Decomposing the diversity problem of the university
Authors:   , Essanhaji Zakia 
Published: November 2023

As the university remains to be a site where racial and gender (and other) inequalities continue to exist, universities are increasingly drawing up diversity policies with which they offer the promise of inclusion to those racialized and gendered Others who have been previously excluded. This resulted in an abundance of diversity policies, commitments and practices which have been a key focus in diversity management and critical diversity studies. Most research focuses on what universities are saying and doing about diversity to resolve ‘the problem of diversity’. Such research has three important weaknesses: (1) it conceptualizes diversity as identity characteristics specifically as the distance to a white masculine norm; (2) it then locates diversity in the minds/bodies of specific individuals or in discourse thereby it only studies cognition and discourse as being constitutive of social reality, but fundamentally neglects to study how bodies and materiality shape social reality and (3) it assumes to already know what ‘the’ problem of diversity is, how it ought to be studied and that it stays the same throughout research inquiries thereby producing dislocated knowledges instead of unfolding how conditions of knowledge production contribute to, intervene with and transform what the problem of diversity becomes.
In light of urgent calls to theorize anew in how and what diversity is studied, this dissertation (1) departs from a relational ontology of diversity in which what ‘diversity’ becomes, is the result of interconnected practices in which bodies, words and objects ongoingly and collectively produce what is known as diversity in research; (2) conceptualizes diversity anew as a shifting and ongoing concern to refer to how diversity’s composition(s) results from different practices of various actors who in their attempts to know diversity construct different, conflicting meanings and how they may then (not) act upon those meanings to arrive at a final, situated composition of diversity and (3) in doing so unfolds how diversity problems are composed instead of imposing their compositions to be ‘out here’, singular and fixed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork consisting of interviews with academics, discourse analysis of diversity policies and observations of diversity events, I empirically trace and unfold how diversity problems are composed in diversity research and Dutch universities.
I find how diversity is composed as (1) an embodied epistemic difference that does not go away (2) white time enacted in and through diversity documents that dictates when and how change will happen for people of colour and (3) an institutional non-problem as white masculine structures restructure themselves when complaints attempt to expose, invert and transform them. As such, the very idea and production of ‘the diversity problem’ is merely a white reflex to mask whiteness’s structural workings through the production of a series of diversity problems that require concreteness of description and vagueness of solutions on the institutions’ behalf to ensure incremental and superficial changes while recentring whiteness. I argue that there is no such a thing as ‘the problem of diversity’ but whiteness introducing white problems. If we are to remove whiteness we must move away from white problems by decomposing ‘the diversity problem’ of the university, break it down with others who are committed to do so. This requires us to tell ourselves the truth about the institution’s white lies, to learn from, sit with and listen to a pain that is not our own so that a new We can become that can move towards new horizons where the university reimagined is one where Our difference can make the difference.