Get comfortable, because it’s about to get uncomfortable.
A question: Will it improve the situation and university experience of minorities if all PSU staff and faculty receive mandatory cultural competency training?
I don’t think so.
This training–the subject of a debate team event a few weeks ago–is at stake. There is an ASPSU campaign platform with the stated goal of “[promoting] the growth of our students, regardless of circumstance, we must cultivate an inclusive and understanding environment on campus.” This is a commendable goal, but it is not reachable via mandatory cultural competency training for all PSU faculty and staff. And generally it is a goal already met.
Now, there are already cultural competency and diversity trainings available, says ASPSU’s equal rights advocate Debra Porta.
“What is not happening,” she said, “is a campus environment that promotes the imperative nature of this training to a successful college experience for students, nor are there adequate resources being made available to fully implement the program.”
The training is seen to be necessary for a number of reasons. On a national level, cultural competency training is used mainly in health professions to decrease instances of misunderstanding between doctors and minority patients, and generally to “[close] the disparities gap in health care,” which is how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services puts it.
More concretely, Porta explained to me that the platform’s main prompting is “the experiences of students themselves, who have felt everything from misunderstood to demeaned, to outright discriminated against.”
This includes “statistics that tell us that students of color, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities and other so-called nontraditional students either do not come to college to begin with, or drop out without completing their degrees, than do their more traditional student counterparts.”
If true, it’s sad. But do we really have cultural incompetence? When was the last time you heard any faculty saying something discriminatory or offensive to students in these categories, let alone something that prevented learning?
In over five years of college, I’ve never heard of one. Well, apart from teachers calling Bush fascist and putting anti-conservative cartoons on their tests–but this was thankfully not at PSU and never prevented my success.
Porta did give me a different example, an interesting one of a student of color who might be marginalized in being asked to speak on “issues that may be … discussed around people of color,” which can “put the student in the position of being expected to answer for an entire culture.”
She is correct that Caucasian students likely don’t have the same experience. But even in the unfortunately uncomfortable example above, why can’t minority students say that they simply don’t represent an entire culture?
That’s it–done with. Should money be spent to voice for students what they could say for themselves?
Another example given regarded a first-generation student who, having been the first college attendee in her family, experienced understandable discomfort in asking what a syllabus was.
If situations like these are simply too uncomfortable to allow, then we are discriminatory after all–not because we allow them, but because we don’t believe that minorities of all sorts have the ability and resilience to deal with discomfort.
For the record, I do not believe in anyone’s inherent weakness. And though I’ve never seen such statistics, I would suggest that even if it is true that certain minority students have remained disproportionately outside the university, this is not the university’s responsibility. It is theirs.
That is, whether or not you ultimately think cultural competency training is the best approach depends on whom you believe controls success: the machine or man.
I genuinely feel sorry for those who have ever felt like staying away after an uncomfortable experience. But you will only experience it again. And any amount of well-intentioned training to make someone feel welcome and comfortable won’t be nearly as successful as someone welcoming him or her.
If you know a more comfortable place to be a minority than Portland State, do tell. PSU faculty and staff have been role models in creating welcoming settings.
I know that ASPSU and those advocating cultural competency training have the best in mind. In essence, I believe Porta in that the training is to be “a program which adds to [professors’] ability to enhance the educational experiences of students.”
I know they see disparities in education as reasonable cause. I only contend that life is pretty good in the classroom already and, no matter how hard the university may try, the keys are ultimately not in its hands.