Put your diversity where your mouth is

Thursday's CultureFest -- the socially-infused block party with a variety of ethnic foods, dances and more -- was a great opportunity to showcase IU's different culture centers and opportunities. Many student groups are able to set up tents, meet and greet incoming freshmen and display a stratified campus culture. \nWhat happens after the tents come down is anybody's guess.\nIU has become a microcosmic society that lets tolerance and acknowledgment become a replacement for acceptance and inclusion. Students assume they're doing their part to reach the goal of diversity by acknowledging the existence of those who are different. But this tolerance -- just leaving each other alone -- only helps to foster unconscious divisions. \nIU rightfully provides an event like CultureFest to offer and encourage students to share their differences with each other. Our campus has out-stretched arms for diversity, providing diversity as a theme for Welcome Week, and there will surely be speeches parading diversity as the semester progresses.\nBut as we try as hard as ever to embrace diversity, we still wait at the threshold of becoming a truly diverse place, let alone an accepting one. Many students come from pockets of the world where they find themselves in a sea of similar faces. Amid the variety of foods at CultureFest, the pizza line always seems to be the longest.\nIU cannot be blamed for the seeming lack of diversity that exists here, and indeed the University should be acknowledged for attempting to faciliate crossing boundary lines. The blame instead lies within every student who doesn't try something new, every student who glosses over other cultures, every student who doesn't say hello to someone new on an elevator. We only have ourselves to blame if we don't welcome each others' differences at all.\nWe realize our campus is made up of more than 35,000 students, and while each has different stories and life experiences -- let's be honest -- sometimes we're astonishingly similar.\nIt's a natural reaction, and it's just simpler to cling to the people or things with which we are familiar. But those who clutch to those similarities need to be willing to explore different groups of people, and those who are willing to explore need to know there is acceptance in a different group or clique. \nIn the last decade, IU's racial diversity has seen little change despite our increased trumpeting of diversity. Our Bloomington campus' minority race enrollment increased 0.8 percent from 1996 to 2004. But statistics like that are just part of our problem. Diversity is more than just race -- it's sexual orientations, nationalities, ideas and political beliefs, religious convictions, ages and more.\nLegitimate diversity is crucial at institutions of higher education. A college or university is among the most varied marketplaces of different ideas, and without experiencing our differences, our educational experiences lack depth. Coming to college is not only about stepping out of your comfort zone, it's also about acknowledging opposing ideas and discovering new people with different backgrounds and points of view.