@circuitrider Thanks very much for your post. Yes, you read my original post the way I had intended it. I agree that diversity is manifested in many different ways and the environmental and personal forces for integration/segregation are complex in their interaction. I have also witnessed that working with others on a challenging and meaningful endeavor can stimulate integration and learning that eludes more focused interventions that focus deliberately cultural integration.
Ethnic diversity is actually less of a concern for me than political, ideological and socio-economic diversity in the college experience.
What group of white kids with any type of real-life exposure to Black kids before they got to college is afraid of ALL of the Black kids because SOME of the Black kids at SOME of the universities around the nation have brought issues to the table that have gone long unaddressed? (In the true spirit of collaboration, you may remember, most of the campus outcries emanated from students who seemed to look representative of at least two racial groups - Black and White.)
When I went to college one hundred years ago, there were students from a northern, cold, state which borders Canada who told the professor they were afraid of me because of the ideas and statements that I contributed to classroom discussion - a discussion which focused for a period on literature of the Harlem Renaissance. These students told the professor they had “never met a Black person before, just seen them on TV.”
Kids are more savvy and flexible, more astute and intuitive than you give them credit for when they are not raised InABubble.
My non-white daughter is a junior, and has a very wide range of friends and acquaintances at Bates. They run the gamut not just based on ethnicity, but also on any other factor or benchmark one cares to consider. Behavior and prejudices are largely individual and learned long before kids get to Bates. There are those who change and grow (isn’t that a part of college and learning?), and those who don’t - on all sides. The “whiteness” of north-eastern, and especially Maine based, LACs is an unfortunate fact. People have to get past that, and it is changing - slowly.
The most obvious divide I’ve noticed at Bates is between athletes and non-athletes. And, there appears to be a section of kids that likes to hang around the “jocks”.
I’ve waited to respond to this post because, honestly, I was slightly taken aback by OP’s original questions/concerns about Bates. It has bothered me for some time now and finally I’ll add my opinion.
My daughter attends the college and I can tell you from years of first hand experience that there are few schools that follow their founding principles of equality, on all levels for ALL people, more than Bates. This goes for the administration and the students combined.
I like how @stressDad explains it succinctly. What you witness in college dining halls is pretty normal on all campuses. If you judge a school by the dining hall scene, everyone might decide to stay home! I believe that the dining hall was/is the least favorite aspect of college for all of my daughters, not just the one at Bates. So much judgement goes on there. Do you sit by yourself? What does that say about you? Do you sit with a group? What does that say about you? Thanks to the insecurities of youth, this list can go on and on. I hope you won’t be misguided and fall into that same “judging” trap yourself.
Reading the last sentence of post at #20, I believe that OP and student will make a thoughtful decision about a school and it matters not if it is Bates. My advice still would be to base the decision on academic fit more than demographics. Your daughter will make the friends she CHOOSES to make, and find activities, wherever she goes.
Bottomline, Bates is a remarkable place for ALL students who are intelligent enough to have been admitted!
For me the dining hall assessment has been an important first view into the potential social dynamics at an institution at which my child might be snowed in for days, nee weeks, or more simply where she will live, grow, seek friendly spaces and dynamic, energetic discourse over that most communal of all events in a day: a meal.
To disregard the value of gauging this interaction as it takes place on a campus is to leave a question dangling in the back of the mind, or on the tip of the tongue because one felt uncertain about asking…Will I seem silly?Will I offend?
I do not think it can be overstated that many parents of students of color are concerned that their child`s experience may be that of being held just outside of the main; for parents of lgbtq students the concern may be the physical and psychological well-being of their child amidst the assumed hetero-dominant demographic; for the very religious there are concerns of ostracism and verbal assault, etc.
Both my high school and college cafeteria experiences were outrageous, Fame-style environments at times, with every racial and cultural group in the respective institutions represented. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses,vegetarian/bean curd eating, Dominican and Chinese, dancing, think-I’m straight/feel I’m gay young people sharing about 40 minutes together.
So I look to see if that atmosphere is present. I have never seen it or sensed it. And that is a ‘notable’ for me.
Should one throw away a chance to discover one’s self at a breathtaking institution because of the mood and the optics in the dining hall? Does it leave you with a bad taste afterward?
I read the CMC article. Amazing that only two students objected to what amounts to institutionally sanctioned segregation. Perhaps some special buses and drinking fountains as safe spaces for “POC?” It is ridiculous.
@Actor123 I appreciate the many candid viewpoints on this issue. I did find particularly interesting @Actor123 's comments:
“What you witness in college dining halls is pretty normal on all campuses. If you judge a school by the dining hall scene, everyone might decide to stay home! I believe that the dining hall was/is the least favorite aspect of college for all of my daughters, not just the one at Bates”
My experience with dining halls has been different. Different in that I have witnessed high diversity - ethnic, socio-economic, major, gender identity, etc. - at some campuses and low diversity at others. For example, at UT Austin where a friend’s daughter attends, I saw remarkably diverse groups throughout the Jester cafeteria complex. I witnessed the opposite at Texas A&M the following week while visiting another friend and their daughters.
Different also in that dining halls can be some of the most enjoyable and productive meeting places for students. My own experience falls into this category. During my sophomore and junior years in college, I looked forward to every meal because the dining room was where I got the chance to meet on a regular basis friends with whom I shared no classes and friends outside of my dorm community. In fact, the friends whom I met in dining halls eventually exceeded the number of friends I met through other channels. In fact, I met my future spouse in one of the dining halls on campus. So while dining halls may not reflect the nexus of social life in all campuses, it certainly can be a significant part of such in some campuses. That is why I do not trivialize the social-dynamics in dining halls.
@Redpandabear The weakness in your method is that you observed only one day and for a short period of time. Any number of factors could have influenced the outcome. I don’t think it is as effective a method as you believe. For example, if you had visited the dining hall for breakfast you might conclude that every student was an athlete.
The funny thing is that I had exactly the opposite experience as the OP in the Bates Commons when I visited with my kids and when visiting them there. Somewhere in one of my posts from a year ago or more is a post where I use the same metric with the opposite results.
The past 30 year’s commencement speakers have included many POC:
Single speakers: 1986-2003, 2012-present
Desmond Tutu, South African social rights activist
Stephen L. Carter, Yale Law prof., social policy writer
Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart
Donald, McHenry, dipolmat, UN ambassador
Donald M. Stewart, Pesident of Spelman U. and advisor to Pres Obama
John Hope Franklin, historian, author From Slavery to Freedom
Henry Louis Gates Jr., historian, intellectual, director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and AA Research.
Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica, winner of the Nobel Prize
Isabel Alexis WIlkerson, author
Speakers among a group of 3 or 4 2004-2012
(in 2004 Bates switched to multiple small speeches)
TJ Anderson, composer, founder of the National Black Music Caucus
Renee Harris, groundbreaking hiphop choreographer.
Anna Deveare Smith, actor, playwright, activist
David Ho, pioneering AIDS researcher
Corey Harris, blues musician and Bates alum.
Warren Washington, chair of the National Science Board, atmospheric scientist
Evelynn Hammond, feminist and African American scholar
Pauline Yu, Chinese scholar, Pres. ACLS
Robert Franklin Jr., Pres Morehouse College.
Fareed Zakaria, journalist
Gwen Ifill, journalist
Vivian W. Pinn, physician, advocate for women’s health
Manjul Bhargava, mathematician
We observed that the kids at Bates were sitting in all kinds of groups (some diverse, some not so much, some groups all students, some with professors) but that no one was sitting alone. That was different from our experiences elsewhere; at some schools we saw groups of white students sitting together and students of color sitting alone, which felt very negative.