When I die, I'm asking for those hours back
End of Induction Week. Warwick Business School is committed to diversity, so of course the week included a lengthy diversity lecture in the very first week. It finished about twenty minutes ago, and took nearly four hours.
And when I die, I want those four hours back.
The guest presenter - an affable French chap - did a reasonable job, considering the complexity of his PowerPoint material (approximately 88,0000 slides, each festooned with a different, stupefyingly complex, and largely inpenetrable diagram.) But I can't help feeling that all these endless nods to political correctness - understanding our differences, celebrating our cultural diversity - is having the opposite effect to the one intended.
All human difference constitutes a tiny fraction of one percent of DNA. The rest is just customs. And even these differences are relatively minor. The class is over 70% non-white non-British; there's not much you can teach anyone here about diversity. And yet we all get along, laughing at the same things, getting over our differences with a handshake and a coffee. It's just not a big problem for us. Or for anyone.
By constantly emphasising how very, very different we all are, isn't the huge and sprawling diversity industry (for it is an industry, and a growing one, growing thanks to fear of the PC brigade) making the problem worse? Driving a wedge between cultures, instead of bringing them together?
On second thoughts - well, of course that's the (unstated) intention. Driving such wedges is how the diversity industry grows. And everyone entering business is going to see a whole lot more of these PowerPoints, each one blowing up quirks of behaviour into huge, business-threatening issues, and the diversity consultants will grow fat on the back of it all.
Such presentations aren't about diversity, really. They're just about marketing.
And when I die, I want those four hours back.
The guest presenter - an affable French chap - did a reasonable job, considering the complexity of his PowerPoint material (approximately 88,0000 slides, each festooned with a different, stupefyingly complex, and largely inpenetrable diagram.) But I can't help feeling that all these endless nods to political correctness - understanding our differences, celebrating our cultural diversity - is having the opposite effect to the one intended.
All human difference constitutes a tiny fraction of one percent of DNA. The rest is just customs. And even these differences are relatively minor. The class is over 70% non-white non-British; there's not much you can teach anyone here about diversity. And yet we all get along, laughing at the same things, getting over our differences with a handshake and a coffee. It's just not a big problem for us. Or for anyone.
By constantly emphasising how very, very different we all are, isn't the huge and sprawling diversity industry (for it is an industry, and a growing one, growing thanks to fear of the PC brigade) making the problem worse? Driving a wedge between cultures, instead of bringing them together?
On second thoughts - well, of course that's the (unstated) intention. Driving such wedges is how the diversity industry grows. And everyone entering business is going to see a whole lot more of these PowerPoints, each one blowing up quirks of behaviour into huge, business-threatening issues, and the diversity consultants will grow fat on the back of it all.
Such presentations aren't about diversity, really. They're just about marketing.
posted by chrisworth at 6:03 PM
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