Universities like to celebrate how diverse their campus community is. They’ll have culture houses for this minority and that minority. At the University of Illinois in Champaign they even have an African American Homecoming which is a distinct and concurrent celebration during the normal homecoming on campus. There is no campus community; there are several different communities that occupy the same chunk of land.
If diversity means having a bunch of different groups who don't really associate with each other in the same general area, than these types of programs are a resounding success. However, if these programs are supposed to create a community in any sense of the word, they are a dramatic failure. As with most race-based programs, all the gets produced is more division.
What all these culture houses, cultural programs, and race-based admission policies do is take people by race, group them together, and make sure everyone realizes that they are distinct. The inherent meaning of African-American homecoming is that the African-Americans have their own events and the white students have theirs. Having a Latino culture house, a Japanese culture house, an African-American culture house, and a LGBT culture house means that those houses become a sanctuary for people to only associate with their "group." Far from creating diversity, it creates division and makes the student body pick up the tab. It makes administrators feel good about promoting "cultural awareness" while all but ensuring the divisions remains firmly in place.
Communities are created by having a common element to rally around. Universities tend to inherently have that element whether it is the common academic institution or the sports teams or the general campus culture. Instead of bringing people together with diverse backgrounds and letting everyone mutually share in those backgrounds, the campus "diversity" programs ensure that those cultures retreat into their own corners. In the name of bringing unity, segregation has been manufactured. A diverse campus community? Hardly.
Article comments
1 - Arch Conservative
Once again you make some very valid and poignant observations of what's actually going on at our campuses today John.
i'm sure some a bunch of liberal idiots who have no idea what they're talking about willshow up soon to refute all of these points with no evidence.
2 - zingzing
having cultural centers (and in buildings that celebrate that culture) is fine and good. but the "african-american homecoming" is just a bad idea. isn't homecoming supposed to be about school pride or some such nonsense?
for once, i'm (nearly) in agreement with bambi. scary.
from what i've noticed, however, "culture houses" function more as museums and galleries, places to give lectures, that sort of thing; they do not necessarily function as a "frat house" kind of environment. at least from what i have noticed.
more to the point, the girlfriend is chinese/taiwanese. so, she's been to her campus' asian culture house several times for various things. i've been there with her a few times as well. not only is it usually empty, it seems it is rarely even open unless there is some event, and when there is an event, the crowd is diverse. that's what they should be used for: cultural events. not parties. or as a general gathering spot.
3 - JustOneMan
How come these sames campuses cant have a White cultural center or a Heterosexual Student Assocaition, or apply the sames silly racial standards to sports teams and they do to academics?????
4 - zingzing
who's going to start a white cultural center? who wants to see their school's football team lose every goddamn week?
logical argument, but it just doesn't work.