Charles Dickens wrote in the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." His first paragraph rings true for the status of race relations at the majority of Ivy League schools.
Since the early 1990s, steps have been taken to further develop the quality of resources available to increase the overall satisfaction of students affected by issues pertaining to diversity. Yet, as students we should rightly ask ourselves if anything has changed. Despite efforts by campus administrative leaders, the demonstrated positive results have been few and far between. We need to strengthen our commitment to improving the climate by increasing student involvement.
An overwhelming majority of more than 3,000 students interviewed at Ivy-League schools are unsatisfied with the climate of race relations. U.S. News & World Report (April 1993) found that 81 percent of black and 73 percent of white students "were unhappy with race relations on campus." Ironically, in the past several years, many Ivy-League administrations have taken pro-active steps to confront this problem. The high-level officials of our institutions are committed to addressing the illusive concept of diversity.
The troubling fact remains, however, that racial tensions on campuses result as often from out-of-classroom student conflict as from woeful administrative failures. At Columbia University two years ago, Jewish students were confronted by a racially charged Black Student Union-sponsored speaker, who addressed the audience as "Columbia Jewniversity." One year later, the University of Pennsylvania was embroiled in a free speech controversy as well. A conservative columnist in the Daily Pennsylvanian consistently wrote editorials reflecting an extremely skeptical view of the performance of the minority student population. After a particularly incendiary column, African-American students confiscated thousands of the papers in protest.
Some battles have reached epic proportions, such as one at Dartmouth. The Dartmouth Review was featured prominently throughout the 1980s and early 1990s for agitating minority professors and advocating programs and dialogue that denigrated the achievements of a wide variety of our students.
How have the universities responded to the challenges that we all have faced? At all Ivy League schools, the first notable signs of change were consistently led by the administration. Columbia released a report in 1992 calling for the establishment of a committee "of civility." Princeton University and Dartmouth followed in 1993 and 1994 by advocating the creation of a permanent administrator who could address issues of concern spanning various minority groups. Harvard University's "Office of Race Relations" and Cornell University's "Human Resource Development Council" were given more powerful roles in attempting to help increase student satisfaction among their most disaffected groups. Harvard's 1994 Convocation touched on themes of cross-cultural understanding. Finally, in only her second semester of leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, President Judith Rodin argued that "moral leadership requires suasion not censorship, conscience not coercion." Unfortunately, despite the noble intentions of these schools, the students may appear to be pacified, but not they are justifiably not satisfied.
This year, I have already begun to sense that the passion for discourse and discussion has waned. At Columbia, only six students attended a campus service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At Yale University, the Medical School canceled classes, while the rest of the university attended them. Through the leadership of Dartmouth's President James Freedman, we may have the most active dedication to discussion of King's vision. Jan. 16 was a College holiday. Several speakers and two days of events highlighted his concerns, which seem to have been blurred in recent years. His was a vision grounded in morality, suggesting that we are all human beings, and must work to make a difference.King titled his 1967 book, "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" We could benefit tremendously if we finally answered the question. It seems clear to a growing number of Ivy-League students that our mutual understanding requires much greater leadership from ourselves.
The truly great developments in understanding each other will come only when we begin to address each other as students first and individuals second. This cannot be placed solely as a burden of minority students, many of whom spend countless hours addressing these issues in numerous locales.
It is also essential that non-minority student leaders take a more aggressive role in creating a true "community" on campus. There is no reason that Princeton's Eating Club presidents, or Penn's Greek system leaders should not take a more active role in assessing the state of race relations, and making a concerted effort to improve it. White students should honestly assess their friendships and group affiliations and the degree to which they reach out to cross ethnic lines. Speaking to an audience of 400 at Columbia earlier this year, Harvard's eminent African-American studies scholar, Henry Louis Gates, challenged those present to move past the politics of identity toward a "politics of identification."
Increasingly, Ivy-League administrations have articulated their vision of "diversity and community." It is imperative that students meet the challenge with leadership and definitions of our own.
