Nurturing the Next Generation of Scholars

Q: What's so important about diversity in the academy, particularly for students of color?

A: In my mind everybody is a student of color, that’s the first thing. But for the academy as a whole, for seminaries, for doctoral programs, for education in general, diversity for me is a code word for excellence. If we do not start representing the great diversity of people who are part of this society in our educational environment we’re not educating folks to meet those needs, be it as teachers or as students. And so for me when I see an environment where there’s a lack of diversity, I see it as probably not very good education going on there because you don’t have that rich stew that you need for students and faculty members to really engage and go outside their comfort because that’s where real education and learning takes place, not where we’re repeating the same lecture that we did last year about Niebuhr.

The richness comes when you’ve got different students in the classroom who are going to hear about Niebuhr- either Niebuhr brother- and they’re going to hear different things, they’re going to ask different questions. And those questions come up in the classroom and everybody starts learning differently just because we sit in different places in the world and we see different things. And that’s where I get excited in the classroom is when a student or a group of students come up with a whole new way to think about something and they’re able to communicate it because we’ve worked together to create an environment where they’ll feel safe to take that risk in a very diverse setting and everybody gets to learn. Everybody gets to benefit, everybody grows. But if you’ve got a monochromatic classroom that’s usually not going to happen.

So for me diversity becomes that place where we begin to enter into true and genuine excellence in education. And when you’re education works that way it affects your ministry. Because you have now been in an environment where you’re asking different questions and you can go into other places than the community or the state or the country or the world and you’re not so uncomfortable with the diversity that you’re sitting in the midst of. Or you ask questions about life, isn’t this diversity here or is it hidden because often it's hidden in communities. My own town of New Haven, folks think that’s a predominately White city, it's not, it's predominately Black and Latino, and Latina, but then if you don't learn how to look and ask questions and move outside of the environment of Yale University you don’t know. And that’s where things where we work on with our students at Yale. Now get off this hill, we lived on a hill. Get off this hill, start to move as a community, don’t go down the hill, go across the street, it doesn’t take far in most of our environments to find difference if we look.