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Gonzaga's Vision 2012, the University's guiding doctrine for the next four years, has seven primary goals. One of those is to "increase diversity and affirm the value of human difference." To achieve these goals, the University specifically hopes to "increase the proportion of incoming undergraduate students who self-identify as students of color."
How diverse is Gonzaga currently? How do campus minorities feel? In an online series, The Bulletin aims to provide persepctive on this dynamic campus issue. In this, the first of this series, The Bulletin sits down with Raymond Reyes, associate mission vice president for intercultural relations.
Gonzaga Bulletin: What does diversity look like at Gonzaga?
Raymond Reyes: I like a more expansive, inclusive definition of diversity. It's more than ethnicity and race. It is social class. It is geographic, rural versus urban. It is Christian versus non-Christian, Catholic-non-Catholic, male-female, and sexual orientation. And language too, and that is one that we are pretty weak at now. What people don't realize is that less than 50 percent of our students at Gonzaga are Catholic, so we have some semblance of religious diversity. We have more female students than male students, so there is gender diversity.
GB: Why is Gonzaga working towards more diversity
RR: The whole idea of human difference, inclusiveness and equity is at the heart and center of the Jesuit mission of a university, so it's central and core to who we are as a Catholic, Jesuit university. If you look at the history of the Society of Jesus, their whole history is about intercultural and cross-cultural encounter and using education as their apostolic mission to do justice in the world. Even the history of Gonzaga was founded in an intercultural encounter between the Blackrobes and the Indian people of this area. Right from the get-go, from day one, it was about diversity. Gonzaga was founded under the idea of educating tribal people. When you ask me, "Why is diversity a part of Gonzaga University?" I would hearken it to two things. One is the definition of culture. What is culture? In my view, culture is a way of life that allows us to walk the spiritual path with practical feet. So, there is a faith-based articulation of the nature, or significance, of culture. Faith in action, very Ignatian. Second thing, what is diversity? Diversity is the living curriculum by which we are invited to master the lessons of love and service to spiritualize our consciousness - in other words, to develop our personhood. From cradle to grave, God, in his infinite wisdom, figured out that you needed diversity on the planet to create the classroom and living curriculum that would create the tensions and the necessities of human beings to learn how to love and how to serve one another. All of the learning at Gonzaga is contextualized in knowing that this planet is becoming increasingly small and that the things that are the sources of human conflict are race, religion and resources. I think that it is a moral and ethical imperative to always animate this issue of diversity as central to what it is to live predominantly white is an artificial environment, it's not real and true to how you will live in the 21st century.
GB: How is your office working toward making Gonzaga more diverse?
RR: My office is a collaborative partner with a lot of different departments in the academic side, admissions, and student life. We do a lot of collaborative work with admissions in trying to diversify the student population. Next year, for example, we are going to participate in the Northwest Leadership Foundation program called Act Six, which is a program that creates a cadre of multiculturally diverse students to come to faith-based colleges and universities in Oregon and Washington. Also, our admissions office is starting to be more intentional in going to places and diversifying our applicant pool. When I first came here in 1987, the diversity percentage was probably around 5 or 6 percent and now we are at 15 percent. In the last 20 years it's been changing at a snail's pace, but the arc of our progress has been moving in the right direction, in the positive direction. Every year we are getting better and better at diversifying our student population and I think that our real challenge is in diversifying our faculty, we are behind in that area. This is where the real learning curve is here at Gonzaga. Our student body is more diverse than our faculty.
GB: Is there a numeric goal for changes in diversity that Gonzaga is trying to reach each year?
RR: We haven't come out officially on any percentage, but my sense is this: If you look at the past, it's safe to say that at least 1.5, 2 percent per year. Here is what we still need to determine: What criteria are we going to use to determine the answer to your question and what is the logic behind benchmarking such a path of strategic action in diversifying our student body? Is it to reflect the local community? If so, we have already exceeded that, because depending on who you read or believe, Spokane is 92 percent white and 8 percent diverse. OK, done that. So that's not a logical place to begin. So what is it? Is it regional? Is it compared to peer institutions? What's going to be our benchmark and what are we going to peg it to? I have yet to have a conversation with my colleagues about thinking about that. In absence of that, we always want to do better than we did last year. We haven't quantified it, but I think that there are a couple of things operating. One, it's a "who's-who in the hood," who are you bringing in to the community that reflects the world at large. There's 6.4 billion human beings speaking over 6,000 languages on this planet and it certainly does not look like the gated community called Gonzaga University. I think that we have a moral and ethical obligation to prepare our students for that. Intercultural competence and being able to prepare young people for a global society is an important imperative in our educational mission. So, not only is it important to bring, in some sense, the world to Gonzaga by virtue of who habitates the classroom, but also the curriculum, how and what we teach, and who's teaching it, the opportunities for Gonzaga students to study abroad, more than just Florence, and re-imagining how we think about international education.
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