University Provost Peter Spear last week followed up the latest move to focus the administration’s efforts in executing Plan 2008. The campus’s new associate vice chancellor for diversity position has the potential to focus teeming initiatives and efficiently proceed toward a more comfortable climate in a way the amoebic Bascom entity has largely failed to do.
On the other hand, the new duties could remain overly undefined and produce little more than another bureaucratic front from which to deflect pressure from Spear, Chancellor Wiley and Paul Barrows.
The result will have a lot to do with how the associate vice chancellor shapes her role in the unfolding semester. Fortunately Bernice Durand is a veteran professor experienced in diversity affairs and initiatives, who appears to have a responsible vision for the new office.
Right now, Durand faces a quagmire task — sifting through the muck of compounding and conflicting ideas that have accumulated since Plan 2008 has been in action. She is trying to identify successful strategies and says she will listen to the myriad perspectives before moving forward with an agenda of her own.
That plan is fine so long as the procedure moves beyond the vague rhetoric of “advancing campus climate” that has impelled mostly ineffective strokes thus far. We will publish our own specific recommendations and cautions for Durand in the next two weeks.
In the meantime, it is vital for Durand to take note of the several embarrassments from the past decade when tolerance initiatives turned into suppressed expression and so-called correctness occasionally replaced dialogue.
“We’re not the PC police,” Spear said, and Durand insists she will confront climate problems by attacking prejudice rather than perpetrators. That’s exactly the kind of active approach — as opposed to reactionary means like interfering in controversial curriculum or instituting anonymous complaint boxes — that can propel real improvement at Wisconsin.
Without being an implement for any incensed party, Durand can be a responsive ombudsman for under-represented voices. She is already aware that academic diversity encompasses promoting accessibility across genders, physical abilities, sexual orientation and other differences, in addition to race and culture. As co-editor of the original Plan 2008 for UW System, she grasps the need for recruitment and retention programs.
If Durand can use her experience and vision to further focus a cohesive and responsible plan, her extension of the administration ought to be a productive investment.
