A modest proposal
The Yale Daily News devotes a long, long article to the potential reform of Yale's "ethnic counselor" program. Ethnic counselors seem to fall roughly into the same categories as the boxes available for checking on the application for admission, but that point is left vague in the article. Under the refashioned ethnic counelor program, "students would be matched with freshmen in the incoming class who voluntarily self-identify as members of the same demographic group." In order to bridge the gaps between members of demographic groups that are supported by ethnic counselors, Yale will look to "a cohort of intercultural educators in each of the residential colleges for undergraduates." These "intercultural educators" also require assistance in "interfacing" among themselves and others:
Overseeing these "intercultural educators" would be a loosely centralized authority — “we’re not sure whether there will be a person or a committee,” Levesque said — that would serve primarily as a means to pass ideas from team to team. “We want program sharing,” Gentry added. “We want to be able to do in Saybrook what worked in Berkeley, for example. Those cultural educators would interface with others.”Lest you get the idea that Yale may be adopting proposals to which insufficient thought has been devoted, the article includes some helpful geneology for the proposal:
The educators’ role in the colleges bears resemblance to a proposal put forth by the Coalition for Campus Unity in November, partially in response to racist and homophobic graffiti found on the walls of residential colleges. But whereas the Council of Masters rejected CCU’s plan, they responded with a measured positive to the changes floated by the Dean’s Office.The article quotes one "ethnic counselor," who helpfully explains:“There were small but important differences between the … reporting structure for the CCU versus the YCDO, and the sense of where’s the proposal coming from,” Holloway said. “It’s not a matter of politics here, mind you, it’s just a matter of who is responsible for maintaining and running the colleges. And the Dean’s Office proposal had a lot more institutional structure and logic to it.”
"[I]t’s hard, as a freshman, when something happens and you feel like you need to talk to someone about your race. Maybe there’s someone of color on your freshman counselor team, but you don’t know if they’re going to be invested in having those kinds of conversations.”The "ethnic counselor" also illuminates the importance of the program under discussion:
“This proposal isn’t just about changing the freshman counselor position or changing the ethnic counselor position,” she said. “This is really about changing the culture at Yale so that we have a culture where students aren’t afraid to talk about diversity, they’re not afraid to talk about race and they really understand the ways in which ethnicity plays a role in their life within the residential colleges.”Reading the article, one can't help but be impressed by the importance of changing the culture on Yale's campus.“To make a change in the entire culture on Yale’s campus,” Showole said, “it makes sense to begin with the freshmen.”
JOHN adds: It's great to see the re-racialization of America continuing apace. It's worked so well elsewhere around the world.
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