No. 112/2021

S ilkeWieprecht has never forgotten one particular review, although it happened a long time ago. The head of the Department of Hydraulic Engineering andWater Resources Management at the University of Stuttgart was a member of the selection committee for a prestigious fellowship for prospective academics. “Suddenly, I read this sentence written by a reviewer: ‘She’s not bad at all,’ he wrote about a highly- qualified candidate, ‘given that she’s a black woman.’” Silke Wieprecht found the sentence so absurd that she remembered it – despite the fact that her work on a host of different selection committees means she reads dozens of candidates’ application packages every year. AT GERMAN UNIS THE TOPIC IS STILL RELATIVELY NEW Nearly everyone who deals with diversity can relate anec- dotes like this. At German universities, it is a topic that is still comparatively new. Gülay Çağlar, professor of poli- tics in the Gender and Diversity Division at FU Berlin and a Humboldt host, says she encountered the term for the first time in works on organisational theory in the private sector. “In business, the term ‘diversity management’ is quite common, clearly linked to the logic of exploitation,” she explains. “For universities this means the more diverse the perspectives, the more multifaceted and excellent the research.” But universities still had very different inter- pretations of diversity: for some it was a kind of extended equality policy, for others, an internationalisation tool and for yet others, a facet of anti-discrimination policy. DIVERSITY TRUMPS GENDER – THAT SUITS SOME PEOPLE VERY WELL To begin with, Gülay Çağlar therefore suggests breaking the term down. Ultimately, it was all about portraying the diversity of society at a university: “Traditionally, we encoun- ter the triad ‘gender, class, race’, but the list is often extended to include disabilities, for example, or sexual orientation or age.” And this is precisely where the problems start: whilst it is statistically straightforward to determine how equally women and men are represented in the student body and amongst researchers, there is often no data on other cate- gories. Whether a woman applying for a professorship is the daughter of academics or unskilled workers is just as difficult to survey as the question regarding her ancestors’ nationality. And another cliff edge was threatening, Çağlar has observed: with all the efforts to apply diversity criteria, gender issues, in particular, could get pushed into the back- ground. “Some people who are critical of promoting women look on it as an opportunity when gender differences are no longer such a focus of higher education policy,” says Çağlar. Above all, diversity policy was a process, she continues, explaining how she and her research team are helping FU Berlin to draw up a diversity concept. One of the first offi- cial acts was to share ideas with the university’s strategic partners worldwide. “At our Israeli partner university, for example, the question of religious affiliation emerged as a category of difference but played nothing like the same role in the other countries involved,” says Çağlar. So, how diversity is defined crucially depends on the specific con- ditions in the individual countries. › Photos of fruit: Adobe Stock 13 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 112/2021