Minnesota State University Reporter

Issue date: 11/7/06 Section: Voices

My decision to come to MSU was largely motivated by the captivating slogans I saw on their Web site, bulletins and brochures. My best slogan was "The Office of Admissions is committed to enthusiastically, ethically, and professionally serving students with their college planning process while upholding a commitment to enhancing diversity that is consistent with the University's educational mission and enrollment goals." This slogan made me visualize MSU as a university with authentic diversity. MSU to me was an opportunity to meet and interact with people from a rich array of U.S and foreign cultures. Well, diversity my ass. I am now a student at MSU and I find nothing but segregation. The administration might be committed to diversity but the university community is certainly not.

Most MSU students are shockingly self-centered and unfriendly. They build these huge fences around their lives pushing away people away with different backgrounds, beliefs and ideas. Is that diversity? Many international students find it extremely difficult to make American friends and this pushes them to form bonds only with people from their ancestry. Who would blame a new Nepali international student for hanging out only with older Nepali international students? What should he do if the students of MSU are not willing to be friends with him? He has no choice than to find people of his kind who would be willing to accept him into their group. The cold reception foreign students have from MSU students and pushes them to form their own communities making MSU a segregated school. Take a good look at the campus and observe it for yourself; observe how this university is divided into race groups. Do you think I am biased? Pay a visit to the cafeteria during lunch or supper and see it for yourself. See how people seat according to race and ancestry. Is that diversity?

   I am not trying to force the students of MSU to make friends with 'complete strangers' if they don't want to. If you don't see the need of having friends from other countries, that's fine, but the university should not make international students feel that there is diversity on this campus when it doesn't even exists. Diversity in this school is theoretical and far from practical.

 I also heard about a globalization project coming soon to MSU. The program will allow students from other countries to come and study at MSU. The initiative makes me feel sorry for these future students because I already know the outcome. Most of these students will come here, they will have no friends and they will be forced to form their own distinct communities. There's no need in trying to globalize when the school has no diversity. Furthermore, the international student fee is by far more than what the American students pay. What's the use of paying all that money only to encounter disdain, loneliness and rejection? As a fellow international student friend once told me, "let MSU globalize its community before globalizing with the world."

I sincerely thought this segregation issue was found only in MSU. Well, I thought wrong. My close friend recently moved to California to study and he told me that the segregation and resentment in his school is equally very alarming. Then I came across an interview with the Australian biographer Hazel Rowley in which she recounted her experience in Texas. She said, "I really saw that it was very rare for black people and white people to be sitting at the same dinner table. And you know, Austin, Texas is divided in half by the I-35; one side is black and Hispanic and the other is white. I came to see race as the most urgent and the most serious and the most fascinating issue in the US…"

Then it hit me. America's myth of being a melting pot of cultures is nothing but a propaganda tool. Though everybody pretends to be one big happy cross-cultural family, race and color are still very serious issues.

Nahum Welang is a Reporter staff writer