Worldwide Morningside

I sit in my Introduction to Latino Studies lecture every Monday and Wednesday—a unique scenario you wouldn’t usually encounter in an Ivy League classroom. I wouldn’t exactly say all of us are “Latinos,” but there is an overwhelming majority of minority students enrolled—the guy from Trinidad and Tobago, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, the guy with the Indian background who claims to be “Latino at heart,” the African-American football player, and the girl who flew all the way from the incorporated U.S. territory of Samoa. A few seats away from me is the Mexican-American student whose family has been in the States for nearly a century, and then there are a couple of second-generation Mexican immigrants—one of whom claims her parents barely knew English when they came into the country, while the other had to move to the United States after her dad got a job promotion. I am not a U.S. minority, but I am an international student coming from a “Hispanic developing country” that identifies itself in how minority populations are visualized in the United States. It is refreshing to sit in a class with this type of demographic distribution, but I’m not sure that the Columbia University student body has reached a fully diverse profile.

A few days ago we started addressing the topic of affirmative action in U.S. college education. It suddenly turned into a very engaging debate. In the construction of a more equitable U.S. system, one would expect to remove all racial or ethnic labels from college applications. But this would imply that those societally disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups would have no help achieving social mobility. Or it could also mean that educational institutions would not be diverse enough, because only the elite have the resources to offer their children the educational tools to excel in academic placement.

This week, the student-led “Occupy Columbia” movement is taking place. In various posters around campus it has advertised itself as “uniting to promote justice and equality on our campus.” What are the implications of the word “equality” in its statement? My recent exposure to my Latino studies class has made me aware that equality can be a confounding and amorphous concept in world-class institutions like Columbia. We argue in class that college applications should not ask about race and ethnicity, yet none of my other lectures are as diverse as my Latino studies class. Minority students are still “minorities” within this system. Efforts to reverse this situation, like the ones enacted through Academic Success Programs, deserve to be applauded. However, should we further reform the college admissions procedure and financial aid policies to help even more disadvantaged students end up here? I was shocked when it was recently published in Spectator that last fall about 75 percent of the international students received no financial aid. This means only 25 percent were minorities moving up in the global social stratosphere.

I wake up each morning in love with the ideology behind this institution, its efforts to make us “world-class citizens,” and the diverse student body I can only learn from. I find it incredible that if the single most important force leading to upward social mobility in today’s world is education, then all the “minorities” in my Latino studies class have made it to the top by enrolling here. But the number of students who do this should be greater—especially at an international level. Columbia shouldn’t be a mirror of the white, elitist, rich stereotype that has characterized Ivy League institutions for so long, but should instead be a reflection of the diverse setting its Core Curriculum and NYC campus offer us.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.