“pujwI’ HIvlu’chugh quvbe’lu’.” (“There is no honor in attacking the weak.”) — Klingon proverb
“In theory, it should work.”
That’s a thought that must be expressed often on university campuses, in Utah and around the world.
Usually it would be in a lab or an office where scientists or engineers ponder ideas about how chemicals interact or how to make a new machine.
After thinking it through, it’s time to put the theory to the test. The chemicals are mixed, or the code written, or the machine prototyped, or the human behavior observed, or the atoms smashed, the amount of coffee or alcohol needed to cross the line from healthy to harmful measured, and the results recorded.
Conclusions may then be drawn. Or the bottom line might be another sentence found in innumerable scientific and academic endeavors:
“More research is needed.”
Utah’s public colleges and universities are now conducting an experiment on themselves. How, they wonder, are we going to comply with the state Legislature’s edict to abolish everything devoted to diversity, equality and inclusion without becoming bastions of white, male, Christian supremacy?
You know, the way all American institutions were before we started worrying about how unhelpful and unfair that was, how much brain power and talent went unused, and started rolling out programs and offices to make sure women or members of various ethnic groups weren’t shunted aside.
Well, in theory, it should work.
Instead of maintaining one specific office or program for LGBTQIA+ students, another for Blacks, another for Hispanics, another for Asians and/or Pacific Islanders, our colleges are moving to a model of a single program designed to reach out to everyone and make sure that nobody is left behind just because they have a brownish hue or an underrepresented ethnic lineage.
Or because nobody in that student’s family ever went to college before. Or because the language they grew up speaking isn’t English.
One example is the new Mehdi Heravi Global Teaching and Learning Center recently launched at Utah State University in Logan.
The center has a practical mission, to train interpreters who are in great demand in our multiethnic society, particularly in medical settings or legal proceedings. But such a center naturally becomes a hub for students who come from, or are interested in, many cultural and linguistic groups.
In theory, it should be good for everyone to have a place designed to reach out to anyone on a college campus who feels they don’t quite fit, aren’t understood or appreciated, even actively shunned. A place that everyone has heard of, can easily find and feels welcome entering.
And it should, in theory, work for the counselors in such a center to be trained and ready to accommodate all comers, not have to refer this student to the office down the hall and that student to the building on the other side of the quad — a diversion that may well prove the last straw for a lost, lonely young person who was already this close to giving up on the promise of higher education.
Never forget, though, that the anti-DEI drive that has demolished the various ethnic and gender programs at Utah colleges is born of white, male resentment. Of the dominant culture taking umbrage at the idea that someone who isn’t one of them might catch a taxpayer-funded break.
It is a feeling that has become the core — if not the totality — of Republican Party thinking. The idea that the strong are supposed to be able to lord it over the weak and it is outside the responsibility of government to say otherwise.
Now we just have to sit back and wait. Wait for the unified centers of academic assistance to introduce the LGBT to the Black to the Hispanic to the Asian to the Native American to the white first-generation college student, bring them all into a mutually supportive relationship and no longer allow the dominant culture to divide and conquer.
When Utah Republicans start insisting that each culture be confined to its own programs and support systems, rather than ally themselves together for the good of all, we will see how this theory plays out.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, was supported through his college career by Star Trek and Monty Python. Read more of his work at georgepyle.substack.com.
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