How, Why, and Why Not to Make a Diverse Syllabus
Later today I will start teaching.1 The other day I finished — I think — all my first-year writing syllabi for this semester. I say “I think” because I need to check them all today for little contradictions — did I change the due date in the calendar but not in the list of due dates in an earlier section, that kind of thing. And as part of this process I will do a little bit of the crudest kind of head-counting: I will check whether more than fifty percent of the writers I assign are white, and whether more than fifty percent are men. If so, I will tinker till the numbers are otherwise. Over time, I’m aiming to try to make it something more like 60-40 not white: roughly proportional to the population of the US as our current crude methods of racial bookkeeping have it.
To judge by the signals that my institution is sending out at the moment, this is putting a little more thought into the question than is really fashionable at the moment. “Really, Phil? Is it unfashionable in your circles?” Well, I don’t mostly hang out with my coworkers, my wife excepted. It probably isn’t, yet, unfashionable among them, although if the Republicans hang on to Congress in 2026 and the Presidency in 2028, we’ll all be surprised by who starts talking about how it’s time to focus on class-based affirmative action (and then never actually fights for that either).2 The style among my actual friends is to be fundamentally against racism but wincingly tolerant, at best, of the sometimes undignified ways that we try to implement egalitarianism at the institutional level. Ways that involve, for example, counting, using the exact criteria that you’re trying to undermine, because otherwise you’ll probably go along passively with the system that generated that criteria. And thinking, “Well, this makes sense and is incoherent at the same time.” This is also my style. I am one of these people: it all makes me feel a little silly, but the alternative seems a lot worse.
“Diversity” — the word winks at us a bit, doesn’t it? Lots of people have pointed this out, this winking. If you teach medieval English literature, and you put Chaucer, Gower, the Pearl poet, Gavin Douglas, John Wycliffe, William Langland, Thomas Malory, and the Wakefield Master on your syllabus, in several important senses that’s “diverse.” These guys come from different social classes, wrote different dialects of English, possessed different sorts of economic interests, subscribed to significantly different versions of Christianity, and just generally inhabited different worlds than the others. One of them’s Scottish, for heaven’s sake! England practiced in Scotland what it later perfected on the rest of the earth — that’s a marginalized people right there. I would not object to this as a syllabus for medieval English literature, specifically — nor would I object if some letters from various noblewoman were added. It’s not gonna kill anyone either way. You’re getting a picture of the subject. Equally, I would object very strongly to a first-year writing syllabus that consisted only of what we would now call white men. You’re not getting a picture, in that case, of the field as it stands, the options that are out there, the range of ways a writer can sound and be.
There is already an infinity of difference between any two writers on earth. Any two people. It’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of this. But, if modern mathematics teaches us anything, it’s that there are infinities of different sizes and degrees. “All even numbers” is an infinity; so is “all the integers.”