hancellor Nancy Cantor believes in diversity.  That ideal is one of the signature points of her distinguished career.  In one respect, the very idea that diversity is a good thing seems to be rather like an indisputable conceptual truth.  How can it not be a good thing when different people get together and learn from one another?  And if anything is true, it is true that each ethnic group can learn much from other ethnic groups.

But the view that I have just put forward is a particular conception of diversity.  Let us call it interactive diversity.  As the name suggests, people get together and learn from one another through marvelous and felicitous interaction.  This form of diversity is to be distinguished from what I shall refer to as shared-space diversity, where different ethnic groups are simply in the same room or building or on the very same campus.   People can be in the same room and not give a damn about one another.  Nay, they may radically despise one another.  People often talk as if shared-space diversity naturally gives rise to interactive diversity.  But they are mistaken.  It does not.  And universities—indeed, Syracuse University—are a marvelous and most poignant illustration of this truth.  At Syracuse University: Asians are generally with Asians, whites are generally with whites, blacks are generally with blacks, and so on. 

It is not at all clear to me that Chancellor Cantor is committed to interactive diversity.  Let me explain why. 

A very common view nowadays among liberals is that victims of injustices have a right to be angry and wrong and perhaps even to hold a grudge against persons who are members of the group of individuals who committed the egregious wrongs in question.  I call this the grudge factor. 

Indeed, to hear some liberals tell it a victim does not have self-respect unless she or he is running around being angry and holding a grudge against the wrongs committed against her or his people. 

Now, my intellectual abilities are severely limited.  So I tend to be very simple in what I say and do not say.  By contrast, I expect a very talented person, such as Chancellor Nancy Cantor to be exceeding clear about her intentions. 

So if she really is for interactive diversity and not shared-space diversity on the Syracuse University campus, then I would expect her to say that with unequivocal clarity. 

But wait a minute, there is a fascinating issue here.  For if one is for interactive diversity, then one has to reject what I have called the grudge factor as a proper moral posture on the part of, say, blacks or Indians or whomever.  For nothing is more of an impediment to any two groups interacting with one another, then the members of one group holding a grudge against the members of the other. 

Accordingly, if Chancellor Cantor is for interactive diversity, as opposed to mere shared-space diversity, then she has to be unequivocally clear that Syracuse University is not a place where what one does is learn how to hold a grudge.  Now, for all I know she hold just this view and perhaps it is implied in what she does say.  But it would wonderful—ever so wonderful, in fact—if she were so unequivocally explicit about this that no competent speaker of the English language could fail to grasp that this is where she stands.

It has been suggested to me by a most inform source that her handling of the Hill-TV fiasco was exceedingly complicated.  And for all I know, that may very well be the case. 

All that I can say, however, is that from where I stood, the way things were handled it looked as if the Chancellor had sanctioned a lynch mob on the part of minorities against whites, and thus she had tipped her hat in favor of the grudge factor.  Claims were made about racism on the part of students that were absolutely foreign to me, although I, a very visible black, have walked back-and-forth across this campus for 18 years. 

Not only that, the vast majority of my students have been white; and it is well-known that if there is one thing I will not tolerate, it is disrespect for me as the professor of the class.  You want to see a black man go from being jovial to being utterly outraged faster than the blink of an eye: let a student lift a newspaper in my class.  The student can be any color under the sun; and I will walk out of the class in mid-sentence.  I have done so in the past; and I will do so again.  Here, in fact, is the letter I wrote when a student did just such a thing this past semester, a copy of which was sent to Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s office and also to Dean Cathryn Newton of the College of Arts and Science.

The point of the story is simply that notwithstanding my very hard-line in the classroom, I have experienced none of the disrespect on the part of white students for which the Hill-TV affair became, to the uninformed eye (perhaps), a vehicle for expressing. 

And this brings me back to appearances.  It looked as if Chancellor Nancy Cantor reveled in the idea of minorities being angry and seeing racism at every turn and in every nook and cranny.  Accordingly, it looked as if she had sanctioned what I have called the grudge factor.  By implication, then, it looked as if shared-space diversity—and not interactive diversity—was the order of the day. 

Now, in the final analysis, the simple truth is that no black or Latino (two groups often stereotyped as being intellectually inferior) will ever be secure in her intellectual abilities unless she or he understands in a way that only the experience of success can anchor that she or he can compete with any and all ethnic groups.  This secure conviction comes not by rhetoric or sympathy, though these things may have their place, but only by experience.  On my view, then, mere shared-space diversity continues to have a crippling effect upon minorities.

The issue is not whether racism continues to exist in America or on college campuses.  I assume that it does.  I also think that the racism is more lateral among faculty than lateral among students, which is why I wrote the essay “A Black Conservative Among White Liberals”.  Faculty members compete for scarce resources in a more direct way than students do.  An entire class can receive a grade of “A”.

The real issue, rather, is how we do undermine the debilitating effects of institutional racism and underwrite the abilities of all equally.  And to that I respond: interactive diversity.  For it is then and only then that all bring to the social moment tools for both criticism and self-criticism.  Mere shared-space diversity is compatible with debilitating self-indulgence. 

On university campuses across the United States, diversity is in the end thing.  But we have seen that diversity admits of at least two conceptions: shared-spacediversity and interactive diversity.  The second underwrites equality for all; the first by itself is compatible with the status quo and stagnancy.  Because souls are at stake, I write in the hopes that Chancellor Nancy Cantor not play fast and loose with this difference.  I want her to make it unequivocally clear even to a feeble-minded person like myself that she stands for excellence for all as opposed to sanctifying grudges for some.