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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.
GB: Is there ever a point when Gonzaga could become "too diverse"?
RR: [Laughs] That would be a good problem to have. Who has the power and privilege to determine how much is too much? I don't think that there is any threat to that ever occurring in my lifetime. I wish that I was wrong but I don't think I am. The most important thing is that even if it was, we could look at the state of California for a preview for that kind of future. It is quickly becoming a community where the minorities are becoming the majority, where no one group has numerical majority over any other group. That is becoming increasing obvious. I think that the country at large is moving in that direction, becoming more ethnically diverse. I think the concern of people who say "How much is enough and what do we do when we get too much?" will be played out in issues of social and economic class. Being a private institution with the current economic situation in this country right now, the implosion of our financial system, is going to really put strong competitive pressure on private institutions, like Gonzaga, to hold its own because people, both white and non-white, are going to be looking at cost issues. And so, that's going to be the challenge in the future and could compromise the efforts around diversifying our student body as it pertains to ethnicity and race. I think that it will end up becoming an economic issue, which is why we are blessed to have Father Spitzer know that it is about endowment and sustainability in providing more access to a Jesuit education at Gonzaga for people from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. It's going to be about money in the future.
GB: In the past, Gonzaga has had some high-profile racial and sexual orientation discrimination incidents. Are these kinds of incidents things of the past?
RR: As long as you get human beings together that are representative of the larger society, these incidents are going to occur. What is important is the frequency, the nature, and the response. I've been here long enough to see a lot of things happen and I believe that we are getting better at dealing with things as they happen, learning from them, and responding to them in ways that hopefully will educate the broader community and at some point change the group norms were where we will create critical mass, where we will be able to self-regulate community discourse.
GB: What challenges face diversity at Gonzaga?
RR: Is the Gonzaga experience the same for everybody? Can we get back to our Christian ideals, as being catholic and Jesuit, and believe in the dignity of all persons? Can we understand and believe the challenge around seeing the other, whoever the other is, through God's eyes? Can we reconcile the tension that exists around members of our community who are Catholic and believe that gay/lesbian behavior is morally wrong? How do we do that? I invite you to read our mission statement and view that as a covenant between myself, as administrator and professor, and you, as a student, and then ask yourself, "Are you getting your money's worth? Are we loyal? Do we have fidelity to closing the gap between the rhetoric of the mission statement and the reality, is the gap as wide as the Grand Canyon or as small as a little stream?" We have a moral and ethical obligation to respond to the call to action.
GB: How wide is that gap now?
RR: A couple of years ago, we had a basketball game where people were chanting "Brokeback Mountain." Then, shortly after that, there was a noose found around the statue at Schoenberg and we have some whiteboard, homophobic things going on in some of the residence halls and people said, "See, that's how Gonzaga is." And I said, "Well, wait a minute, how do you know that?" That's one incident, and I agree one incident is one incident too much, but are you going to do an impressionistic painting and use one incident to do broad-stroke generalization of how Gonzaga really is? So then I lobbied, and so did others, to actually do some rigorous social science around the campus climate. We are doing surveys to determine this right now. Until I get the results back, I won't know for sure. I have great optimism and hope for Gonzaga. I have taught here for 21 years and have seen the great difference in the students. The students here now are a lot different from those of 1987-88. I think that you come with a different philosophy and frame of reference of human difference because your own experience was different from those students 20 years ago. I think that your generation is more willing and able to take the quantum leap in intercultural relations than previous years.
GB: Is your optimism being met?
RR: I am hopeful. I think that in all the years that I have been here, that this is the best place that we have been in terms of movement around recruitment and retention of faculty, staff and students; campus climate, the idea of academic content and courses and programs and study abroad, and our outreach to Spokane and relationships to tribal communities and Catholic, Hispanic, Spanish speaking communities in central Washington and California; participation in Act Six, giving us more access into African-American communities to get them to come to Gonzaga. Father Spitzer and others have been very supportive in giving me the financial resources necessary to be a collaborative partner in all of these programs.
If you have an opinion on Gonzaga's campus climate that you want to voice, contact features editor Tony Schick aschick@gonzaga.edu
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