<p>Tilgaham, are you asking how we’re ranked that high? If that’s the case, then the next time you walk into lunch at Lovett, consider the makeup of people at the different tables. Watch the video that Rice put out to publicize the Princeton Review rankings ([RiceUniversity’s</a> Channel - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/user/RiceUniversity]RiceUniversity’s”>http://www.youtube.com/user/RiceUniversity)), and look at the lunch table they show when talking about diversity. In most college videos, you would assume that this table is staged, but you and I know all of the people at that table and know that they actually eat lunch together.</p>
<p>The reason Rice ranks so high on Race/Class interaction is because it’s totally unremarkable. When a really good friend of mine was filling out a questionnaire that her med school sent her, there were questions about “At your undergraduate institution, how much interaction did you have with people of the following races…”. For “Hispanic/Latino,” she almost put “little to none,” before I reminded her of the several people in our close circle of friends who happened to be Mexican-American and of her Spanish-American junior-year suitemate. That’s the true mark of diversity —*that it’s such a part of your daily life that you don’t notice it anymore.</p>
<p>You also forget about the other part of that ranking, which is class interaction. The residential colleges, by their very nature, unite people from wildly different backgrounds, unlike fraternities and sororities, which necessarily exclude people who can’t afford to pay for dues and social functions.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that Rice is a shiny happy post-racial society that should be a model for the rest of the country, but I am saying that we do a lot better than most other places.</p>