This is your call to action so listen up. Each person on this campus has a simple yet vital role in promoting diversity and collaboration on campus. Diversity and collaboration are related and the two working in tandem can produce some pretty incredible results.
The topic of diversity is for the most part exhausted. By now everyone understands (or at least says they understand) the value of different perspectives abilities backgrounds identities or points of view. We get it. Let’s move on.
Then the debate centers on how to achieve diversity. Is it by establishing quotas or other forms of regulation? Or maybe if we talk about how much we appreciate diversity will it somehow materialize?
Right now our celebrations of diversity on campus seem to be largely centered around events celebrating one ethnicity at a time. Everyone gets to celebrate black cuisine together during Black Heritage Month. We all munch on Hawaiian food together to celebrate the Pacific Islander heritage. And I love that stuff. But it doesn’t promote diversity.
Those types of events are “cultural awareness” events which are also important but shouldn’t be confused with attempts to improve the diversity of campus life. We are kidding ourselves if we think that moving as a homogenous group through different cuisines and flag-waving events makes us more diverse as a student body.
Real diversity comes from the desire of each individual to be completely and uniquely themselves unafraid to share that uniqueness with the world. We can still remain united through common values or goals while keeping our individuality.
Great things happen when diverse groups start working towards a common goal. I saw this first hand last year as I watched the cast and crew of “Life is Not a Musical: The Musical” put together the first feature-length student film in (known) Pepperdine history.
It seemed like such an impossible task. There was no support structure. No compensation for anyone involved. No precedent. No guarantee of success. Just a dream that got the right team behind it.
And the right team is a diverse team. Actors business students musicians dancers make-up artists and filmmakers all owned their roles as diverse members of a larger team to tackle a huge project. The extensive interdisciplinary collaboration I saw on the musical was invigorating.
The college campus is such a great way to explore our diversity and celebrate it with collaborative projects. We have people on this campus studying every field imaginable doing research constructing experiments publishing papers exploring faith and celebrating the arts among other things.
What happens when you smash together a computer science student a music student and a religion student? I have absolutely no idea— I just picked three majors at random.
But who knows maybe it’s a computer program that analyzes the Bible for references to certain themes and then encodes them into a musical sequences for us all to hear what the melody of the Bible would sound like.
How cool would that be? Sure that example is contrived but the point is that exciting things happen when diverse people come together and collaborate.
So where do you come in?
First share your uniqueness with our community. Second encourage others to share theirs.
Find out what you have to share. Maybe it’s your passion or your ability. Maybe it’s your cultural background. It doesn’t matter. You’re the only YOU on this campus so don’t deprive us of what you have to offer.
Encourage the same in others. Express gratitude for each other’s individuality and do your best to try and bring it out in them.