Diversity has a long way to go

By Joshua O'Connell
Posted Monday, January 17, 2005

Over this school break, a recent gift from my friend Megan got me thinking. At a Salvation Army store, she tripped across a custom-pressed record of the Fairfield University Glee Club, a perennial favorite at my university. The pressing could best be guessed to be from the 1960s from the looks of the design and dates on the record, but it's hard to guess because there's no actual date on it.

It's fascinating to think of what the school was like 40 years ago, but even more interesting to me was the picture on the back. The men's glee club, as they called it on the record, had about 100 men in black suits, white dress shirts and the men were all white. It's amazing to consider how much Fairfield, like society, has evolved in the past half century.

The men's glee club was all men because in the '60s Fairfield was not yet a co-ed college. That changed in the 1970s. Other forms of diversity have taken hold at the school, too. Recent student newspaper articles have documented the continuing struggle that the university has been making to attempt to have the student body and faculty more diversified in regards to race, gender and sexual orientation.

Their efforts have paid off for me. While Fairfield University may rightly have earned a "most homogenous school" rating a year or two ago in the Princeton Review, those whom I have met who "aren't like the others," as the old "Sesame Street" song goes, are probably the most interesting people I've met to date. The different perspectives, the different attitudes and ideals, and yet the same optimistic point of view have been excellent lessons learned and friendships gained for me.

What makes this point more clear to me is a gentleman that I had the misfortune to get to know recently who would make comments totally out of line, on a regular basis, without realizing that he was actually doing it. Today's society is politically correct, but you know a bad comment when you hear it, and he was doing it with such regularity as to offend me and anyone else who happened to be around.

I found myself trying tactfully to indicate my distaste for those comments, but it didn't seem to work.

It seems for every step that we take forward, you can still see a long, winding road ahead until prejudice and diversity aren't words in our vocabulary. But the fact that we are taking steps forward, and continuing to do so, despite some people we meet, is a good thing. It's not good to become complacent, but I'm glad that society, like my school, is moving beyond the days of a sea of white men.

This column originally ran January 17, 2005 in the Connecticut Post and January 27, 2005 in the Fairfield Mirror.

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