Hilal Nakiboglu: Breaking down ethnic isolation

Connecticut College President Norman Fainstein canceled classes one day last month at the request of student leaders there. Nearly all of the 1,650 students on campus spent the day listening to and participating in a three-hour forum.

The gathering came in necessary response to a series of racist acts recently carried out at Connecticut.

Unfortunate incidents of damaging vandalism cloaked Black History Month with a sad shroud, and an intercultural group dealt with fear and discomfort after receiving a hostile e-mail at the college. When a minority student was harassed over the telephone recently, student leaders finally decided something needed to be done.

It is telling that the push to action came not from Connecticut College administrators, but from the students themselves. This gestures toward a larger tendency: faculty and administrators can make reluctant, poor choices when it comes to managing their student populations.

Last December, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education provided further testament to this. The piece reported on Diversity Week activities at the University of Houston. Apparently, administrators there thought investing in a 600-pound "Human Race Machine" was a sign of forward-thinking. The machine, which looks like a large video-game booth, employed digital photography technology to change the "racial appearance of the face." Instantly, with the help of this great machine, students could walk in and be transformed, effectively "becoming Middle Eastern" or "Indian," for instance.

The idea that this could happen presupposes that certain physical traits are racially determined. It also suggests that we can "understand" -- or at least gain some sort of awareness around -- another race, another ethnicity simply through the process of receiving what the article calls a "racial facial."

Surprising to administrators at the university, students didn't appreciate the Human Race Machine. Some found its propensity to add stereotypical traits disturbing. Other students were bothered by the exaggerated nature of the features applied, especially those which characterized "being" Asian or black.

At the University of Houston and Connecticut College alike, administrators were guilty of unfortunate poor judgement and, in the case of the latter, inert complacency. My hunch is, had both sets of campus leaders consulted their students, things might have been handled differently.

It is convincing to say that administrators and faculty are better versed and equipped than we are when it comes to issues of scholarship, as well as the nuts and bolts of running an institution. Arguably, they are good at balancing budgets and developing academic curricula respectively. Yet, perhaps they could lend a more attentive ear to us when considering aspects of campus life for which we just might have a better sense.

Scholar Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has described campuses today as being damaged by a "cult of ethnicities" which "exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms... between races and nationalities." Deciding that the end result is a climate of "self-pity and self-ghettoization," he understands current collegiate interpretations of multiculturalism as being unfortunately separatist.

In The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger even quotes one unnamed Penn professor as saying our campus has "separate armed camps. The black kids don't mix with the white kids. The Asians are off by themselves. Oppression is the great status symbol."

Certainly, Penn is not alone in being accused of ethno-racial huddling. Dinesh D'Souza has criticized Stanford University for having "ethnic theme houses." Even Oberlin College, the poster child-prototype for the racially integrated institution, was slapped by Jacob Weisberg, formerly of The New Republic, in a piece which described a college where "Asians live in Asia House... [and] foreign students in the Third World House."

Although I don't subscribe to Schlesinger's and D'Souza's larger beliefs around the functions of multiculturalism, I do find some relevance in their above points. Universities have, since the early 1990s especially, attended to "diversity" by creating these "ethnic houses." Clearly, these centers have their place and function. Yet, caution must be exercised when their creation comes with the price tag of, using Schlesinger's language, campus disunity.

Walking into the ARCH Building, it is encouraging to see resources dedicated to the support of, largely, minority students. What is less heartening is the realization that although they share space, meaningful communication between the centers and beyond is limited.

Penn's Greenfield Intercultural Center has a stated mission of linking student centers with one another. But located on the outskirts of campus and with dwindling funds, it is far removed, sadly understaffed and often forgotten. The center looks primarily to volunteers and part-timers to carry out programs essential for the interconnection of campus groups.

GIC's task is ambitious: to prevent the persistence of isolated, insular "ethnic houses" from harming Penn's campus climate. Let's hope, for the sake of students especially, the center isn't starved out of existence. It is needed here.

Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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