Dean Dad Nails Another One

At our university, we've been going through some hassles over diversity. What does it mean? How can we improve it? What policies are needed to increase the pool of applicants from backgrounds unlike our current faculty? To what extent is each individual in the university committed to diversity, and is it enough? We are hardly alone in this sort of institutional soul-searching, as this post from Dean Dad makes clear. As usual, he is absolutely right about the real institutional needs, and the real costs of current efforts. The money quote, for me, is this one:

A really productive approach to diversity, I'd hope, would take as a starting point the idea that we shouldn't just find different-colored pegs for pre-existing holes; we should re-shape the holes.

Our real challenge, it seems to me, is not to find people of color who want to come to our university as it is. It's to change our university to the type of place where people of color want to go.