Cultural Diversity and the Test of Leadership

Abstract

Cultural Diversity and the Test of Leadership Item: Last year, the valedictorian of the graduating class of the U.S. Air Force Academy was Hoang Nhu Tran, a boat person who was among the last to get out of Saigon in 1975. He arrived in the United States able to say Hello and little else. This fall, after finishing a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he will take up a scholarship at Harvard Medical School. If you read the papers or look around your classroom, you will know Lt. Tran is not alone in his remarkable level of achievement--merely symbolic, the most newsworthy example of a particular minority that is making the American dream its own. Item: In California, officials last year predicted that this fall, a majority of all school-age children would be from some minority group (Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian). As often happens, California is the leading edge of a major, national demographic change. We are more and more becoming a nation of minorities. Item: Sometime in the next century, the life expectancy of a newborn child will hit 100. For the first time in human history, it will become commonplace--the norm--for four generations to know and interact with one another. We have no models for a society constructed on that demographic premise, nor do we yet understand how to construct an intergenerational culture. Item: A recently published book gives a devastating portrayal of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press). William Julius Wilson argues that America's cities have become the breeding ground for families and individuals whose behavior contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America, a socially pathological environment characterized by joblessness, disintegration of the family, and the increasing physical, social, cultural, and economic isolation of the poor. These items are indicators of massive subterranean shifts in our country and the makeup of our population. They are descriptors of the America in which the new generation of leaders in CEC must operate, and which will shape the agenda they must meet and deal with in the next decade and the next century. They represent both the hope and the dark underside of a swirling mass of issues that travels under the name diversity. The Baby Boomers. In the middle of all this is the average CEC member, born sometime between the end of World War II and 1964--a baby boomer. More than with any other, it is with this generation that I would like to have an evening by the fireside. And if I could, this is what I would want to say to you. Your generation has begun to succeed mine in positions of responsibility and authority. You are taking over, and you will have to lead. You're lucky. You were shaken loose from the foundations of my generation by the cultural earthquake called the Sixties, by the Vietnam War, the Peace Corps, the civil rights struggles, and yes, even by the Me Decade. You lived through a social commitment to do good when times were good. And that commitment has shaped you. Your challenge is the generation right behind you, those who have been born since 1970. And what you may not yet see is that they are more different from you than you are different from us. A big percentage of them are the video boomers, the kids-becoming-adults whose entire consciousness of self and society has been molded by television, by the easy availability of whatever they wanted, whether money or sex or drugs, by a social ethos which promised and delivered instant gratification. …