Structured Interaction Helps Bring Students TOGETHER

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Oct, 2000 by Nicole Rivard

Over a four-week period in March, 50 students and staff Arizona State University in Tempe learned to play the historical harmonies of Samba, explored the interconnectedness of musical styles, and cooperated to produce new, unified musical sounds from within their group. The program is one of the new ways the school's Intergroup Relations Center is encouraging students from different groups to see eye to eye.

"In this program students explore the commonalties and differences between them and music is the impetus for it," Jesus Trevino, director of the center, said.

The center, which has nine staff members, opened three years ago to develop structured ways to bring students together. It is the vision of Students Against Discrimination; a group that formed after a series of incidents during the 1995-1996 academic year.

The incidents began when a racial slur was spray painted on an African American staff member's car. Several months later, a teaching assistant introduced racist material into her English class as a way of teaching about racism. The material, which had no explanation of what it was designed to do anywhere on it, made its way around the campus. More than 300 students protested and asked the administration to take steps to deal with acts of discrimination against minorities.

ASU students representing many different backgrounds proposed the center as a way of addressing issues of diversity and intergroup conflict. It was the first center of its kind in the nation. It is funded not by grants but by the university, and is composed of ethnic racial minorities as well as whites and other groups that work with faculty, staff, and students to create structured interaction between groups.

Since its inception, retention at ASU has gone up. For several decades, the freshmen retention had been approximately 69 percent. Now ASU's retention is up to 75 percent with all ethnic groups in the same ballpark.

"The center is part of a bigger effort at Arizona State. We are convinced that diversity needs to be part of our University," Milton Glick, senior vice president and provost at ASU, said. "One reason you go to college is to broaden your perspectives and to go away where everyone doesn't look like you or have your history. That's what higher ed is for."

Diversity Vs. Divisiveness

The debate over diversity on college campuses still divides higher-education leaders. Some believe student groups contribute to diversity and community on campus and others argue that they promote self-segregation, which threatens the overall unity of the campus.

Several months ago, in an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times, author Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University, stated that a survey he helped conduct at one campus showed "a balkanized campus, in which the zone of tolerance or indifference to offense grows increasingly small. At worst, our survey shows a more and more Hobbesian world, where each group battles against others for resources inside and outside the classroom."

Levine, who was not available at press time, goes on to say in the op-ed piece that colleges are making real progress in diversifying their curriculum, but "colleges must confront the diversity issue with candor, and not hide behind programs that placate groups but divide the campus."

His portrayal of higher education upset some people, including Debra Humphreys, director of programs at the office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Learning of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and Carol Schneider, the group's president.

"If today's college students aren't easily interacting across racial lines, it is because we, as a society, are failing to truly integrate our schools, cities, and towns," Schneider said. "For many students college is their first real experience of a multi-racial community. New scholarship that Levine overlooks proves convincingly that students on diverse campuses report a high level of intergroup contact in classrooms and in their close friendship groups."

She is referring to research like that done by Anthony Lising Antonio, assistant professor in the School of Education at Stanford University in California.

Almost half of the sample of students he surveyed reported having friendship groups that were racially and ethnically mixed. His findings also revealed that students with diverse friendship groups frequently thought of themselves as the exceptions in an otherwise racially divided student climate, suggesting students' perceptions of diversity differ strikingly from their actual interpersonal experiences of diversity.

The discrepancy, he says, highlights a tremendous opportunity to improve campus racial climate and reduce perceptual barriers to interracial interaction. Colleges and universities should encourage students to take advantage of the opportunities that exist to socialize with someone of a different race or ethnicity and create more opportunities, he said.

"Everyone talks about segregation on college campuses but they never talk about solutions," Trevino said.