Dear Darden Community,
In my capacity as Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer for the Darden School, I would like to welcome all of our new members of the Darden family to Charlottesville, and welcome back all who have taken time away to pursue new ventures or just rejuvenate.
If you walk through the halls of the Classroom Building, The Abbott Center, the Faculty Office Building, Student Services, or Sponsor’s Hall, it will quickly become all too apparent that we constitute an extraordinarily diverse community in both overt and subtle ways. As we settle into working and living together in the coming months, you will continue to be engaged in dialogue about those differences. That dialogue will happen in classrooms, at dining tables, in offices and in the hallways and it will often be enlightening and invigorating.
As you continue to broaden your perspectives on difference and diversity, it may help to understand and reflect on why diversity matters at the Darden School. Here’s why:
- Diversity has the potential to elevate performance, both individually and collectively. In an increasingly global and diverse world, being a proverbial diversity ostrich is just a bad idea. Being professionally and personally successful in the coming years requires that you have a clear understanding of and comfort with people who are different from you. Contrary to popular belief and rhetoric, diversity is not always good. Sometimes it leads to dysfunction. But when it is engaged and managed well, difference provides unparalleled benefits in performance, innovation, and satisfaction with the relationships in your life.
- Diversity challenges us to examine our values. Being happy and harmonious together with our differences is a nice place to be, but in fact in most situations, the harmony is a bit of an illusion. Real harmony emerges in a diverse community only after the members of that community have challenged one another, listened to one another, felt reactive and frustrated with one another, and experienced empathy and understanding with one another, even when our positions are irreconcilable. Difference is important at Darden because it makes us pay attention to assumptions we have likely not questioned: “I am rarely if ever biased,” “Some people are always biased,” “Differences don’t matter that much,” “People don’t understand enough how differences matter.” By examining our values and assumptions about each other and about ourselves, we make ourselves more skillful and competent professionals and more enlightened individuals.
- Diversity provides the context for learning inside and outside of our classrooms. The way we effectively enhance our performance and challenge our values is through learning. Incorporating those lessons into practice is what creates sustainable change for us as individuals and for this school. For lots of reasons, I suspect we are united in our aspiration for the Darden School to thrive today and in the future. Our ability to promote an environment of learning in the face of difference is what will create sustained value for the School.
My hope is that each of us at Darden has an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding experience in the months ahead. I have no doubt that how well we negotiate our differences as a community will contribute to the quality of that experience.
Good Luck and have a terrific year!
Martin Davidson
Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer
