Cultural Diversity and Effect on Students' Futures

Similarly to "you are what you eat", and as naturally social beings, the interactions we have greatly affect our attitudes and ways of thinking. The article "Five Years After Graduation: Undergraduate Cross-Group Friendships and Multicultural Curriculum Predict Current Attitudes and Activities" explains how these interactions do not even need to be limited to social interactions. Students can also be exposed to difference in courses that discuss ethnic and cultural diversity topics. According to this survey study, there seems to be a correlation between students being exposed to diversity and the promotion of multicultural awareness and commitment. There may also be an increase in critical thinking skills and civic engagement activities, such as volunteering, due to exposure to diversity. It can be interpreted that the university's part in exposing students to difference is increasingly important as demographers have predicted that "by 2020, 1/3 of the United States workforce will not be White (Toossi, 2002)" and since universities are often the first opportunity students have to have significant interactions with diversity.

When it comes to the issue of interactions with diversity in a student with mostly White students, the article suggests two ways the impact of a mostly homogeneous environment could be maximized. One way is to have curriculum that covers topics of diversity or ethnic information. Another method is to extend their concept of diversity to not just a person of another ethnicity but also to a person of another religion or sexuality as well. They encouraged, especially, for those in a mostly homogeneous environment to make cross-group friends with those who are stigmatized.

Three recommendations made for the "higher-ups" in universities are, one, to include multicultural courses, especially those that include small group discussions, two, to foil students' tendency to create friendships with like-people by organizing programs that encourage more diverse friendships, and three, to create an environment where students feel safe interacting with different people.

Not For Profit Nussbaum

Progress, democracy, and the soul: all concepts that the United States seems to be doing wrong, according to Nussbaum. Sure, we may be one of the richest countries in the world, and, thus, our economic progress/growth gets an A but in terms of equality of success and wealth and the improvement of quality of life, what should be the true marker of progress, we are failing on many levels. Our recent penchant for the supposed money-making STEM majors over the “useless” critical thinking skills obtained from the humanities and liberal arts serves to drive the United States’ students away from democracy, that is, a government in which informed, questioning, critically thinking citizens are expected to participate and choose their ideal representative. When it comes down to it, then, what suffers the most is the soul, that is, the humanity rather than cold calculations, connection rather than manipulation, and empathy rather than productivity. Everything has its price and what we exchange for efficiency and money is our humanity, our warmth, our soul.

The fact that these concepts are related are explicated by Nussbaum’s discussion of the soul:

“When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.”    

In other words, our definition of progress as economic progress with no concern for equality of distribution and access, enables and even sometimes encourages anti-democratic practices of manipulation and sole productivity, of seeing humans not as humans but as production tools. The significance from this passage comes from its explanation of how the concepts are interrelated and, thus, may help us to reevaluate our lives. Some might go through their daily lives unquestioning of the end goal to find a career, unquestioning of the authority around them and the penchant for efficiency and productivity. Through this passage we are reminded that there is more to life than production.

With such egregious unequal wealth distribution, it always surprises me that there is not more protest from the other 99%. The fact that this unequal distribution can also be seen as a failure of democracy, one of the concepts the  United States prides itself on, is even more reason to protest. Perhaps, however, people do not realize the trend that progress = more money, but only for the 1% and that education is increasingly coming to mean passing a standardized test and becoming dutiful working citizens. The discussion of the soul was especially refreshing to me since I have become accustomed to competing with others by endlessly looking for opportunities for my resume or professional growth. It is easy to forget the value of friendships and humanity when your focus is on surviving in a competitive job market.

Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education by Henry A. Giroux -

In a world where “Higher Education”, according to Giroux, is increasingly the puppet of commercialism and production, students are becoming increasingly apathetic to “his [or her] responsibility to society” and, worse yet, free thinking is silenced by dominant corporations and media messengers something needs to change. Something needs to change because Higher Education’s purpose is not simply to crank out employable candidates but, instead, to develop free-thinking and critical individuals who question the world and are not only aware of its issues but also brave enough and wise enough to know that simply knowing is not enough. One must act upon their knowledge and be civically engaged in the world and change. In the end, if “Higher Education” institutions fail at their main purpose, who will be able to combat and challenge the wealthy authority, the crushing 1%? Who will hold the greed and actions of the 1% accountable?

The fact is, if “Higher Education” keeps producing more and more people who simply go with the flow because their individual lives are superficially fine, it will most likely be harder for any change to be instigated as one of the main ways we can combat the wealthy are by banding together and taking action. We must first, however, recognize that something is wrong and go against the grain of what the dominant media tells us. I am quite sure Giroux would agree as he discusses higher education’s purpose and why free thinking is vital:

“ …confusing a market-determined society with democracy hollows out the legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not commercial. This is a particularly important insight in a society where not only is the free circulation of ideas being replaced by ideas managed by the dominant media, but also where critical ideas are increasingly viewed or dismissed as banal if not reactionary.”

 In other words, democracy’s future should not be based off of market and commercialism. Instead, its focus should be morals and the public good. This focus is hard to achieve, however, when any nonconforming ideas that are beneficial for the public good are voiced.

When it comes down to it, it is in our best interest to fight for a more critical higher education system. Sure, we might get good grades from easy classes and find decent jobs but when it comes to solving harder problems and combatting injustices, one needs developed critical thinking faculties. Students should resist passivity and, instead, engage in the world’s issues as critical thinking beings to, hopefully, create a better world. Democracy should be a majority vote, not what the 1% wants.

Academically Adrift Statistics

You would think that after all the money, exams, and paperwork you go through to get accepted and to take classes at a university would pay off in the end, right? All the time and money invested into college, the supposed epitome of education, the supposed equalizer of minorities' systematic disadvantages. Unfortunately, as Arum and Roksa explain with data from their studies in Academically Adrift this is simply not the case. Not only are university students experiencing little to no growth in learning, as demonstrated by critical thinking skills and the like, but minorities' differences in learning stay the same, or are even exacerbated, in college.

Something is definitely wrong with an educational system which fosters academically adrift students whom feel obliged to go to college but have no way to reach their end goal, or an end goal at all for that matter, in mind. What irked me the most was how college is supposed to be the institution where the playing fields are somewhat leveled, to account for discrimination and disadvantages minorities and working class people face, but that it only perpetuated the inequality. Inequality is especially perpetuated by standard examination prep courses that prepare the upper class people way better for future academic endeavors than the working class or even middle class people.

At the end of the day, the United States higher education system is greatly lagging behind that of other countries and the intimidating thought is, although we were the main pioneers of higher education, others are catching up to us as demonstrated by a quote that put this situation into perspective in terms of the United States' economy.

“We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities. But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are,” the recent federal report A Test of Leadership observed. “Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”

Thus, even though we may have been ahead of the higher education game at one point, we are now slacking when it  counts more than ever and this will ultimately be detrimental to our economy and citizens both of which will eventually get left behind.

Academically Adrift with with Arum and Roksa.

Upon reading Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, I was struck by the data presented on college life and how much college life has changed, ranging from how students spend their time to the cost of higher education to the attitudes and focus of universities and their administration. I also found it frightening how all these aspects are interlinked and, thus, if one aspect is bad, it will greatly influence the others. For instance, because the focus of modern-day professors is often research and scholarship, the time and effort put into teaching is often negatively affected and professors are less inclined to assign challenging work or work that will require a lot of grading and feedback from the professor. It was easier to make sense of why such effects might happen when I considered Freire’s “banking concept” of education. I was appalled to see similar negative patterns and data in higher education not just in Nathan’s book My First Year but also in an article from Inside Higher Ed.

The focus on research and scholarship usually results in the cop-out method of lecturing/teaching a classroom material and administering a multiple choice test on the material. This kind of teaching, thus, encourages students to “learn”, that is through rote memorization, the bare minimum to pass the exam. This concept reminded me of Freire’s “banking concept” of education in which rote memorization is often used and the teacher is the ultimate authority in what is important/what you should “learn”. Any students whom disagree or do not understand this will do often do poorly in the exam.

When one juxtaposes the information presented in Nathan’s My First Year and that presented in Academically Adrift, it is troublesome to see the similar trend of strategic students that seem to care less about true learning than students in the past. This disturbing idea is demonstrated in Arum and Roska’s novel when they present data on cheating in college:

"In a longitudinal comparison of nine colleges, for example, college students who admitted that they copied from other students on tests or exams increased from 26 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1993.”

This comes to show, also, how strategic students take advantage of this watered down system of education to get their degree with minimum effort. With modern students studying less hours per week than students in the past, as Nathan reports, and the ease of cheating true learning in this educational system, one can understand why the percentage of cheating students as recently increased.

As if lack of dedication to true learning weren’t enough, the focus of universities also seems to be shifting from academia and students’ education to serving their desires and attracting “customers”, another common theme in both novels. One example of this can be found in the Inside Higher Education article that I wrote about earlier in which the university is aiming to attract customers by approaching domestic violence from a unique viewpoint.

College Life According to Nathan

The two chapters I elected to read from My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan were chapters 2 and 4, respectively titled "Life in the Dorms" and "As Others See Us". I found both these chapters to be eye-opening and relateable in the drastic contrast between how media and the first week of class makes college out to be versus how it is in reality. Below I will discuss what I found to be the most interesting points made in these two chapters. I will also attempt to relate the chapters to a past theorist we have read in class, specifically Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

One of the concepts I found most interesting in chapter 2 was the fact that students, according to recall-based interviews and activity logs, not only studied less than past students but also relaxed/had fun less. Instead, modern students use their time working. I found this particularly interesting because it contradicts the theme of "we are here for a degree" and "school comes first". At the same time, however, I can see how this occurs as prices keep increasing and students feel more pressure to avoid or pay off loans. Another factor that could contribute to this phenomena is the idea that work experience is crucial to finding a job after college. Or, less responsibly, that students need to work to keep up with their spending habits.

In chapter 4, I found it intriguing how different American culture is to other cultures. Having grown up American and being accustomed to the traditions and customs, I never noticed how confused and ostracized foreigners must feel when we are friendly to them but not interested in being more than that, in being true friends. This superficiality reminded me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave when the people merely saw shadows of reality. There was a deeper reality but all the people in the cave were interested in was the surface of their world, that is, the shadows. I found it interesting how people from other countries are close to their classmates, to the point of going out to eat with them after class if the timing is appropriate, as well as to their friends' families. It occurred to me that part of the reason we are so lonely is due to the emphasis on individualism. In part because of this, we do not make the time to forge bonds with others. Instead, we focus on ourselves and our goals. We are friendly to others but we have no friends.

University Student Experience Now vs.Then

This week, our reading came from Rebekah Nathan's My Freshman Year. Her project consisted of an ethnographic study, in which she did her best to immerse herself in undergraduate university life by becoming a student and observing her peers. Throughout the reading, I felt a sense of de ja vu because the description of the university system and its educational methods seemed similar to Freire’s description of the oppressive banking educational system.  Both, for instance, establish a hierarchy in which the teacher is superior giver of knowledge and student is inferior receiver of knowledge format, as demonstrated by the different tones of conversation and conversation topics Rebekah was exposed to as a student versus as a teacher. Both in the novel and Freire's article, there exists a cold, machine-like functioning of the school system that stifles creativity and critical thinking as demonstrated in a passage on page 9:

"Despite the great variety of planned activities, there was a curious sameness to many of them. As an anthropologist, I saw a "script" in these introductory experiences...More important, I could begin to see the repeated (and, after a while, anticipatable elements of the experience that marked shared understandings and  cultural elements."

This passage describes how the system can be so efficient and mechanical to the point of being predictable. Such a system, thus, makes it easy to follow precedence and not think outside of the box or to critically analyze how the repetition of the same types of events and activities impacts the students and posterity. Students and future generations are given the "script" and are often expected to follow it. In a sense, then, the information that is being "deposited" into the students is this undergraduate student life script which they are expected to rotely memorize.

I find the experience Nathan had to be true. When I first came to university I was excited to see all the new and exciting events and people but now that I have been going to school for three years, I see how all these events follow a certain skeleton. I also see how all these events are organized into neat boxes and are scheduled for certain recurring times and days. These events are consistently, mechanically, predictably the same. If you try to stray away from the system, if you are honest that you are straying away from the system, you get hit with fees and with obstacles.