Task force begins to address issues

The Chancellor's Task Force on Diversity, a committee that will define the University's opinions regarding diversity, has taken giant strides toward addressing its charge.

The student subcommittee of the task force met for the first time Monday to deconstruct and discuss the open-ended questions the task force generated at Wednesday's meeting.

Archie Ervin, chairman of the task force, said Monday's meeting was an attempt to establish some baseline information.

"We'd like for this group to start drilling into those broad research questions about the areas we want to look at," he said. "This subcommittee drives the arena for students."

The questions the subcommittee developed stemmed from the umbrella questions the task force had instructed them to analyze in relation to the students at UNC.

Issues of vision and commitment, diversity of presence, the educational benefits of diversity, responsible interactions and a supportive climate for diversity filled the subcommittee's agenda for the meeting.

Sue Estroff, a professor of social medicine, said the University's tendency to initiate discussion during times of specific crises might influence the students' thoughts on the proactive nature of the task force.

"I'm really worried about the hollow gestures from the students' points of view," she said.

Christina Delane, convener of the subcommittee, said the University doesn't embrace the minorities on campus.

"Every minority student that I've come across here has thought about leaving the University at some point," she said during the meeting. "The only visible culture on campus is the middle-class white man."

The committee questioned the definition of a dominant culture.

"The dominant culture is upper-class white people. Period," Delane said.

Estroff disagreed, instead emphasizing the fact that everyone has differing perspectives on whether there is a group of people in their community with which they can identify.

"I would say the dominant culture is Christian white people," she said. "This campus is presumptuously Christian."

Delane said the low percentage of minorities in the student body at UNC doesn't anger her.

"The issue to me with diversity isn't how many people are here, but what the University is doing for the people that are here," she said. "Embracing the groups here is better than having 20 percent of minorities on campus and ignoring them."

Sophomore Sheena Oxendine, a member of the subcommittee, learned about the University through minority recruitment programs. She said during the meeting that the diverse culture of UNC that she experienced during the admissions process created a false sense of the minority environment at the University.

The subcommittee agreed that Chancellor James Moeser's time-crunch is pressing and that qualitative and quantitative research should be gathered.

Estroff made a motion, with which the subcommittee unanimously agreed, that qualitative research must be involved in the upcoming studies.

"Data collection would be erroneous and incomplete if it was based only on survey questions," she said.

The subcommittee will reconvene in November to continue shaping the questions it will use to address diversity at UNC.

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.