Our Campus: Equal but Separate

I ran into a neighbor of mine on College Walk the other day. We made eye contact and smiled as we passed each other. As I walked on, I thought, What's her name again? Then it hit me: I'd never really talked to this neighbor--a very friendly-looking East Asian girl--even though she lived perhaps thirty feet from my door on John Jay 5. That realization led to a second, much more disturbing one. I didn't really know any of the Asian kids on my floor--or any of the black kids, for that matter. I thought about the people I did know on the hall, the friends I hung out with every night: white boy, white boy, white boy, white girl, white boy, white girl, white girl.

What's wrong with this picture?

I attended a small, private high school with a largely white student body, but my group of friends there was much more heterogeneous than it is here. Among my close friends, I counted blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, atheists, Arabs, and Asians. When the time came to choose a college, one of the things that most attracted me to Columbia was its phenomenal diversity. The campus teems with representatives of just about every color, class, and ideology. Yet now that I'm on campus, my group of friends is almost entirely white. True, Columbia is the most ethnically diverse place I have ever been, but it is also the most balkanized.

To find evidence of the student body's self-imposed segregation, one need only walk around the campus. On the steps of Low, in dorm rooms, at tables in John Jay, racially homogeneous groups are hanging out everywhere. I surveyed my friends, and many have noticed these groups, whether they are a part of one or not. Not even inebriated bar-hoppers fail to notice that the Saturday night crowd at the West End is usually ninety-nine percent white. Few people, however, mention these observations to others. Who are we, after all, to criticize each other's choices in friends?

College, I suppose, can be a scary place. Perhaps people like me associate with people of similar backgrounds out of a desire to recreate the comfort of home. In a place that I don't always understand, it's nice to have people who understand me. It's difficult to abandon that comfort, even temporarily.

Of course, some mixing does occur on campus. Plenty of people have friends from different ethnic backgrounds. There are, however, some undeniable social patterns here--there are many Asian cliques and white cliques and black cliques, but not so many mixed cliques as one would expect from such a progressive university.

I don't quite know how I'd suggest that the community respond to this. I've perceived no overt racial tension at Columbia--that's certainly a good thing. Additionally, racially homogeneous groups are not necessarily economically or ideologically homogeneous ones. My group of friends here is mostly white and middle-class, but it includes former public and private school students, Jews and Christians, liberals and conservatives. Our ideological differences lend themselves to many lively debates. It's not as if I'm not experiencing or learning anything new with them. However, a little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that I--and for that matter, my friends--are missing out on something significant by partitioning ourselves this way. It feels a little cowardly.

I suppose that what I'm advocating is a university-wide discussion of the issue. Maybe I haven't been here long enough--am I the only one who feels as if she lives on a segregated campus? If I'm not, am I the only one who cares? All throughout last summer's debate regarding the legality of affirmative action at our nation's colleges, educational experts told us that encounters with a wide variety of classmates were a vital part of any good college education. I'm eager to see why this is true, but I've not yet been able to find the answer. I simply don't run with a racially diverse crowd, and I don't feel like many of my classmates do, either.

Changing this and making friends from different races will be hard--the highly individualistic nature of Columbia students, plus the frenetic pace of life here, make it difficult for all of us to break out of our daily routine and meet new people. However, I think the results will be worth the effort. After all, what pride is there in being one of the most diverse Ivies if we never talk to each other?

The author is a Columbia College first-year.