The Boston Student Conversazione held last night at the School of Management brought undergraduates, graduate students and BU faculty members together to address and discuss the role of diversity in higher education and listen to a distinguished speaker address the topic.
The Boston Conversazione is the 10th BU has hosted since 1989.
Danny J. Boggs, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals, spoke to the audience of 50 regarding his personal views on questioning the importance of diversity in education.
Despite the widely held belief of the importance of diversity, Boggs said there could also be consequences of such standards, including the overuse and misrepresentation of the term. Boggs said diversity had a good reputation and was a good thing, but the term has been so overused in today’s society and has begun to lose meaning.
On the other hand, Boggs acknowledged the importance of diversity in every education, claiming that education is the search for diverse knowledge.
He stated the importance of finding the context of each situation before a decision can be made on whether or not diversity is relevant.
And unlike the popular “melting pot” metaphor used to describe American culture, Boggs suggested a different one — a tapestry. He said that all the threats of a tapestry are different and told the audience that they had the free will to choose a thread with which they were associated.
After his lecture, a dinner was served and a discussion was held at each of 10 tables about a question posed by history professor Bruce Schulman. He asked if coming closer to one positive meant forgoing another in its place.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
