Degrees of Difference: Culture Matters on Campus

Degrees of Difference: Culture Matters on Campus is a videotape created in 1998 by Elizabeth Ellsworth, the late Mimi Orner, Clark Thompson, and Rick Voithofer. Funded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education Dean’s office, the program has been shown on public television and a copy is available for campus use from the Dean’s Office in the School of Education (24 minutes, ½ inch).

The program begins to address the richness of the social and cultural difference brought to university and college campuses by members of the university and college communities. The video features various creative social and cultural responses that students, faculty, and staff make the “meeting places: between what they bring to and what they find at the universities and colleges. At those meeting places, we can see how social and cultural difference is always in action and in the making. It is always in process and never complete.

“Degrees of Difference” emphasizes the strategies and ideas that students, faculty, staff and administrators have for getting their needs met, for making a home on campus and for feeling good about themselves and their work, their cultures, and their bodies. The university is portrayed as a site and an occasion for the production and negotiation of social and cultural difference, rather than as something that exists of or prior to these dynamics.

The tape’s producers invited students (graduate and undergraduate) and administrators to choose what issues they wanted to address and how they wanted to be imaged in the video. Three students, Victoria Devereaux, Jeanne Lascourt, and Kevin Kumashiro self-produced segment by selected images to represent themselves and scripting their own narration.

The video is divided into five sections: “Because We’re Here,” “Campus on the Verge,” “Commuter Campus,” “Degrees of Difference” and “Culture Matters.” These five sections can be watched together to promote a general discussion or individually to facilitate discussion about the specific issues raised in each section.

This tape is designed to support faculty, staff, students, and administrators in:
1. Expanding visions of “who is here” on university and college campuses and “how we are here”—paying particular attention to people’s strategies for social and cultural continuity and survival.
2. Fostering a sense of three-dimensionality of people’s lives as students, faculty, and staff;
3. Imagining innovative pedagogical and administrative responses to the meanings and operations of social and cultural differences in university classrooms and life.

Facilitators at screenings of “Degrees of Difference: Culture Matters” might find the following to be useful:

I) “Degrees of Difference” opens with a series of questions, including:

1. “Shouldn’t I treat everyone as a unique individual?” David (Administrator)
2. “Why do I feel so awkward around people from other cultural backgrounds?” –Rachel (undergraduate)
3. “Why am I required to take an ethnic studies course?” – Eric (undergraduate)
4. “Shouldn’t I try to be color blind?” -- Michael (Professor)
5. “Do I lose out as a white person under affirmative action?” –Gretchen (Graduate student)
6. “If we have come a long way towards ending racism, then why does it occur so frequently?” -- Beverly (academic advisor)
7. “Is the correct term ‘Black’ or ‘African American’?” – Craig (academic staff)
8. “What do I want to know about race and ethnicity, but am afraid to ask?” – Connie (Professor)
9. “Why should I care about social and cultural differences” – Patricia (graduate student)

II) One section of “Degrees of Difference” elaborates on Peggy McIntosh’s “Knapsack of Privilege” a listing of circumstances and privileges that are often taken for granted or an “natural” by those who enjoy them. In that section, voices speak the following:

1. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
2. I can be sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only one speaking English.
3. I can be fairly sure that my body size or disability will not count against me in terms of academic and family privileges.
4. Because of my sexual orientation, my partner is seen as an asset to my life, deserving of health benefits and family privileges.
5. I can speak in my native tongue without fear that people think I’m talking about them.
6. I can count on being in the company of people who speak my language.
7. I did not have to be educated about racism, sexism, or heterosexism in order to protect myself from physical harassment.
8. I can find my race widely represented in course work, texts, and popular culture.
9. Because of my sexual orientation and appearance, I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the residence halls, at the healthy service and at social events on and off campus.
10. I can easily find courses that give attention only to people of my cultural, racial, or language background.
11. I don’t have to worry about whether I can fit into desks or lecture hall seats.
12. I can be sure that I need legal or medical help, my race won’t count against me.
13. I can easily buy music, posters, greeting cards, and food that fit with my cultural traditions.
14. I can be unaware of the perspectives of people of other races and cultures without realizing any penalty within my culture.
15. I can county on my skin color to enhance the appearance of financial reliability.
16. Most everything that makes up campus life supports and celebrates my sexual orientation.

III.) The following quotes appear in “Degrees of Difference”:

1. “By 2056, most people in the U.S. will trace their ancestry to Africa, Asia, the Latin World, Pacific Island or Arabia” -- Ron Takaki

2. “If I am not what I’ve been told I am, then it means you’re not what you thought you were either. And that is the crisis.” -- James Baldwin

3. “If I and other teachers truly want to provoke our students to break through the limits of the conventional and the take for granted, we ourselves have to experience breaks with what has been established in our own lives.” – Maxine Greene

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