Is diversity ever a bad thing?
The right wing's use of the word is as ironic as it is savvy. Although they are a party whose platform actively combats attempts to diversify the sexual, racial and socioeconomic composition of educational institutions and workplaces, Republicans realize that "diversity" has positive connotations for many, if not most, Americans. "Diversity" reminds us of a non-confrontational plurality, of the fuzzy myth of the American "melting pot." No one wants to admit to being anti-diversity.
The progressive - and to this point, dominant - American concept of "diversity" is about helping those groups and individuals who have been historically underrepresented and oppressed. But the intellectual diversity movement reconceptualizes the word, making "diversity" about ensuring that in every place and at every time, the voices of the privileged and the powerful can be heard. This myopic ideology posits that a lack of conservative professors at Brown and Harvard is as serious an oversight as the lack of blacks, women and poor people at the highest levels of U.S. government, academia and the private sector.
Last month, conservative political thinker Dinesh D'Souza gave a provocative lecture here at Brown, sponsored by a special fund set aside for speakers - presumably conservatives - who bring "intellectual diversity" to campus.
So left-of-center institutions, it seems, are buying into "intellectual diversity."
Applying my liberal arts education to these confusing political developments, I recently turned to the Oxford English Dictionary in an attempt to catch the right wing in a double bind. I wanted to use linguistic history to show that "diversity" has always referred to helping the underdog, as opposed to bolstering the majority within institutions of dissent. What I discovered, however, was far from conclusive - conservatives, in their co-opting skepticism of the term, might be just as linguistically "right" when it comes to "diversity" as the Left.
The Norman invasion of England in 1066 made French the official language of the English throne, nobility and clergy. It was not until the late 14th century that authors such as the populist Geoffrey Chaucer began to write in the vernacular tongue that was developing into early-modern English. According to the OED, when Chaucer was writing "The Canterbury Tales" in the late 14th century, the English word "diverse" - from the French "divers" - meant not "different," "varied" or "multiform," as it does today, but carried the negative connotations of "adverse; perverse; opposed to what is right, good, or profitable."
Almost 200 years after Chaucer's time, the writer Edmund Spenser made a stylistic decision as political as Chaucer's choice to write in English instead of French. A social conservative who hoped to curry favor with Queen Elizabeth I, Spenser wrote his "Faerie Queen" not in the lively vernacular of his contemporary, William Shakespeare, but in Chaucer's antiquated vocabulary. Chaucer and Shakespeare, writing in the vernacular of a rapidly changing tongue, made progressive statements about the value of the average person's language. Spenser, on the other hand, was a reactionary who explained that he chose the vocabulary and grammar of the past because unlike the late 16th century, the 14th century was a time "when simple truth did rayne, and was of all admyred."
When Spenser used the word "diverse," he reverted to the older meaning: "to turn aside, diverge, be diverted." One embattled knight, Spenser wrote, was "diverst" as his opponent "forth rode." For Spenser, we see, "diversity" was a bad thing, a mark of inferior difference. In fact, like today's conservatives, Spenser believed in the superiority of the dominant, ingrained culture of the privileged. After the Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland in 1559, Spenser emigrated to Ireland as a colonizer, where he wrote the pamphlet "A View on the Present State of Ireland." Too politically incendiary even for the 16th century, the work - which argued that England should completely suppress Ireland's native languages and customs - was published only posthumously.
Like Spenser, who used reactionary language to reflect reactionary politics, today's Right unwittingly defines "diversity" in a way more closely related to its medieval meaning of fearsome difference than its contemporary connotation of benevolent inclusion.
If liberals want to retain the progressivism of "diversity," they must realize that they do not own the term, and enter into a vigorous public debate that, instead of accepting the rhetoric of David Horowitz and his ilk at face value, reveals the underlying ideologies of fairness and historical perspective that inform the liberal definition of "diversity."
Progressives can't assume terminology is stagnant. In fact, the opposite is true: Words are often only empty shells, waiting to be filled by a well-articulated ideology.
Dana Goldstein '06 is OED-lightful.
