by
John Stevenson
Do
you wear shoes in your home? No one in
my family wears shoes in my home or in their own. It’s our custom. Visitors usually follow suit.
It’s
also the custom in some Asian countries and in Hawaii to leave one’s shoes at
the door. And it’s becoming more common in
“the contiguous 48.” So what to do when
you go to someone else’s home. Shoes or
no shoes? Well, the solution is to
follow the custom of your host. If shoes
are acceptable, leave them on. If it’s a
no-shoe house, go shoe-less. Common
sense.
Similarly
if you were visiting Japan, for example, you would leave your shoes at the
door. You would never, I hope, think
that the fact that you wear shoes in your own home should privilege you to wear
shoes in your Japanese host’s home. The
local custom takes precedence.
Of
course wearing shoes (or going shoeless) in the house is not the real subject
here. It’s just an illustration of a
commonly held principle: people the
world around generally accept and follow the primacy of local custom.
Which
brings us to another example of campus craziness---perpetrated not by the
students, but by the school administration.
Campusreform.org reports on Clemson University’s diversity training
program for its faculty. To drum up
attendance, Clemson’s Office of Inclusion and Equity offered mugs and t-shirts
for faculty members who completed the online “inclusion awareness course.”
The
training features diversity-related fictitious scenarios from which
participants are to select the most inclusive response. Here’s an example.
“Alejandro
scheduled a 9:00 a.m. meeting with two groups of visiting professors and
students from other countries. When he
arrived, he found the first group had been waiting for 15 minutes. The second group arrived at 9:10.”
What
should Alejandro do? The incorrect
answer, of course, is for him to explain to the tardy arrivals that “in our
country 9:00 a.m. means 9:00 a.m.” The
correct answer is that he “should recognize cultural differences…and adjust
accordingly.” The explanation is that
“time may be considered precise or fluid, depending on the culture.” So Alejandro should recognize “that his
cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any
other.”
Notice
what has happened here. Alejandro is the
host. In his country (the U.S., since
Clemson is in South Carolina) “9:00 a.m. means 9:00 a.m.” But the diversity training encourages faculty
to ignore the primacy of local custom and accept instead that it “is neither
more nor less valid than any other.”
As a
consequence, members of the tardy group in this fictitious scenario do not
learn the local custom and of course are not expected to follow it---and they
presumably have no clue they have been discourteous to the members of the
on-time group and the host. If there’s
to be a second meeting, I wonder how the fictional and likely frustrated
Alejandro will go about scheduling it?
The
anonymous Clemson faculty member who alerted campusreform.org had this to
say: “I’m appalled that Clemson thought
it was necessary to ‘encourage’ its employees to take this course. I can only guess the number of productivity
hours the University lost while faculty and staff suffered through the infuriating,
biased, laughable examples.”
The
Alejandro scenario dismisses the primacy of local custom. Shoes in the house or not? Show up on time or not? Ignoring (or unaware of) the wisdom of the
ages, Clemson’s Office of Inclusion and Equity says it doesn’t matter: all
perspectives are equally valid.
Paraphrasing St.
Augustine, who bequeathed us the correct answer some 17 centuries ago: When in Rome, I do as the Romans do. It is polite and avoids conflict.
