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Debating Diversity:  Approaches to Equity and Opportunity in a Changing Democracy invites key leaders, intellectuals, public figures, activists and scholars to the University of Arizona campus to engage with faculty, staff, students and members of the general public in an exploration of differing ideas and political, social and programmatic approaches within the context of current legislation and ideologies. 

This symposium's speakers are guest lecturers in a series that is part of a Debating Diversity course that involves University students. The course and symposium encourages a commitment to a critical analysis of the benefits, challenges and practical implications/applications associated with a wide variety of perspectives and approaches.

Each symposium guest will speak 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. at varying location. Check individual speaker posts or the list under "Speaker Schedule" for additional information, or to view the schedule in a printable form, view  DebatingDiversityLectureSchedule.pdf . All sessions are free and open to the public. For those who are unable to attend, audio files and notes are available under "Audio Files and Speeches."

The Debating Diversity series has come to a close.

People may not consciously realize or acknowledge it, but there exists a dominate and pervasive way -- in our language, media and in curricula within education -- of seeing and thinking about disability that suggest that disability is something to avoid, to fear and to dismiss.

Sue Kroeger, director for the University of Arizona's Disability Resource Center, wants you to imagine a few things: Imagine that disability is not something most of us commonly think it is, that people with disabilities are not who or what we have been taught to assume and that much of what we know about disability is wrong.

Now hold onto that.

"What is a frame? A frame is  a collection of stereotypes individuals
rely on to understand and respond to events; a mental structure that
shapes how we see the
world and how we act and what counts as good or bad," Kroeger said while presenting her talk, "The Power of Framing," during the UA Center for
the Study of Higher Education's Debating Diversity symposium this month
-- the last in the series.

Consider what you have heard and seen. Perhaps you watch "Glee" and are familiar with Artie whose character, like that of Cpl. Jake Sully in Avatar, is paralyzed. In such examples, and others in the media, disability is distorted and seen as a "special need" and as something one must overcome in order to be viewed as motivating. These are the dominate themes within the disability frame, Kroeger said.

Thus, the frame through which disability is see and the ways in which disability is interpreted and discussed  is a warped representation of reality, Kroeger added.

"We think we know what it is. We think we know what it is like. We think we know disabled people and what they're going through. We make all sorts of assumptions about all of that. I would like us to entertain the notion that might not be correct," Kroeger.

"Often times we disregard the frame all together and consider what it
says as reality," she said.

"Everything is about support, words like allow, empower, success, needs,
assistance, service, special, weakness, limitation, eligibility," Kroeger added. "That's the problem for the dominate frame of
disability -- it is so strongly held together that many of us cannot see the
reality. So, it's actually not the truth, it is socially constructed. So
disability ends up being socially constructed."

Within higher education, then, disability studies becomes an important and viable response to the dominate frame, providing a way to remove the problem from the individual with disability and put it in its rightful place -- societal constructs and beliefs. Kroeger said it also is critical to reinterpret the the world around us -- whether it be perceptions, believes, the physical real, policies or practices -- that causes and reinforces disability.

"I don't want to leave you with 'Every image is bad,' but there are problems with how disability is framed and presented and what happens for us when we have not developed a critical disability voice," Kroeger said.

"If you all stopped and spent the nxt week and really thought about
keepign your eyes and ears out for diability you would be amazed,
absolutely amazed," she added. "It is really wise to get closer to a truth. We must be able to entertain some different ways of thinking."

Increasing operating costs, competition for resources, tuition costs and polices, state political environments, enrollment capacity and college readiness challenges are among the top 10 issues affecting institutions' abilities to improving access and helping to support workforce development, said Tom Anderes, the Arizona Board of Regents present.

Anderes, in presenting his talk, "Diverse Pathways to Educational Excellence and Workforce Sustainability," this month said these are key, system wide issues that are of key importance in Arizona and other states in the nation.

He discussed ways Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) members and institutional leaders at the three state universities are working to realign policies and practices to be better prepared to meet the state's demands for higher education.

At the core is ABOR's Enterprise Plan, Anderes said.

"We are talking educational excellence, access, research, workforce, productivity -- all things that that make a lot of sense and are probably in everybody's plan in some form or another," he said.

"Failure to provide people from all backgrounds and circumstances with the education skills necessary to become knowledge workers will threaten our democracy, our society and the economic future of America," Anderes said earlier in his talk. "Sound pretty dramatic. Democracy. What's going to happen with democracy if we end up drifting a little bit from where we are right now?"

In a single generation U.S. has dropped from first to 12th place in higher education attainment, he said, also noting that by the end of the decade, about 80 percent o fall jobs will require some sort of postsecondary education training.

The plan, which is expected to stand through 2020, emphasizes that institutions should focus more keenly on educational and research excellence along with improved productivity and also workforce and community support.

Outcomes and performance drive the plan, Anderes said, saying heightened numbers of students attained and degrees awarded along with increases in patents and expenditures are among the measures emphasized. Other measures include improved access by way of online degrees and a better-employed workforce.  

"It's not just about funding, it's not just about somebody saying well the state didn't give us money were going to raise tuition, were going to be flat we can't do it," Anderes said.

"We have to really look at other ways of becoming more efficient.  Doing less in certain areas, more in others.  Getting a sense of different priorities," he added. "Ultimately, each of the universities has to look as much as it can at itself knowing that funding isn't going to be available probably in the next couple of years at least.  And saying, 'If we are going to reach these targets, we have got to do things differently.'"

Michael S. Roth reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that: Opportunities for creative collaboration are going to be essential
if we are to transform our factories of failure into academies that
promote learning, cultural participation, and opportunities for
economic advancement. In a democracy, education that merits the term
"higher" depends on challenging entrenched inequality; it depends on
the hope for change. By promoting access to quality high schools that
prepare students for college, we can cultivate that hope. By developing
universities that overcome isolation and inspire innovation through
great teaching, that hope can energize pragmatic liberal learning today.

Sue Kroeger is currently the Director of Disability Resources at the University of Arizona. Prior to coming to Arizona in 1999, she was the Director of Disability Services at the University of Minnesota for 14 years. She manages a staff of 40 full and part-time employees that provide services to faculty, staff, and students with disabilities, assists the university in meeting its obligations, and provides consultation and education.

She received her master's degree in rehabilitation counseling at the University of Arizona and her doctorate in human rehabilitative services at the University of Northern Colorado. Prior to coming to higher education she worked in public and private rehabilitation.

Kroeger, in addition to her administrative duties, has presented at numerous conferences, published articles on disability and higher education, and co-edited a book entitled "Responding to Disability Issues in Student Affairs" published in 1993. She has been Treasurer and President of the National Association of Higher Education and Disability. She holds adjunct faculty status in the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling where she teaches undergraduate courses in Disability Studies and advises graduate students. She has been principal investigator for numerous federal grants and has consulted nationally and internationally.

Kroeger will present her lecture, "Disability and Universal Design," on April 26, 12:30-1:45 p.m. in the Kiva Room of the Student Union Memorial Center.

Sue Kroeger discusses ways in which disability is framed. She says "they are so pervasive in our world," adding that the frame of disability is powerful, and is one that situates disability wrongly with the individual instead of its rightful place within a social and global construct. Kroeger's April 7 lecture has been postponed. A new date will be named at a later time.

Tom Anderes was appointed president of the Arizona Board of Regents in 2010 after having served as senior vice president for administration and fiscal affairs at the University of Wisconsin system.

Prior to his 2008 appointment with the University of Wisconsin system, Anderes served as senior vice president for administration and finance for the Oregon University System. Additionally, he served as interim chancellor from 1999-2000 for the University and Community College System of Nevada.

For a six-year period that began in 1978, Anderes served as Arizona
State University's assistant director of university budgets. He earned his undergraduate and M.P.A. degrees from the University of Arizona before going on to earn a doctorate in higher education administration from the University of Connecticut.

Anderes will give his talk, "Diverse Pathways to Educational Excellence and Workforce Sustainability," April 21 in the Kiva Room at the Student Union Memorial Center.

University of Arizona President Emeritus Peter W. Likins served as the institution's 18th chief administrator from 1997 to 2006. During his tenure, the UA chose to focus on developing excellence in selected areas and better defining the role of UA South after the approval of the Arizona Board of Regents' "Changing Directions" initiative.

Shelton also helped led the Focused Excellence initiative, participated in the development of the Translational Genomics Research Institute and was instrumental in the creation of the BIO5 Institute. Also under his leadership, the Arizona Health Sciences Center expanded its Phoenix campus to allow Arizona medical students to attend all four years of medical school in Phoenix. In April 2006, Arizona Board of Regents members granted him the Regents' Medal, making him the 11th person to receive the award in more than 40 years.

Prior to the UA, Likins had been president of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., for 15 years when he was appointed UA president. Prior to Lehigh, Likins was provost at Columbia University. There, he also served as professor and dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Before going to Columbia, Likins spent 12 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he progressed through the faculty ranks and was honored several times for distinguished teaching.

He earned a master's degree in civil engineering at Stanford University, a master's degree in civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in engineering mechanics at Stanford University. He also holds honorary degrees from several institutions.

Likins will present his lecture, "Diversity and Today's College Student: A President Emeritus' Perspective," April 14 in the Catalina Room of the Student Union Memorial Center.

The well-established practice in the nation's higher education structure has been to reinforce the dominate social group -- white, affluent heterosexual males.

"This was the norm in American colleges and universities when I was born, and even earlier than that," said University of Arizona President Emeritus Peter Likins.

Likins, while speaking during the UA Center for the Study of Higher Education's Debating Diversity symposium, said it is troubling to imaging individuals, while working to build their freshman class, purposefully shaping a homogeneous class of students.

"They didn't want them to learn different perspectives, they didn't want their students to be exposed to students who had a different racial history, a different religious perspective or a different class event," Likins said.

This belief continues to exist today.

But it is time to get beyond the conversation about diversity as a "good thing or a bad thing," Likins said. The real challenge is in what diversity means today and how it should be advanced.

"They are both substantial topics," he said. "Do we want people to learn from the diverse perspective of others it's
not a question that has one possible answer. "We want our students to learn in an environment where people of different perspectives contribute to the learning environment."

But how does one encourage others to see the benefit of interactions and education in a more diverse environment? Likins said logical, structure arguments simply will not work. The best approach is through storytelling.

Likins spoke about the family he and his wife, Patricia, raised, having adopted six children during the 1960s, raising them with compassion and love. He has published his family's history in a new memoir, "A New American Family: A Love Story," published and released by the UA Press.

The Likins family included American Indian and African American children, a daughter with disabilities and a gay son. Another son would eventually develop schizophrenia and drug abusing habits, dying at the age of 33. Likins also discussed the difficulty he and Patricia Likins faced when encouraged not to adopt a child with disability or African-American children during the 1960s, a time of tremendous social and racial strife. The widely held beliefs at the time, which promoted social and cultural homogeneity.

"What's important about that state of our lives is that we were, perhaps, a little bizarre on first appearance," Likins said, adding that others "got used to us after a while."

Much progress has since been made to alleviate some of the stresses on certain populations, Likins said, adding that the next "wave" of moving beyond prejudice and discrimination is not going to accomplished with more legal constructs, but "with more love."

Likins said: "When we carry these prejudices around, then, what takes those prejudices away is not some pathological argument, is an association -- something you love and admire."

He also said the meaning of diversity must be widely embraced not as a category, but as a "sweeping concept" that serves to "create an envionrment in which people learn from each other."

There exists an undeniable truth that people of color, Mexican immigrants and the poor have deliberately been relegated not merely to marginal status in the U.S., but also have been pushed into a dispensable underclass, Cornel West affirmed.

The evidence is in the U.S. spending on military actions and activities compared with that of K-12 and higher education.

It is in the continued removal of rights among communities such as those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

It is in the continued overrepresentation of people of color in the prison
systems, the underrepresentaion of such populations within the
nation's university system and the glaring statistic of 20 percent of
U.S. children living in poverty with higher percentages when children of color are considered.

"This is the richest nation in the history of the world. That is a moral disgrace. Young people are 100 percent of our future," West said, speaking to a full audience at the University of Arizona's Centennial Hall April 1.

Considered on of the great thinkers of our time, West welcomed speaking in Arizona, the "epicenter for the struggle for human rights in the Untied States." He dedicated his talk to the late Manny Marable, a dear friend of West who was a  historian and civil rights activist, who passed the morning of his talk in Tucson.

West, whose talk was part of the "Borders to Democracy" series, quoted Socrates -- "The unexamined life is not worth living" -- and said inequity exists and continues to exists because so many people are afraid to die.

"What does learning how to die? It is mustering the courage to deliberately examine who you are," said West, a Center for African American Studies professor at
Princeton University. This requires wrestling what it means to be human "from the frivolous to
the serious" and experiencing the full catastrophe, he said,
referencing Jon Kabat-Zinn.

'When things get dark and disparaging, you sit there and you wrestle with them," West said.

"It is any time you give up a dogma or a prejudice or a predisposition. There is no development without dying inside," West said, adding that no one person is free or can choose to opt out of this process. "We need to focus on the courage to think critically" and to speak the truth -- the real truth of people's lives and experiences, not "a deodorized discourse."

It was West's attempt to unsettle and unhouse the audience; to bring about an emotional and intellectual rift -- one necessary to shake individuals out of their dormant thinking and into a more elevated and truthful humanity. This, he said, is what is necessary to create a more loving, compassionate and respectful of wisdom.

For his beliefs, West said he has continually been accused of going against America. But, he said, "I am not anti-American, I am anti-injustice."

He wants the same for the nation of people. Yet people are blind, self-consumed and preoccupied with superficiality, spectacle, status -- "weapons of mass distraction," West said.

"You can't get critical consciousness staying connected every minute of the day on superficial things," he said. "The only way we shatter our sleepwalking is to be unsettled."

West charged the audience with being truly human -- grounded in the Earth without arrogance, having love and compassion for their fellow humans, especially those of color and who are poor, and in living a life that persistently and deliberately counters injustice even in the face of retaliationon. "We need more misfits," he said, adding that no one has a monopoly on morality or knowledge.

"It does not matter what color you are, it is about the love you have in your heart," West said, though he does not promote colorblindness.

"That is the only way American will repair itself," he said. "It's not about tolerance, but respect."

Tohono O'odham National Chairman Ned Norris Jr. introduced West, saying he hopes that voices of visionaries like West would continue to spark inside of
others a strong desire to rise up against injustice and inequity.

Norris closed the event with a special gift for West: A basket woven by Doris Hose, one of its tribal members, of materials on the nation's land. Embedded in the basket was the image of a turtle, signifying "its capacity to cope with stress and adversary." 

West's lecture was sponsored by the Tohono O'odham Nation and numerous UA offices. They are: African American Student
Affairs, Asian-Pacific American Student Affairs, Chicano/Hispano Student
Affairs, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Affairs,
Native American Student Affairs, Student Service Fee, The University of
Arizona BookStores, Women's Resource Center, Office of the President and
the Dean of Students Office.