Editors urged to diversify university publications
By Martin Ricard
Diversity Institute Fellow
03.30.06
Colleges, universities and their supporters need to do a better job of covering diversity in their publications, the editor of a Seattle-based magazine said at a Nashville conference Thursday.
As colleges and universities struggle to recruit and retain diverse students, their magazines face challenges in relating to minorities while representing their universities’ traditions, Naomi Ishisaka, editor of ColorsNW Magazine, told a group of alumni magazine editors.
“Instead of putting a person of color on the cover just because they’re a person of color, cover stories on a subject like math and include a person of color,” Ishisaka suggested. She was speaking at the editors’ conference of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. “You’ve got to mainstream it so that it’s not such an oddity.”
The editors were discussing ways to improve coverage of diverse cultures, an issue that has become more critical because publications are being pressured to take more risks in covering complex issues related to people of color, Ishisaka said.
Editors also were encouraged to learn more about specific cultures within the ethnic groups represented on their campuses.
“They need to be thinking about what it means to be editing in a truly multicultural environment,” said council president John Lippincott
According to the organization’s website, the council is the largest association of educational institutions in the world.
One of the council’s goals this year is to increase minority representation within alumni, diversify the editors of their magazines, and create more diversity in the profession, Lippincott said.
One purpose of the conference was to urge alumni magazines to take more risks in covering controversial issues, especially race, and look at ways to integrate those issues into their publications and eventually into their educational constituencies.
“One of the questions we’re trying to answer is, ‘How can we as institutions address a reality … that has not necessarily been openly discussed in the past?’” Lippincott said. “We’re trying to find a middle ground.”