[576] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
"diversity" and GIRs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (asarahm)
Tue May 8 20:24:40 2001
Message-Id: <200105090024.UAA14516@biohazard-cafe.mit.edu>
To: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 20:24:02 -0400
From: asarahm <asarahm@MIT.EDU>
from the HASS website (web/hass/www/hass-d.html) : the 5 HASS-D
categories are "literary and textual studies", "language, thought and
value", "visual and performing arts", "cultural and social studies",
and "historical studies". HASS-Ds are designed to a) get you to
think in new ways about the world and b) make sure that students's
courseloads are well rounded (i.e., they don't take only art).
i think a lot of HASS classes and HASS-Ds are good at helping you find
and appreciate diversity in your surroundings. there are science
classes that do too - ecology (1.018) is a good example, IMHO. i
think appreciation of diversity is one of those "aha!" things rather
than something that can be explained... but sometimes you have to be
put into the right context to get the "aha".
personally, i think that adding more hoops to jump through is a
REALLY bad idea. 1/3 of our program here is already decided for us,
with a small amount of flexibility.. if we like diversity, we should
like diversity of course options too... :) if you feel that the
current HASS options don't really address diversity, i would
lobby the HASS faculty and ask for it to be emphasized more in HASS-Ds.
but what do we mean when we say something is "diverse"? i think when
a lot of us (myself included sometimes) say diversity we really mean
race diversity. i've lived with folks from more states than i can
count, from 5 countries, and with native speakers of 4 languages other
than english (hindi, bengali, russian, and spanish). i consider the
people i have lived with to be "diverse" but are they? the majority
(by far) of the people i have lived with in my life have been white.
i think it would be great if that *weren't* the case - if my hallmates
and housemates and roommates over the years had better reflected the
US racial demographic. and i think it would be great if more classes
at MIT discussed cultural differences and what creates them.. (the
gov. class i'm taking at harvard had a unit on identity creation which
was really interesting.. ). but i don't think it would be great if
that class was 1/2 full of people who were pissed off at taking that
"bullshit" or if some of my housemates didn't really want to live with
me, but were forced to for the sake of "diversity".
my $0.02,
asarahm, who doesn't believe in requirements and almost went to
brown for that very reason.
______________
Sarah McDougal
Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
asarahm@mit.edu
