Diversity and the International Student

For an international student like me, there is no place like Columbia. Harvard sits atop the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Georgetown has an impressive international relations program, and Oxbridge costs significantly less than 50,000 dollars a year, but none of that really matters. With its pedagogical philosophy and its approach to the concept of education, Columbia offers a truly singular international education.

We all know that Columbia values diversity. We experience it for the first time during NSOP week. We see it on College Walk. We hear it in our Core class discussions. We deal with it so much that it may even become banal to us. But it is perhaps only the international student who, because of his or her ostensible foreignness, appreciates how important this diversity is.

Internationals are often told about the difficulties of adjusting to a new school and a new country at the same time. Before sending its students abroad, my high school in Japan organized a “senior transition meeting” in which it warned seniors of the potential culture shock we would experience in a new country. During NSOP week, I joined my fellow international students in a meeting that exposed us to the different climate of “the American classroom.” Though certainly helpful, both meetings were superfluous. Columbia’s commitment to diversity offers everyone, including me, a comfort zone and a place to feel at home—but not a crevice in which to hide from exposure to different and even conflicting and provocative viewpoints.

For me, Columbia’s dedication to diversity speaks to my religious identity as a member of the Bahá’í Faith. On April 12, 1912, Columbia University opened Earl Hall to the Son of the Founder of my religion. He delivered a speech in which he addressed a common element of Columbian philosophy and my faith: he said, “It is our duty to put forth our greatest efforts and summon our energies from all directions in order that the bonds of unity and accord may be established among mankind.” Columbia demonstrated a commitment to diversity almost a century ago in giving one of the central figures of the Bahá’í Faith a platform to speak from, and this commitment still resonates; in last year’s World Leaders Forum, President Bollinger raised the question of the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran in his address to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is at Columbia that I find my religious beliefs acknowledged and respected. With such a commitment to diversity here, assimilation is not difficult—in fact, there really is no need to assimilate.

At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, Columbia’s diversity provokes just as it welcomes. Last week, President Bollinger welcomed Sir Salman Rushdie to the inauguration of the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia. Last year, to the World Leaders Forum on the same campus, he welcomed President Ahmadinejad, who represents a regime that seeks to put Sir Rushdie to death. Does diversity then become a self-contradiction—can we, for the sake of diversity, paradoxically tolerate those who cannot tolerate diversity? What does this mean for an international student who may bring with him or her ideas and beliefs that conflict with those prevalent at Columbia? How do we reconcile the contradictions diversity engenders?

I feel that Columbia seeks to answer these questions—or rather, to force us to answer these questions—in part through the Core Curriculum. Frontiers of Science seeks to train us to think rationally and scientifically, while Art Humanities makes us look at the world from a diametrical perspective. Literature Humanities is steeped in Western culture, while the Global Core seeks to compensate for that. It is as if Columbia’s emphasis on diversity of thought and analysis of different points of view is tailored for international students. Columbia teaches us how to synthesize the different cultures and ideas we were exposed to in our upbringing, thereby reconciling them. In this way, I believe that internationals almost viscerally feel the importance of having this exposure to diversity­—it speaks to a central part of our identity to think about education as a means of appreciating and solving the question of diversity.

It is true that Columbia is, in all its racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural heterogeneity, a microcosm of New York City and of the United States. The diversity we encounter in the city complements and enhances that we experience on campus, while the election of Senator Obama to the Presidency makes any talk of the importance of diversity to the identity of America entirely redundant. But to dismiss Columbia’s diversity simply as a reflection of its surrounding culture is to fail to give the University adequate credit. The creation, maintenance, and fostering of the diversity on which we pride ourselves is difficult and controversial, but for the international student especially, that commitment to diversity is invaluable.

That Columbia respects diversity but is never afraid to question and challenge it makes it a global leader in international education and the obvious choice for internationals thinking about which college to attend. Any international student can probably attest to being stalked and spammed in high school by admissions officers preaching about how they seek to diversify their campuses—something Columbia has already done and continues to do. This commitment to an international student body is important, for it is from the style of education at Columbia that global solutions to the most pressing global questions emerge.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.