Diversity in UNCW’s staff

Sean W. Cooper, Assistant Opinion Editor

Walking back to my dorm from convocation freshman year, I gazed in awe at the sea of teal in front of me.  Everybody was dressed in teal so much that it almost hurt my eyes. Then I looked behind me and looked at the faces trailing me and I realized that I was also caught in a sea of white.

What I’m getting at is that UNCW isn’t a very diverse university at all. We don’t stack up well against other schools in the UNC system.  At UNC Charlotte, 39.6% of students identify as a racial or ethnic minority. UNC Greensboro has 46.4% minority students.  At UNCW, it’s less than half of that: a mere 20.8%.

Our school has been labeled a “PWI” (in contrast with the term “HBCU,” a predominantly white institution) and has been dubbed “UNC White.” This doesn’t just apply to the makeup of our students. It applies to our staff, as well.

Granted, UNCW’s faculty and staff have become increasingly less white over the last ten years, which I would assume is partially due to the efforts of Dr. Kent Guion, the school’s Chief Diversity Officer and the rest of the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion. We also made a great stride in 2015: hiring Dr. Jose “Zito” Sartarelli, our first non-white chancellor.

Some academic departments are heading in a more progressive direction than others when it comes to diversity.  In the Department of Communication Studies, for instance, only 74% of the faculty is white, and only 61% of the faculty in the Department in Mathematics and Statistics are white.

However, some departments have made no such strides for “improvement,” if we wish to call it that.  The faculties of at least three academic departments—those of Economics and Finance, Film Studies, and Public and International Affairs—are all 100% white.

On the other hand, dare I ask this question of all of you: does diversity actually matter?  It’s my belief that it doesn’t.  At the same time, this belief may be frowned upon, but it certainly holds water.  At the end of the day, we are all people.  Race is nothing more than a social construct with the intention of dividing people into groups so as to let some people feel superior to others; diversity is nothing more than an attempt to counteract that.

If we ignore race entirely, we have a better university and a better world.  At the end of the day, our goal shouldn’t be to make the staff as black or white as we possibly can.  Our goal should be to improve the quality of teaching at our university in any way possible.

If attempting this results in an all-white staff, that’s not an indication that we’ve done anything wrong. Nor is it such an indication for an exclusively minority staff.