Diversity reconsidered

First of all, happy birthday to the Fifteenth Amendment! The legislation was ratified 140 years ago to the day and continues to age like fine wine.
In other news, I have diversity fever. The first class session of EAD 965 featured an intense match of semantic volleyball, during which all team members rolled up their sleeves and sought to nail down a working definition of diversity. We sweated over syntax and mixed metaphors with wild abandon. The fruit of our labor took paragraph form and, I argue, a definition largely unrecognizable to anyone who has actually used the word diversity in a sentence. Average Americans would have wept had they been present.
The good news is that we are not alone in our semantic morass.
We are joined by the American Associations of Colleges and Universities (1995) who have defined diversity as:
The variety created in any society (and within any individual) by the presence of different points of view and ways of making meaning which generally flow from the influence of different cultural, ethnic, and religious heritages, from the differences in how we socialize women and men, and from the differences that emerge from class, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability and other socially constructed characteristics
Really? Was it necessary to compile a greatest hits list of social identities and tip the hat to Kegan to define diversity? No, people, we are working too hard.
A word's definition need only account for the word itself, not for the nuances of every social context in which a word might be used. If we want to know what educators or institutions of higher education mean by "diversity" we must take a harder look at those educators and institutions, not at the dictionary.
If for the sake of argument, we did take a look at the dictionary, we would find a starker linguistic landscape. The Oxford English Dictionary (which MSU affiliates may access for free here) defines diversity as "The condition or quality of being diverse, different, or varied; difference, unlikeness". There is no mention of social identity or making meaning of difference. There is no reference to policy making or sociohistorical context. There is just difference. Diversity is a vessel we fill with different differences to address differently differing difference. We cannot talk about the contents of the vessel as part of the vessel itself. The language we use is a reflection of ourselves, not of the language.
So, I have diversity fever. I can't stop thinking about all of the ideas that those four little syllables can encompass, all of the roles it can play. Mostly, I can't stop thinking that the diverse use of diversity tells us what kinds of differences we value . . . or not.