Get in: Rhetoric and Realities of Diversity in the Global University

Abstract Diversity – in the nominal sense of widening access to education beyond majority group interests – is a stated objective for many institutions of higher education worldwide. However, different narratives of national and institutional identity play a role in how programmes of diversity are conceived. In recent university reforms initiated in Japan by MEXT (Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), the drive to internationalize universities through increasing the number of foreign students, faculty and collaborations runs alongside an historical and reactionary othering of rational and critical thinking as “western learning.” By contrast, for universities in the “west” the pursuit of diversity is considered an affirmation of the university as a site of civil and rational discourse, in which the welcoming of different voices is considered in terms of being both a moral imperative and institutional asset. Using Bill Readings’ 1996 critique of the modern university as a bureaucratic corporation, “The University in Ruins” as a reference point, the dissonance between the policy goal of diversity and what may actually happen in a classroom is discussed here from personal experience of teaching the history of photography, and other subjects, in Japanese Universities. Modes of classroom interaction and the role of the teacher, beyond culture-specific models, are interrogated, and finally discussed in relation to a holistic view of education espoused in the teaching methodologies of Charles A. Curran and Caleb Gattegno.