Matt Cooper
Lantern Staff
Last spring the Butler Lantern reported on an obvious discrepancy that exists among the Butler Community College faculty. It was noted that the overwhelming majority of instructors are white.
In fact, less than three percent of faculty are of an ethnicity other than caucasian; this is an incongruity for one overlying reason. The student body is a veritable mixing pot of cultural multiplicity.
A figure to keep in mind is 28 percent. This is approximate percentage of students at Butler who are not caucasian in descent or are not originally from the United States.
Just under two-thirds of the student body is white, which means that the teaching staff is not very reflective of its undergraduate scholars.
All this is according to statistics gathered by Butler’s Department of Institutional Research.
After considering input last year from the Butler Inclusion Council’s Crystal Aluko and other instructors of the El Dorado campus, one conclusion was reached.
Given that Butler is located in a more rural area, a lack of diversity is not exactly a surprise.
Five different Grizzly students gave their input on this conclusion.
Upon arriving at Butler, Freshman Pre-Law major Victor Ramirez was not caught off guard when he found that its teaching staff was a bit culturally static.
“Since this is a small community, I knew coming in that the diversity would lessen,” Ramirez said.
Sophomore Olivier Ndikumana relayed this idea.
“You come here knowing what you are going to get,” he said. “This [El Dorado] is a small town and a small college, so it might not attract people from other nations.”
For some, the diversity discussion at Butler is purely a socioeconomic issue related to locality.
“We are a more rural area,” sophomore Andrew Nobert said. “Most people here are somewhere in the middle class.”
Most students come to Butler for the same reasons. Prerequisites are inexpensive and for El Dorado locals, the commute is minimal. However, for those like Ramirez the choice is one that requires knowing a school’s surroundings.
“You have to look at the demographics of the city you’re in and not just the school you are going to,” Ramirez said.
At a national level, student diversity is ever increasing. In fact, a study cited by U.S. News expresses that by the year 2050, contemporary minority groups exiting college will represent 55 percent of the workforce in the United States.
With this in mind, other Butler students acknowledge just how vital a diverse learning environment is to the learning experience and to the future.
Freshman nursing student Sam McGovern stressed that importance.
“I think you should be exposed to other races and ethnicities,” McGovern said.
McGovern’s solution to Butler’s lack of staff diversity, she said, would be to simply offer more culturally mixed classes.
In the end, this issue is one of nationwide relevance relevance. According to National Center for Education Statistics, 84 percent of all college professors are white, two thirds of which are male gendered.
The consensus is that a more mixed learning environment is a more effective one and that some instructors just aren’t as capable of empathizing with students of a different background than their own.
“Different races, you can learn from them,” sophomore Clark Tolleson said. “I would get tired of going to an all white school by the second month.”
Ramirez captured this idea with a direct statement.
“There are just some things ethnic teachers can relate to,” he said. “There are differences between how Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass became literate and how Mark Twain did.”
As for some instructors at Butler who are unable to meet the needs of ethnic students, Ramirez simply said, “They know they can’t relate to us, so they don’t try.”
For Tolleson, Ndikumana, Ramirez, Nobert and McGovern, one fact remains: The student body which they are a part of is highly diverse and representative of the cultural world outside of Butler County.