Appointed in 2009 as the inaugural Vice President for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity at Case Western Reserve University, Marilyn Sanders Mobley, PhD, provides strategic leadership for the university-wide effort to develop and sustain a welcoming environment for faculty, students, staff, and alumni. She is a member of the Leadership Cleveland Class of 2010 and serves as a trustee for the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cuyahoga County Public Library Foundation, and Women of Hope. She was also selected to chair the Breakthrough Charter Schools Diversity Committee and was recently selected to serve on the board of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. Prior to her appointment at CWRU, she served as Provost at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Prior to her provost appointment, she was the Associate Provost for Educational Programs at George Mason University and a tenured Associate Professor of English, where she was also a faculty member for 19 years. Dr. Mobley also founded the African American Studies Program at George Mason and served as its first director for six years. She is a published author and Toni Morrison scholar, whose first book— Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative (LSU Press, 1991)—was one of the first cross-cultural studies on the Nobel Prize winning author. Her two books in progress include Spaces for the Reader: Toni Morrison’s Narrative Poetics and Cultural Politics and The Strawberry Room, And Other Places Where a Woman Finds Herself, a memoir about the passage from family trauma to spiritual recovery. Dr. Mobley is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc, and is the proud mother of two adult sons and grandmother of three grandsons. She serves as a lay minister at Arlington Church of God and resides in Akron, Ohio. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

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The Paradox of Diversity
Marilyn Sanders Mobley, PhD
Vice President for Inclusion, Diversity & Equal Opportunity and
Professor of English
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio

2. This, then, is the end of his [or her] striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation…
--W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 1903
The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the
academy.
-- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the
Practice of Freedom, 1994
Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
--Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture, 1993
A Context for Dialogue on Diversity

3. par·a·dox | ˈparəˈdäks
a situation that seems to have
contradictory qualities
The Paradox of Diversity

4. Adapted from Loden, 1996
Cultural Contact Lens

5. Mom Dad
A Legacy of Diversity Work