural events designed to introduce different world heritages. “One week,” she says, “we would do Jewish heritage, the next week would be African-American heritage and so forth throughout the year.”
ADVANCEment
Another turning point came when a student on the Diversity Council, which is composed of all the diversity club presidents, said the council needed to mount a major event like San Francisco’s Lunar New Year celebration.
“Because he brought it up in a room with a group of people who were interested in and knew about Lunar New Year,” Clack says, “all of a sudden, we started to do these big cultural programs. It just exploded. First there was Lunar New Year, next there was Soul Night, then Posada and Powwow, and it goes on and on.”
Now, major cultural events happen regularly every year, which gives the hosting organizations not only a stated purpose that lends bonding and mutual support, but also a means to reach the greater campus community.
Once Clack had things moving on a large scale, it was time for the next step, and that was a multicultural student organization called ADVANCE—Advocating Diversity and the Need for Cultural Exchange. “ADVANCE has about 30 members,” Clack says. “They apply to get in, and they spend their Friday evenings discussing social issues. Whenever I talk about ADVANCE at a conference, the first thing people ask is how I get these diverse students to sit down together and talk. But I don’t understand why that’s such a difficult concept.”
ADVANCE has a committee that does campuswide programming, and the group hosts Culture Fair each year. “Culture Fair involves the Office of International Students and Scholars,” Clacks says, “but before that, it never occurred to me that this is a group of students that had a voice it wanted to share but that wasn’t getting heard. You have, for example, a group of Romanian students who say, ‘Thank you, we’ve always wanted to tell people about Romania.’ It’s been interesting to see that we are effecting change in ways we didn’t anticipate. I see that as progress.”
Clack is encouraged by the students she works with in ADVANCE. “If they’re the leaders of tomorrow,” she says, “we’re going to be in really good hands. They know how to talk. They know how to listen. They have deep interests that go beyond anything selfish. They’ve discovered that if you talk about problems, you’ll find they aren’t so insurmountable.”
