The Diversity Puzzle (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

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In his Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece, Ronald Shaiko, a senior fellow and the associate director for curricular and research programs at The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, says that in order to create diverse campus communities, colleges and universities must do more than accept diverse classes of incoming students each year.

“I can attest to the fact that the benefits of diversity do not spontaneously arise merely from the presence of a varied student body,” writes Shaiko.

Architecture is needed that “would ‘nudge’ students into interactions outside of their comfort zones,” Shaiko says. “Without such nudges, students will default to sameness or, in the words of the political scientist Robert Putnam, they will ‘hunker down’ with students like themselves.”

Read the full opinion piece, published 6/9/13 by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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