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Key points
- We cannot succeed alone because achievement is socially constructed.
- People tend to ignore the 99.9 percent of our genetic similarities and to magnify the 0.1 percent of difference.
- Applying the generosity to foreigners philosophy requires that our actions match our values.
University of Miami President Julio Frenk deeply cares about students. I initially came into contact with him in my capacity as the president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Miami, my alma mater. Although I am one of the thousands of students with whom he engaged, President Frenk continued to serve as a treasured mentor.
During my time in Miami, I went to get a haircut from a barbershop near the University of Miami. The barber told me that President Frenk gets his hair cut here; he attests that President Frenk is thoroughly devoted to students. And I, having studied at three higher-education institutions, strongly agree. President Frenk practices what he preaches.
What I find inspiring about the story of President Frenk is simple: He arrived in the United States from Mexico to pursue his higher education and then climbed the ladder of success. His story provides a glimpse of hope that international and foreign students are an integral part of American society.
I recently returned to Miami to meet with President Frenk to discuss my professional goals. In my one-hour meeting with him, I was exhilarated as I had the pleasure of engaging with his focused mind. I shared with him my zero-generation concept and the success I achieved with Psychology Today. President Frenk suggested that I have done well in the genetic lottery, which we all undergo. Although I arrived in the United States at age of 19, I somehow persevered and navigated a new language and culture without the support of my family and friends whom I left back in Yemen, where I was born, raised, and educated.
President Frenk made a subtle yet important distinction: He argued that no one starts from zero as we all owe something to someone. However, some of us have better social advantages than others. After we undergo the genetic lottery, as President Frenk suggested, we are destined to have either nourishing or toxic parents. None of this involves our conscious efforts. We are thrown to the precarity and uncertainty of life, right before we gain consciousness of our very existence.
Absolute and Relative Merit
When I shared the zero-generation students concept with President Frenk, he mentioned the hubris of merit, where some modern professionals erroneously believe that they are self-made, altogether forgetting all the structural advantages that made their success possible in the first place. Incorporating the insights of his colleague Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard, who published The Tyranny of Merit, President Frenk proposed two categories through which merit could be ascertained: either absolute or relative.
Absolute merit ignores the contingencies in which human success is situated, whereas relative merit incorporates those contingencies. For example, when we assess the intelligence of zero-generation students, we have to situate their worth according to the life contingencies in which they are raised. We cannot assess the zero-generation students in so-called objective standards because they foster bias and miss the intelligence of those students. People do not start life on equal footing, and we ought to incorporate that fact when assessing human talent.
Achieving Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
In our quest to achieve equity, diversity, and inclusion, we have to look beyond the American-centric notion that tends to pervade the higher-education discourse that operates on national silos. The problems in our higher education are not American problems; they are human problems that ailed our species since the dawn of civilization. We are hardwired to notice the difference, which is often deployed as the basis for “othering” people whose ways of being, doing, and knowing are rendered different and therefore inhumane.
President Frenk shared that his philosophy of showing kindness to strangers challenges this natural tendency to discriminate based on difference. He suggested that humans are more alike than different. Although we are 99.9 percent identical in our genetic makeup, we, unfortunately, tend to focus on the 0.1 percent difference and use that as the basis of our reference.
Although we live in ostensibly modern and therefore better times, we are still paralyzed by the tribal mode of thinking that demarcates humans into either “us” or “them.” Consequently, we have to adopt the generosity to strangers philosophy to counter our tendency to discriminate based on difference. We should use the difference as a marker of unity, diversity, and inclusion—not division, discrimination, and prejudice.
Generosity to strangers, therefore, is neither for the timid nor the rigid. Ironically, most modern people claim to exude an open mind toward difference when, in fact, they discriminate against difference vehemently and viciously. They claim to be global citizens, yet they wholesale reject traditional ways of being, doing, and knowing in the world. This conflicting attitude, which I observed in three higher-education institutions, is confusing at best and hypocritical at worst.
The solution to this predicament is to lead by example. That is why the story of President Frenk is worth spreading—he is a leader whose actions match his values. He is not only a par excellence scholar but also an exemplary leader—setting a high record of leadership, scholarship, and public service.
