“Diversity” is a word thrown around so often on this campus in such heated contexts, yet no one ever seems to want to define it. I would like to thank Emily Greenhouse for moving beyond the use of diversity as referring only to students of color, acknowledging the need for “class diversity.” The fact that about 59% of students at Wesleyan receive no financial aid is a scary reality, where the majority of students have no personal investment in Wesleyan’s financial aid policies.
America’s Constitution and Wesleyan’s mission statement both lay claim to ideas of “equal opportunity.” However, clearly 59 percent of Americans cannot afford to spend over $200,000 per child for a four-year college education. While numbers and statistics are great for proving one’s point and in this case certainly show a terrible, contradictory injustice, “diversity” is not simply a matter of numbers. True “diversity” means that all Americans would have an equal chance of being accepted to and then attending Wesleyan (for all four years or for however long it takes to graduate). This is clearly far from the reality.
Therefore, when Emily Greenhouse talks about “diversity,” I would ask her to question what diversity is. The issue is not simply the number of students of color and of students receiving financial aid, but why it is so much easier for white students and upper-middle/upper class students to attend our University. Eliminating loans is a crucial part of this process. If all persons truly have an equal chance of attending Wesleyan, no one should have to be in debt to receive a Wesleyan education. Financial aid should not be synonymous with debt.
While few Americans have had the opportunity to attend private school or a top public school, most Wesleyan students have a background in this type of elite education. While my top public high school had nearly every A.P. class offered in addition to a wealth of honors classes, underfunded schools in less wealthy communities (communities that often have a higher concentration of people of color) are less of a gateway to elite Universities like Wesleyan. When it is assumed that students will take three, five, eight A.P. classes before attending Wesleyan, how can a person at a school oferring two, one, zero A.P. classes offered possibly hope to be accepted? If accepted, how could ze possibly hope to be prepared for the curriculum? How could ze possibly want to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt when ze could attend a less-prestigious public state university for free or at a tenth of the cost? How could ze hope to have hir S.A.T. scores compare to those of students who paid $100s, $1,000s on S.A.T., A.P., and A.C.T. prep classes?
In conclusion, Emily Greenhouse and other Wesleyan students, I would ask that you be wary of discussing “diversity” as numbers and percentages. After all, whose diversity are we discussing? Who is diversity? Although I may agree with the latter part of Emily’s statement that “at schools like this, even where there is great diversity among states, countries, ethnicities, and races, economic diversity is not a reality,” I remain concerned about her claim that we have “great diversity” in these other areas. After all, who are the less waelthy students likely to have the opportunity to attend Wesleyan? Especially in America, where race means more opportunity and, so often, more wealth? Simply bringing in more lower class students and more students of color does not make our school more “diverse.”
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