The English department sponsored a Gilbert Lecture entitled ” The Trouble with Diversity: Model Minorities and the Minority Model” yesterday in DeGolyer Library, featuring Walter Been Michaels, Chair at the Department of English at the University of Illinois in Chicago and author of several books including “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,” on which he based his lecture.

Michaels began his lecture with “the model minority,” a term applied to people of different cultural backgrounds who have achieved higher incomes and education than the population average.

Looking at the question of why some minorities have appeared to succeed more than others, Michaels argues that the theory puts too much emphasis on race and culture and not on class.

“The point is not that they assimilated so much to American culture as they did to the middle class,” he said. “The questions of culture and diversification are profoundly irrelevant.”

He notes that it is the people who were raised in a middle class home and immigrated to the United States were the people who were termed “the model minority.” However, this fact is skewed by the heavier focus put on diversity today than class.

“We prefer differences that we are supposed to respect,” he said, “not differences that are less egalitarian. Economically we are a much less equal society.”

Calling the model minority “deadly misleading,” Michaels said, “what matters is not your place in culture, it is your place in the wealth of the economy.”

He cites the American university system, nearly 80 percent of the population, in terms of economic wealth, is under-represented. He argues that universities are becoming less open and that only the top 20 percent of the population are allowed to fully take part. He claims this is because of the widening of the gap between upper and lower classes.

At a time when so much attention is directed to a celebration of cultural differences, Michaels said “social mobility is at an all-time low.”

“You know where social mobility is greater?” he said. “Germany. So if you want to pursue the American dream, one, learn German, and two, get on a plane to Frankfurt.”