Social life?

foolishpleasure
Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:54:58 +0000

1- It’s easy for folks in the majority to dismiss the importance of numbers.

2- If a campus (not necessarily Muhlenberg) has so little diversity that even when/if the students of color self-segregate you don’t have the same visual impact as on a more diverse campus, that doesn’t mean there’s more interaction.

My college was about 5% black and there was a fair amount of interaction. But at meals, black students often sat together at “their own” table - - except in the houses where there were too few black students to fill a table. The three black students at the table with five white students were still together in their own group, but the visual impact of clusters was different than the impact of a cluster of six black students (regardless of whether the two remaining seats were empty or filled by non-black students).

I noticed a similar pattern at D1’s prep school, which was 20% black - - and which we selected over another school where D would have been the only African-American girl on campus (there were three African int’l students).