On Friday, August 31st, the University of Illinois at Chicago announced that it was ending its 71-year-old collegiate gymnastics program. I got the news not from a press release, but from my devastated son, who is on the team and chose to attend UIC for the opportunity to compete, forgoing a full-scholarship offer from a school much closer to home.
But this post isn’t about the young men and women who were recruited (some as recently as May) in what now feels like a bait and switch. It isn’t even about the potentially devastating ripple effect this decision will have in the world of gymnastics, where only 15 men’s collegiate teams will remain. It’s about the core values of the university and what this decision says about them.
Besides the long-standing tradition of gymnastics, one of the most appealing aspects of UIC is its tremendous diversity. UIC has one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation, ranking 9th on the U.S News and World Report’s ethnic diversity index. I’ve walked across the campus many times, and it’s clear that the students come from many different backgrounds, ethnicities and cultures.
But thinking of diversity in terms of simple demographics, of statistics that might be gathered from a five-second questionnaire, is a betrayal of the core value of diversity. Real diversity comes in having people who are different at deep levels, beyond what you can see in skin color or dress. A university that wants to have a truly diverse campus must attract students that are unique. One of the ways to do this is through athletics. Since a university is an academic institution, attracting athletes inherently adds a mix to the student body.
There is no athlete more unique than an elite gymnast.
No amount of talent can overcome the minimum twelve years of hard training required to make it to this level. Of course, all the other sports usually require hard work to make high-level achievements. But we all know of examples where someone of tremendous athletic talent is able to pick up a sport relatively quickly and excel at the highest levels. Some of the most well-known sports figures didn’t really get started until high school or college. This is simply physically impossible in gymnastics. The skills they perform at the elite level require years of training for even the most naturally gifted person.
This extremely long mastery time is probably one of the biggest factors in why gymnastics doesn’t have the number of athletes that other sports do, but it also works to select people who are unlike anyone else. This is the true heart of diversity, having a group of people who are radically different from one another come together to achieve something great.
It’s clear that gymnastics at a university will attract unique people, but will they still be demographically diverse? Maybe gymnastics is like some other sports and has a tendency to associate heavily with one race or culture due to social and historical factors. I wondered this, but the UIC gymnastics team itself proves that excellence isn’t limited to any certain group of people. The team members are African American, Hispanic, White and Asian. They’ve had eight people represent seven different countries on the international stage. This kind of exposure attracts varied and diverse people to the university.
The UIC Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity says, “Everyone at UIC must consciously and deliberately work to create an environment that welcomes varied identities if we are to create a community distinguished by principles and practices of diversity …” By cancelling the gymnastics program are they consciously and deliberately creating an environment of diversity or are they doing the exact opposite?
Since few other schools have gymnastics programs, clearly keeping it at UIC will continue to attract unique people, not just the gymnasts themselves, but all the people they are connected with. Is UIC seeking to simply become like every other university, with a limited selection of mainstream sports? This is not a path of inclusion and embracing of differences.
Let’s move beyond a rudimentary understanding of diversity that seeks only to lump people into statistical categories and truly embrace creating a community of different people. The gymnastics program at UIC was already doing this, bringing in people who were unique both in the easily visible attributes like race and culture but also in the deeper qualities of what makes up a person in their essence. The mistaken decision to end gymnastics at UIC is a move that is the antithesis of the values that UIC professes to uphold.
#SaveUICGym #ItsUIC