The University of Wisconsin Athletic Department recently added a link to its homepage promoting programs geared toward diversity, fueling an ongoing debate over the effectiveness of the strategic framework of such initiatives.
The link offers interested viewers information collected by the Athletic Department on a wide range of diversity-oriented programs, activities and organizations available within the athletic department.
“It was important that we added the link so that people have access to and knowledge of what we are doing in regards to diversity,” said Bridget Warren, director of inclusion and life skills programming.
Terry Gawlik, associate director of athletics, added the link is not only for student athletes but anyone interested in the Athletic Department’s recently expanded diversity efforts.
The initiative is part of a recent sweeping effort throughout the university that addresses diversity, according to Damon Williams, vice provost for diversity and climate.
“The system has voted at the regent level to adopt inclusive excellence as the next meta-framework for the campus,” Williams said.
While there have already been many recent diversity initiatives Williams sees as successful, he also said there are still many areas for improvement.
One such area is increased retention of minority students, which Warren identified as one of the goals of the new link.
“The UW campus and culture can be a very unique experience for an African American student, for example, because it is predominantly white,” Warren said. “If we can enhance that experience, potentially we can increase retention of student athletes, and increase the diversity of the university as a whole.”
Associated Students of Madison Diversity Chair Steven Olikara agreed there is often a difficult transition process for anyone with a cultural background different from UW and said it is important to have programs that help people through it.?
However, he cautioned many such programs, while valuable in ways, can often be guilty of a fatal mistake, namely, the misuse of relevant terms like “minority” and “diversity.”
In fact, Olikara went on to say many self-defined “diversity” programs on campus can, in a sense, defeat their own goals.
“We pre-label certain students as being diverse, and the main consequence of that is you not only hang onto these labels, you also are not reaching the rest of the student population,” Olikara said. “So, you’re sort of creating a separate community on campus.”
In this sense, Olikara said he thinks the use of the word “diversity” as it now appears on the sidebar at UWbadgers.com may actually be reinforcing the very type of isolation it seeks to restructure.
In addition to these problems of connotation, Williams also sees possible systematic difficulties at the university level.
“[W]hen things are loosely coupled and decentralized they can often times not be implemented as strategically and effectively as we hope,” Williams said.
