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.
John Bambenek is the Assistant Politics Editor for Blogcritics and is an academic professional for the University of Illinois. He is a columnist for the Daily Illini and blogs at Part-Time Pundit deep from the corn fields of Illinois.
He is the current owner of BlogSoldiers, a blog-only traffic exchange.
