Diversity in educational insti
Diversity in educational instiIntroduction
Diversity, the new buzzword in the professional world and universities across the country is definitely going to be a major issue as we step into the millennium. Before we get any further, what exactly is diversity? Diversity is a term covering all significant differences between people- not just the obvious ones. These differences include age, education, role, abilities and experience as well as gender, race, ethnicity, language and literacy skills. The dictionary defines diversity as a "situation that includes representation of multiple groups within a prescribed environment, such as a university or workplace. This refers to difference between cultural groups, although it is used to describe differences within cultural groups".
America is probably the most diverse country, with a majority of the population living in diverse neighborhoods. The rate of immigration is increasing tremendously. A further subset of the population believe that in about 20 years from now, they would be living in neighborhoods twice as diverse as now. Universities across the country consider diversity to be their major assets (University of Miami, Florida). The professional world and universities are stressing on the importance of diversity and undertaking programs to implement diversity successfully. Well before we undertake any discussion on diversity, it is imperative to understand why this term has become so sensational and taken the professional world and universities by storm. Our country has always consisted of people from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, the other major happenings around the world today are collaboration, technology advances and globalization. This increasing globalization has resulted in people working in foreign locations. This calls for people from different cultures to work towards a common goal, for which, one needs to learn and accept the cultural differences.
Coming from a diverse background and belonging to a diverse country, we are of the opinion that diversity is important to the success of an organization. Our group members belong to the Indian sub-continent, with 6 of us from India and one person from Pakistan. This society was initially an alien society to us. But the diversity in this country and the value given to it helped us in the process of assimilation. We believe that we can learn from this culture and teach our values to this culture in all our actions. Diversity is a must and as Dr. John Hall of Drexel University puts it, "Diversity has only advantages, there are no cons. The cons are nothing but barrier to diversity in an organization". We feel that the advantages of diversity far exceed its disadvantages. With the current emphasis on teams and with the increasing globalization, diversity is imperative to achieve success. Our opinions are expressed in detail in the final section.
In the following sections, we are going to discuss several issues such as diversity - pros and cons, incidents of diversity in the workplace and universities and our view on this issue. Our paper lays an emphasis on diversity in universities, though in certain sections we...
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