Slaton's engineering article

Slaton's article presents two different stories of engineering and minority education. In the first section, a well meaning university president attempts to diversify an engineering program and create a strong school by capitalizing on skills and abilities of minorities. Unfortunately, his conservative approach leads to less-than-desirable results.

In this case, by resisting the introduction of remedial level classes in higher education, he effectively limited the potential of the school by not including students that had not received comparable training to non-minorities. Unfortunately, in many cases, the reasons for the lack of education prior to higher education is related directly or indirectly to events and environments that are intricately related with the minority culture.

In the second case, Slaton describes a story of a minority centered University flourishing because their main funding sources (CARR and NASA) allow enough time for the school to create an infrastructure that supports the research that these funding institutions desire. Slaton depicts this school as fundamentally different than the first school in her article. In this instance, the school makes little attempt to diversify, but time and resources are given to students, faculty, and staff in order to produce results that are valuable for the community.

I'm forced to wonder why this is a story that is intricately tied to racial diversity. The cases described could have occurred regardless of race. I believe the more important point may be that rationalistic control over education is not the one and only way to run a school. The cultures that created minority disadvantage in both cases are not specific to minority; they are specific to disadvantaged cultures. That is, power runs through discourse in any human environment; it may be more important to look for those that are suffering rather than those who are popularly seen as different.