And so we've talked about the influence of the history of American higher education and how that shaped the structural arrangements that persist to this day in terms of our different institutional forms and purposes. But there's another factor that influences what we do in a way that is somewhat less clearly evident. And it has its roots in the very time in which the modern American university was being established. This roughly corresponds to a period from the latter half of the 19th century through the first World War. And here again we see the interplay of structures and cultures and we reach out beyond the institution to look at things that were occurring in our larger society, both within the United States and around the world at that time. Let's begin with roughly 1875, 1880, this was a time following reconstruction in the south where Jim Crow was dominating southern culture and racism continued to exist in the north as well. The very concept of racism depends on a Demarcation between groups on the basis of racial identities. Something that most of us would recognize is socially evident, but scientifically construed. This happened to be the same time that the social sciences were being established within the university structure. Economics, political science, psychology, sociology, all of these took shape. All of them had their first professional meetings in a period roughly bounded from 1880 to the first decade of the 20th century. It was a time of enormous and increasing economic polarization. In some part driven by the industrial revolution in the United States and elsewhere. But the interplay, industrial expansion and capitalism created what might have been predicted as a division in individuals and groups on the basis of economic status. It was a time of increasing urbanization. And we began to distinguish rural life from city life. Elsewhere around the world, it was the time at which colonial empires were being created. And when you reflect on that notion itself, you can understand that the very idea of colonialization requires the sense that one culture defined by a nation perhaps, has some right. Some might even say a responsibility or a burden, to take over other cultural groups and to an effect transmit their values, their expectations to others who have little say over their process. This was not just something going on between Europe and Africa, or between Europe and Asia, South America. The concept of manifest destiny also found its language, its voice during this various period with tremendous implications. Genocidal result for indigenous populations across our continent, it was during this same period that the scientific bases of eugenics began to form. And towards the end of this time, standardized tests of intelligence were used to determine individuals of high potential and individuals who are either normal, or in one way or another, less than normal. It was a time of the construction of great massive tools. And if you reflect upon the Industrial Revolution and all that it freed up in the reapplication of new technologies to new tasks, you know how many tools originated during that very same period, 1880 to 1910. But there were other kinds of tools, too. Tools which ultimately shaped the way that we think and the way that we develop knowledge. The periodic table came into use in chemistry. The way our libraries were organized was largely established by the Dewey Decimal System. The telephone system and all our systems of communications found their way into networks largely connected of course by long poles strung with wire. And at the same time, we began to talk about different phenotypes, different cultural groups, being more or less predisposed to different moral behaviors. It was right during this period, right at the beginning, that Joh Venn introduced a patent for what we now call the Venn diagram. I want to explore its implications just a little bit as a way of demonstrating the effect that social construct that seems very much part of our scientific inheritance shapes the way we think, the way we discover things, the way we code things. The very basic aspect of the Venn diagram is that circle a is all that is and b is all that isn't. It's all that's a and all that's b. With a certain amount of overlap in between. But nonetheless the dichotomization of groups, individuals and ideas, this quickly became interpreted as a way of categorizing what was expected and differentiating it from the unexpected. Think about that in the application of the scientific method. We create a theory or a hypothesis which we test and we differentiate our findings based on what we expected and what we didn't expect. These same ideas then became used in ways of differentiating between groups and in some cases combining groups. Largely for convenience, but in some ways this mechanism of suggesting that all Filipinos, or all Chinese, or all Pacific Islanders can be grouped in a certain domain. And that, even more tragically, all of these bubbles can be described as Asian. It seems to be a way of organizing knowledge, but you might even reflect on the fact it's a way of organizing our ignorance. More recently we've categorized individuals on the basis of their citizenship. And so we have documented students, undocumented students. And then a new category introduced by a political act, an executive order, dacamented students. But we somehow can conflate all that with another way of thinking. And this suggests that all Latinos are either documented, undocumented, legal or illegal. Most recently, we've been examining, perhaps long over due, the clear distinction between that which is male and that which is female in terms of behavior, in terms of gender identity, but also in terms of biology. The more that we force people into groups the more that we arbitrarily, and often times it is arbitrary, assign people status. The more that our concepts of diversity come down to differentiating and then comparing the notion of diversity to the expected. And the expected too often and more often than that becomes white male heterosexual. And often times our religious affiliation, more familiar to us than some others. And this notion of diversity, this privileging of whiteness, is not just something that's occurring in the public square. My argument is that it's rooted ultimately in the way that we discover and translate what we think we know. We organize around this very principle. You see, the way our colleges and universities have fashioned themselves. Quite familiar to most of you is the idea that you go to the third floor of the student services building and you see a long hall with many different doors that an individual might enter. And each of them is associated with a specific group. And yet, there are individuals who are veterans, who are transfer students, who may be struggling with attention deficit disorder or post-traumatic stress. There are individuals who might have reason to be concerned about an institution's compliance with Title IX, who are also first-generation students. This notion of doors and boxes actually doesn't hold up at the individual level, does it? We know that each of us is more intersectional than that. And yet, these organizational structures, largely organized, if you will, around problems rather than identities are part of almost every college or university I've ever visited. You know what, this not only take shape on the third floor of the union. This is actually something that occurs neurologically as well. It has its effect on the way that we become aware of difference. And how we translate our awareness into understanding. This is not just something that occurs inn society and as I've suggested it is something that's prevalent in the very roots of our sciences. But it's also part of our own mental structure. Our hypotheses, our statistical approaches are grounded in patterns of expectation. And what doesn't fit is unexpected, deviant. You see, we ultimately end up taking this to a point where it is us and them, normal and abnormal. It becomes the identification with what we believe should be the case. And everything that doesn't fit is deviant. A deviant religious group, a deviant citizenship, people living in the wrong place, people with health conditions that constitute deviance from what's expected and normal in the aging process for instance. Deviant mental health qualities. This notion of what we are and what we expect, and what differs from that is as much a part of American higher education as the campus, as the student union, and students, and as faculty, because it gets at something quite deep. The way that we come to discover and translate knowledge. Take a few minutes to think about how is this reflected in your own work, how is it reflected in the institution of which you're a part, how it's organized. The degree to which faculty interchange around their own views of the world. This very idea that we can encircle and enclose certain things and contrast them with things that look different is deeply grounded in the development of the modern American university.
