The Diversity Statement

To the hiring committee at Drake University Biology Department,

In the current globalized society, fostering diversity and inclusion in academia is ethically imperative and essential for academic excellence and innovation. As an applicant for the Traveling Assistant Professor at Drake University, I am dedicated to promoting an inclusive and equitable environment for all students and faculty. My commitment to diversity is exemplified by my work, I worked with nine other doctorates all from China which was an incredible opportunity. They would speak to each other in Mandarin and keep secrets and lock me out of collaboration. One time I was assigned to a project that was similar to one of the doctorate graduates, we were testing early candidates for immunotherapy on triple threat breast cancer. I found out he was stealing my data from the local share drive for the laboratory, and my heart expanded three sizes with gratitude for the opportunity to learn how to password-protect my folder to maintain my intellectual property and integrity, a trait that has benefitted me throughout my career. It was an early lesson in cybersecurity that would not have been possible if not for encountering graduates of a foreign nation.

My teaching experience also exposed me to a plethora of diversity, the massive void of multicultural experience looking at their laptops during my lectures, boys trading crypto and girls checking their Instagram analytics during team projects, providing one-word answers to my queries. It was like peering into the abyss, an abyss that was peering back and felt predatory and nostalgic, like a hazy 1970s national geographic documentary in the Amazon rainforest. During my tenure at UCSF, I would walk to the Golden Gate bridge and peer over the side, (this was before the safety nets were installed), and peering over that bridge felt so eerily reminiscent of the lecture hall.

My supervisor, a white male, encouraged me to help my female and immigrant colleagues write grants and articles to help further their career, because he said, and I quote, “let’s face it, as a white male you aren’t going anywhere in academia”. After providing my two weeks’ notice to UCSF and joined City College of San Francisco, I had to train my replacement, an Indian immigrant, who had very thorough questions of my methodology. I helped him years after my resignation. This dedication to promoting an equitable environment for students and faculty shows my perseverance and grit in developing a just and equitable society for all.

My commitment to promoting an inclusive and equitable environment does not stop at the workplace, but also includes my home, when I entered into commitment vows to my partner Karuna, an immigrant from Thailand. Karuna is the love of my life and taught me to break free from my colonial and heteronormative mindset. Perhaps you have played the game “the floor is lava”, where you keep your feet from touching the floor or you lose, and you and your friends go from couch to the loveseat and climb the banister in an effort to traverse the room without touching the floor? That is in essence the life one leads with Karuna, whom I love very much for her anticolonial and unique perspective. We have a set of shoes that we must wear inside the house, and we must never take our outdoor shoes inside the house. We also cannot wear our socks inside the house without slippers, because the socks can still get dirty from contact with the floor. Bringing the groceries home is an adventure, as I need to take my outdoor shoes off to put on my indoor slippers, and when we have to make several trips, I must switch from my indoor slippers to my outdoor slippers in the garage, and then switch back to my indoor slippers to enter the house. The outdoor slippers obviously cannot enter into the house either. Our clean floor remains further evidence of my steadfast devotion to indigenous East Asian culture.

When Karuna and I had our daughter Chalaem, I was so delighted she looked like her mother. Our favorite times were during the pandemic; it provided the structure we needed as a family. Now, not only was the floor lava, but other people’s breathing was also lava. The social distancing, the masks, the rules made us closer together, huddled in our rented townhome. We would take classes asynchronously and sing karaoke with each other. We documented our vax schedules and cherished our time together, having virtual playdates with our classmates. For us the use of pronouns was natural and seamless, Chalaem is a they/them and we encourage her and her non-binary playmates to express themselves naturally.

Diversity also means letting go of old-fashioned concepts of patriarchy and masculinity, which I have thankfully forfeited in entirety. In a way my non-tenure position at City College helped complete the inversion of outdated sexual roles. I do a majority of the cleaning and cooking, as any man should do. I must say as a point of pride that I am very good at washing dishes, far better than Karuna who is a natural leader and breadwinner in the family. I take each minute and focus on cleanliness of each dish before loading each immaculately clean dish in its precisely proper place in the dishwasher. Karuna insists that the autoclaving nature of the dishwasher eliminates any residual oil on the plates. I am even more proud of my ability to vacuum, which I do with perfect rectangular precision. Karuna has a beautiful mind, but she doesn’t realize that you need to bisect the room into triangles with the vacuum and attack the hypotenuse of those triangles in a figure eight motion. That’s why she never believes me when I tell her I can finish vacuuming faster than her and remain more consistent. I feel a twinge of a frisson every time I see the tracks in the living room carpet with alternating straight lines.

Every single moment of my life is consumed by my engagement with diversity. Why, for example, just the other day I bought some asparagus and instant béarnaise sauce mix from the grocery store. I had a perfectly divine plan to boil asparagus for five minutes then sauté lightly in olive oil while preparing the béarnaise. It would naturally pair well with rotisserie chicken and oven roasted potatoes. But Costco was out of rotisserie chicken on this particularly busy day, and the next day I come home and Karuna just blatantly doused my asparagus with soy sauce. Now, I tell you, is there any greater commitment to diversity? And just last weekend I went to Costco on a Sunday, and while I was trying the free samples, an Indian family huddled in front of me to get free samples of lentil curry on paratha. There was a ten-year-old and a teenage girl and they were just two fisting the paratha and getting one in their mouth before grabbing the third and the parents’ eyes widened as if it were their last meal and confiscating the freshly made samples. The Oaxacan server, no taller than 4’10”, soul exhausted, looked up at me and sighed deeply. When she told me “Is ten more minutes” I knew that the gift of diversity has provided me a wealth of patience and strength of character, which I am willing to provide in service to the role at Drake University.

My hobby life is also enriched by dedication to anticolonial, liberation-minded mentoring programs. I participate in a program that mentors immigrant women who come to America pregnant that are nervous about their future that provides resources and positivity for them to find the closest planned parenthood and assist with aftercare and procuring funding for tubal ligation and a wealth of resources to obtain housing, food and health care. We had monthly quotas, not set in stone of course as it was all volunteer, but we would try to optimize access to female health care for as many immigrant communities as we could. Every time a niňa would come home we could coordinate a welcome home message explaining that “She was the future of America”, that immigrants visiting planned parenthood should take control of her career and future was what defines America.

To be an American means to break through old barriers that keep us confined. But colonial thinking, heteronormativity, and patriarchy are all social constructs. Nothing confines and restricts us more than biology. That’s why the project I am most proud of is the one dedicated to helping guide young immigrants through their transition to American society and additionally their genders. I am an administrator for POTLUCK, which stands for Professors Offering Transgender Latinx Unlimited Cosmetic Konstruction, that encourages young immigrant boys to perform dynamic and acrobatic entertaining their audience and encourages young immigrant girls to stop plucking their eyebrows and play pool. I teach them to coordinate GoFundMe and OnlyFans campaigns for their drag ensembles and top and bottom surgeries. And crucially, and this was something I’m particularly proud of, was the total bodily exchange program. It was ingenious really. All the breast reduction tissue, where does it go? In the biohazard bin, right? There are tens of millions of MtFs just waiting to achieve their destiny and become who they were meant to be, and here is all this tissue that is going to waste. So, we invested in tissue retention programs to match breast tissue to amenable hosts with similar blood types and created fundraising drives to match donor tissue with recipients. We even have a program that allows people born in the wrong gender and race to have mixed race implants. Because some immigrants feel dysphoric about their upbringing and until now had thoughts of depression and suicide but the means to address cross-race dysphoria were not at our disposal until today. Until POTLUCK got involved this procedure was very experimental and only done at very exclusive institutions. Thanks to our efforts at POTLUCK, we enable and facilitate this service for all immigrants of oppressed colonized nations. With the help of my fellow faculty we even crafted this welcome hymn for students.

The POTLUCK commUNITY hymn:

POTLUCK is a community whose aims are ever true

In fact we’re like a family; filled with kindness too

It doesn’t matter your phenotype or phrenology

POTLUCK is here to help match biology to psychology

POTLUCK is bursting at the seams with creativity

Not with words or paint or film but with your identity

Perhaps you feel a tingling in your armpits or areola

That it should originate from Armenia or even Anatolia?

Perhaps your left breast should have come from old Rwanda

Variety is the spice of life, the right one’s from Uganda

With the forearm of Tibetans, we can craft a fine erection

And POTLUCK’s surgeons are the best, don’t worry for infection

Here at POTLUCK we open up our arms to refugees

Who heretofore had no chance to do just as they please

Throw off the chains of backwards and contemptuous hysteria

Welcome to the transgender, transethnic cafeteria!

We aimed to provide support and a safe space for those who have experienced pushback in life and seek to provide gender transition services no matter where they come from, what they believe in, how they look, sound, speak, hear, think, move, feel, or understand the world. In addition to teaching and research, my goal is to provide this level of openness and acceptance to every single student at Drake University.

I know I’m over the word limit here but I have one key anecdote I want to share: just the other day I visited Yosemite national park with Karuna and Chalaem. It had these magnificent waterfalls and majestic views. There were all kinds of wildlife and especially birds. There was this red shouldered hawk that sits there peacefully watching over all of these patrons of the park. It’s called red but it’s really a kind of golden cummerbund he wears, stealthily watching us. In the midst of this beautiful natural park are people of all different backgrounds, Arabic families dressed in full regalia taking family photos, Honduran single moms with and endless supply of young Abuelita’s in training. I had brought my old Canon to take quality photos, and right there on the guardrail overlooking this majestic waterfall is a Gatorade bottle sitting one hundred feet from a trashcan. This was just one example in which I found myself bursting at the seams with gratitude for the benefits of a diverse and multipolar society benefit a menagerie of humanity of all shapes and sizes, because, in my moment of picking up that Gatorade bottle and trudging a hundred feet to the garbage can, I felt a swelling of pride because diversity gave me the opportunity to become a more thoughtful and valuable citizen providing a service to beautify the park so that Jordanians and Guatemalans can have a more pristine view of nature. Diversity provides the obstacles that make me become a stronger citizen.

I began climbing the rock face in Yosemite, I brought Chalaem as I had recently received my belaying certificate to support them as they was climbing. I became enamored with the idea of climbing rock faces the act of conquering nature and expanding my presence over it, mastering the terrain and making claim to it and planting my flag. But my exposure to and contribution to serving a diverse and multicultural experience, still gnawed at me. The black spider of the abyss enveloped me like a dark shroud cold to the touch. The guttural syllables from their foreign tongues echoing in my cavernous mind. The sagging eyelids, darting and evasive eyes, constant plea for better grades and an unmistakable congealing of sebum on cold days, the pervasive aroma of coriander and turmeric stinging my eyes. When bouldering these visions haunt me and I consider my life insurance policy, which Karuna doesn’t even know about, and whether now was the time to make my final contribution to the very concept of diversity. Maybe I will let the hiring committee at Drake University help me to make this decision.

In closing, I envision Drake University to not only reflect the diversity of our society but actively works to dismantle whiteness and create pathways of opportunity for all, whether they are brown or black or rainbow colored with a little bit of pink and baby blue in the mix. I am excited by the prospect of joining Drake University if it shares this vision and welcomes the chance to collaborate in building a more inclusive future. I believe diversity isn’t just a value – it’s a daily practice—one that challenges comfort, invites conflict, demands humility and openness and listening and unlearning and growing—because without it, we stagnate—we silence voices—we lose what makes us truly innovative and human.

Together toward inclusion,

Richard Carousel, PhD