On Diversity*
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Trace ON DIVERSITY* AMY CIMINI AND JAIRO MORENO DIVERSE: to “turn apart” (ME & OFr < L diversus, pp. of divertere, to turn aside < dis-, apart + vertere, to turn). he word “diverse,” etymology informs us, appears in the thirteenth century, perhaps in T analogy with a term used in geometry, “transverse.” Roughly four and a half centuries later, the word’s meaning becomes more or less fixed: an adjective signifying “different in char- acter or quality.” Late in the 1930s, “diverse” emerges as a verb to designate a new imperative in U.S. economics: to diversify, meaning the careful quantitative distribution of various invest- ments. By 1978, in a landmark United States Supreme Court ruling on university admissions, the word “diversity,” now a noun, comes to inscribe both a qualitative distinction of ethno-cultural groups and their quantitative distribution in institutions of higher education. Although the balance between quality and quantity, as well as their definition, was subject of much legal dispute, the notion became widely accepted that diversity of representation of various groups was fundamental to the educational mission of the university and the well-being of the social field. Whenever we speak of diversity in the U.S., we invoke the spirit of the Supreme Court’s definition. * The authors would like to thank Ana María Ochoa for comments on a draft of this article, and Clara Latham for expert research assistance. Jairo Moreno also thanks Philip Ewell and Frederick Bashour for the invitation to participate in the 2007 Society for Music Theory diversity panel in Baltimore.
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