Kimstu:
OK, but the question is, do Native Americans need to go live in the Native American dorm in order to learn about being Native American? Or are these houses just preaching to the converted?
It would make more sense to allow students to live in any ethnically-themed dorm except the one which corresponds to their background.
sqweels: OK, but the question is, do Native Americans need to go live in the Native American dorm in order to learn about being Native American?
I don’t think anybody’s saying that they do. Not all Native American students live in Native-American-themed housing, and not all students in Native-American-themed housing are Native American. As I understand it, that’s the way pretty much all ethnic-themed university housing works (december has dredged up one or two hints about possible exceptions, but AFAICT we haven’t yet seen a definite instance of ethnic-themed housing that is officially committed to ethnic self-segregation).
It would make more sense to allow students to live in any ethnically-themed dorm except the one which corresponds to their background.
Wouldn’t it be a little silly to try to run program houses devoted to exploring a particular ethnicity’s language and/or culture while deliberately excluding as residents the people who know most about them?
Where will the cultural atmosphere come from if the experts aren’t even allowed in the door? It makes no sense.
With all due respect, Kimstu, you’re talking about two different things. These language houses were for people who wanted to practice speaking that language or who were comfotable with that language. There might have been a bit of culture thrown in, but the main thing was to practice that language. That’s a specific educational goal. It’s
independent of race or ethnicity.
The ethnic houses are not about language. People don’t speak Asian or African or Native American in them, obviously. You say the language dorms have a long history. How about ethnic dorms? My impression is that they’re quite recent.
I was trying find out how old Cornell’s Ujamaa House was, and came across this article from Cornell Review, which says Ujamaa House is all black.
Cornell Review calls itself conservative. It’s noteworthy that liberals today are supporting racial separation, whereas they used to favor integration. No wonder I now call myself conservative.
december: It’s noteworthy that liberals today are supporting racial separation, whereas they used to favor integration.
That’s kind of disingenuous: even the most vehemently liberal supporters of cultural-identity programs and ethnic-themed housing are not advocating the anti-integrationist views that the conservatives of yesteryear (and not a few of them today, as it appears from all the flap about Trent Lott’s pro-segregation comments) espoused. Legally enforced racial segregation is still a conservative—though, I hope, extremist fringe conservative—rather than a liberal ideology.
Personally, I don’t like even the milder official commitment to ethnic self-segregation that your cite indicates in the case of Cornell’s Ujamaa House. Ethnic program housing can be a very educational experience for students of all ethnicities, but it loses a lot of its value if some students are excluded from it based on their ethnic backgrounds. I think the inclusive policies adopted by most university ethnic-themed housing are far preferable.
I stopped reading after this:
so many problems with this statement, so little time…
What makes you think this is a liberal cause, december? And what makes you think the rise in themed dorming can be translated into racial segregation, since 1) students still intermingle in and outside of classes and 2)students of any background can live in a themed dorm?
Cornell is known for having racial tension (at least among the black alumni who I know). This reputation can be traced before there was such thing as themed dorming. Perhaps Ujamaa is the result of that history instead of the cause of it.
Just curious, do you have any problems with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)? Do you think they are a type of racial segregation? Why or why not?
That’s a rather disingenuous comment, december. Do you have a cite for liberal organizations supporting racial separation/segregation?
I think the problem here is that your terminology is off. You seem to think that maintaining a cultural identity automatically equals “segregation.” It does not. Segregation, in the sense that you are using the word, is a systematic separation, enforced from outside the ethnic group. From Merriam Webster:
Maintaining cultural diversity is done from within, and can (as I think it is in this case) be done fairly and without discriminatory practice.
I don’t think anyone here is supporting racial segregation, but anyone with a sense of culture should support cultural diversity. It is an important distinction, and one which you seem to be ignoring.
Yes. I was exaggerating.
However, the old segregationist philosphy was that it was just better for the races to be separated, whether de jure or de facto. The old liberal philosophy favored integration in all cases (or nearly all cases. They didn’t necessarily want to force integration on the black colleges.)
laughs Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking this…
Yeah, you know what they say about great minds, Av. 
Well, december, if you’re not seriously maintaining that liberals favor racial segregation, then we’re back to the claims in your OP that ethnic-themed dorms “have led to segregation at many universities” and “encourage separatist thinking among minority students.”
Since the source you cited did not actually study these issues on any campuses but just drew their conclusions from “course catalogues, publications and Web sites”, and since most university ethnic-themed housing is not racially exclusive, I think your claims remain unsupported.
Come back when you have some actual evidence—not just opinions—that ethnic-themed housing is bad for students, and then we can talk about it, eh?
Well sure, I wasn’t being serious. My point was that while we insist that white students expose themselves to diversity, we encourage minority students to continue cloistering themselves within their existing ethnic groupings.
Where has anyone insisted that diversity is only for white people?
Otherwise known as every dorm in America.
I’m exaggerating, but you have to admit december white dorms are the standard at most schools whether they’re officially sanctioned as such or not. Maybe sticking to people you feel similar to isn’t the healthiest and most enlightened of motivations, but eliminating ethnic dorms would still allow the white students to self-segregate if they wanted to.
sqweels: we encourage minority students to continue cloistering themselves within their existing ethnic groupings
Doesn’t look like it to me. Again, not every student of a particular ethnicity lives in a “program house” focusing on the language/culture of that ethnicity, and not every student who does live in such a house belongs to that ethnicity. Moreover, as was pointed out above, there is no one “Asian” or “Hispanic” or “African-American” culture, so there’s a lot of diversity within the various “ethnic groupings.”
How can this be described as “cloistering”? Of course, this doesn’t necessarily apply, at least not to the same extent, to ethnic-themed houses that really do refuse to admit members of other groups, like the all-black program house at Cornell that december mentioned. But we’ve seen no evidence so far to indicate that such “exclusionary” policies are common in ethnic-themed housing; in fact, that Cornell example is the only one I’ve seen so far.
But the thing is…the house is not officially all-black. That only, right now, maybe this semester, it’s all-black, doesn’t mean it’s always been that way, nor that that’s the way it should be.
And the different cultures…even if they are all-black, I can be pretty sure Nigerian culture is different from Dominican culture, even if they have their similarities (like all cultures do).
KG: But the thing is…the house is not officially all-black. That only, right now, maybe this semester, it’s all-black, doesn’t mean it’s always been that way, nor that that’s the way it should be.
Oh. Thanks. Well then, what is december kvetching about?
I would think that the combination of Asian, black, Hispanic and Native American students would constitute a substantial percentage of most colleges’ student bodies. Typical colleges were nearly lily-white 40 years ago, but I don’t think they are today.
From what I have read, it has always been effectively all black since its inception, which IIRC was about 20 - 25 years ago. I do agree with you and Kimstu that totally segregated dorms are different from those with merely an emphasis.
december: I would think that the combination of Asian, black, Hispanic and Native American students would constitute a substantial percentage of most colleges’ student bodies. Typical colleges were nearly lily-white 40 years ago, but I don’t think they are today.
Don’t have many figures off the top of my head, but apparently in 1998, UC-Riverside’s 31% minority enrollment was higher than average. This year at my small liberal-arts alma mater it was about 30%, and at the university here it’s 28%.
Speaking of numbers, btw, it’s worth pointing out that the number of spaces in ethnic-themed “program houses” is generally quite small compared to total housing resources: here it’s well under 200 beds for an undergrad student body of 5500. Even if every single minority student wanted to live in minority-ethnicity-themed housing and no whites were allowed in, about 9 in 10 minority students would still have to live elsewhere. (This may also mean that the 140-bed Ujamaa House at Cornell, which has 27% minority enrollment in an undergrad student body of 13,658, could always be filled by black students even if it wasn’t officially restricted to black students.)
In short:
The vast majority of ethnic-themed residences are not restricted to students of those ethnicities.
Their mission is not to segregate minority students but to foster the cultures and languages of those ethnic groups, not just for members of those groups but for everybody.
Even if their mission was segregation and they did exclude non-minorities, most minority students would have to live elsewhere among students of different ethnicities anyway.
I conclude: the OP is a tempest in a teapot.
(By the way, december, when are you going to start paying me for this research-assistant job? I swear, on the average thread you start I dig up about five times as much data as you ever do. :D)
Most dorms already have a theme- affluent and white.
Going to college is a pretty scary thing. For a lot of these kids, this is their first time away from home. They are being exposed to a lot of new people and a lot of new ideas. It’s exciting, but sometimes they need some comfort, something familier, something like home. Remember, these kids are living in these dorms. They are trying to make a home out of a small room that they probably share with a stranger. They are trying to make a home away from their families, their friends, their way of life.
And so they try to make the dorms feel like a home. The dining halls serve comfort foods like lasagna and sugar cereal and tater tots in the morning. They hold cookie-decorating parties for Christmas and dance parties on weekends.
And this is all well and good. Unless all these things that are supposed to be comfortable, familier, and home-like are things that you didn’t grow up with- things you consider to be strange, intimidating, and just not a part of you. The dance party isn’t going to be much fun if you listen to hip-hop and all they want to play is Weezer. Lasagna and tater tots are going to seem pretty disgusting if you grew up eating Japanese food. Christmas parties just arn’t that exciting if you are Jewish.
So why can’t these kids, who are going out into the world for the first time, have a year or two (people don’t usually stay in the dorms too long) where they can create a comfortable familier environment to live in? Why do we think we have any right to tell them that they should be uncomfortable for the sake of “cultural diversity”? They have to live in these dorms all the time. This is their only respite from a strange and sometimes hostile world that they are just learning to deal with. Why do we think that we have any right to force our own little social assilimilation agenda on them?
And just in case you don’t believe that the dorms are set up for a specific kind of person.
I’m white. But I’m poor. I grew up damn poor. On food stamps. In a project.
Kids that go to college, for the most part, are not poor. College is set up for those people. It was pretty unnerving for me to be suddenly thrust into a place where people come from such a different background.
I had to learn to talk about different things. At home we made jokes about food baskets and substidized housing. I had to learn not to show off how resourceful I was. It took me a year to stop mentioning the price of things when I showed them to people (I got this cheese for only fifty cents a pound! I fixed my CD player with duct tape! This sweater was only a buck at the Thrift Store!). At home we always talked about the prices of things and shared our ideas on how to get by cheaply. But when I did that in college, I either got looked at funny or laughed at.
And I didn’t fit very well. People made jokes about the poor, not knowing that someone that comes from poverty was among them. They’d either act confused or disgusted when they had to ride busses. I couldn’t go out to the expensive places they did. I’d have to explain why I couldn’t go to Mexico or Hawaii or Florida for Spring Break with everyone else. It didn’t bug me that I didn’t have all the stuff that they have, but it did bug me that I couldn’t fit into the culture of people who have stuff.
But even more problematic were the little way that they very structure of the school arn’t designed for the poor. The bus that took us to the store only stayed there for half an hour- plenty of time if you just grab stuff off the shelves that looks good, but nearly enough time for someone that is used to comparing prices, using coupons and searching around for the smallest blocks of cheese. The parking permit system grants equal status to the kid that can’t possibly take the bus a couple of blocks to school when she could drive in the car that daddy bought her as it does to the person that can’t afford to live in town and drives in from a few towns over way past where the busses stop running. When you get medicine from the Health Center, they add it to your college bill under the assumption that they are doing you a favor because your parent will pay it. The program designed to keep your from driving drunk also simply adds taxi fees to your college bill so that your parents will presumably pay for it. Everything- from the way the bureucracy works to the way that you use the dining hall- assumes that a parent is handing out money hand over fist- which for the most part they are.
Now, I know I felt uncomfortable and experienced many inconviences because I was poor. I imagine that people from different cultures feel a lot of the same things but with different circumstances. A “poverty” themed dorm might have been a little overkill, but really it would have been nice to have something that acknowledged my background and made me feel like I wasn’t the only one.