Diversity

Season’s greetings, readers! I’ve been wanting to post all week, but I was having difficulty thinking of a worthy topic. Any suggestions or questions that I can write on in future posts would be appreciated. For now I’m going to talk about something that, as a Kent State student, I hear spoken of a lot -- diversity.

Kent State University has a love for diversity and a pride for how much of it they have on this campus. By “diversity,” I/they mean having and teaching about a mixture of different races, religions, and other related walks of life. This is most obvious in places such as the stater and in some of the magazines produced by JMC.

The bottom line of my opinion on this is, against the grain as it may be, that “diversity” is overemphasized here at Kent. Not that I think that it’s unimportant (quite the opposite, I LOVE talking to students who come from other countries or have beliefs or opinions that vary from my own), I just think that Kent’s focus on it is stronger than is necessary. They chase it as an end in and of itself, and discuss it to an extent that I have no doubt has gotten on the nerves of most students here. It becomes counter-productive at times, with so much emphasis placed on minorities that it feels segregating in and of itself. However, though I think it’s overdone, I still understand the reasoning behind it, and don’t plan to argue that it needs to be changed (there are other, more pressing, problems they should address here first).

However, this being said, I think that there is, at times, a double standard to this diversity of people and worldviews. The most significant one is a proposition by some of the “higher ups” here, notably President Lester Lefton, that the number of Kent Core classes should be cut to give students a more unified foundation in their education and cut costs to the university. (Explanation: Kent Core, also known as Liberal Education Requirements, are classes all students have to take to graduate. There are several options we can choose from, though, and few classes here that everyone “must” take.) However, the very point about unified education opposes the idea of diversity. Taking a variety of people and giving them similar classes to “unite” them in their education is not diversity; it’s a melting pot, if not also a statement that students must carry certain values or interests. The fact that there is flexibility and options in what we study is what makes the Kent Core useful.

Finally, I think that the idea of religious diversity is ridiculous. A religion isn’t something a person is born with, nor is it an indifferent choice one makes. Religions are belief systems and truth claims that form the very foundation of a person’s worldview. People of different religions cannot celebrate their difference the way that different races can. Christians believe, I won’t sugar-coat it, that those who do not accept Christ are wrong to do so and will be eternal implications for this stance. Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and other religions usually claim similarly -- that those who do not accept their beliefs will be punished for it. The idea of religious diversity lies in an assumption that all religions are more or less equal, or equally true. This simply cannot be; Jesus claimed to be “THE way, THE truth, and THE light,” other religions state things that don’t mix with other religions. The idea of religions as truth claims is that only one can be true, and any that contradict that truth must then be wrong. If all religions are equally true, then the only logical assumption is that none of them are, and therefore the idea is filled with atheistic or at least agnostic assumptions. Religious diversity, or attempts to achieve it, is not diverse at all.

Does anyone agree? Disagree?

-Caleb Ference