IU’s racial disparity

On July 23, the Indiana Daily Student ran a story about Ohio State professor Russell Fazio and his study on interracial housing assignments, which produced a disturbing statistic.

At IU, students who are randomly assigned a roommate of a different race are three times more likely to request a change than students who were given a same-race roommate.

What’s perhaps more shocking than the statistic itself was the reaction it elicited from IU administrators who were quoted in response.

“It really surprises me, because I think it would be contrary to the case,” Pamela Freeman, who is associate dean of students and director of the office of student ethics and anti-harassment programs, told the IDS in the July 23 article.

Of all the people this report shouldn’t surprise, you’d think Freeman would be at the top of the list. Sadly, that wasn’t where the lunacy stopped. Two other people quoted in the article, Sara Ivey Lucas, IU’s assistant director for housing assignments, and Eric Love, IU’s director of diversity education, said IU is “diverse.”

They’re wrong.

By its own statistics, available through the University Web site, IU’s fall 2007 black enrollment was at 4.3 percent, about half of the size of the black percentage of Indiana, according to the U.S. Census and about a third of the nation at large. Hispanic enrollment was 2.5 percent - again, half of the state of Indiana and about one-sixth of the national percentage.

The response illustrates clearly the disconnect between IU’s very real diversity woes and what the administration thinks it’s doing to solve them. But even its best attempts to cater to minority students seem only to further the school’s rampant de-facto segregation.

None of IU’s eight black fraternities or sororities are members of the Interfraternity Council of IU or the IU Panhellenic Association, nor the “multicultural” Greek Council, but rather the National Pan-Hellenic Council, made up entirely of black fraternities. Black IU freshmen seem to be secluded to the Southeast neighborhood. And, as Fazio’s report stated, IU students who get a roommate of a different race are three times more likely to request a transfer.

It all culminates to prove what most IU students already know: We aren’t diverse, and we don’t feel integrated, and we don’t seem to be making progress. And if IU stopped its grandiose speeches on how “diverse we already are” long enough to actually look down from its ivory podium, it would see its audience and know the truth.

Instead, students have become cynical. They’re subjected to relentless depictions of IU’s racial climate ludicrously incongruous with the present situation. They hear officials fumble through declarations of false current achievements and feel like they’re listening to Kim Jong Il expound on about how the North Korean economy is robust and the people well-fed, actual observations be damned.

IU squanders its credibility selling a bogus reality to students who know better, and it winds up unable to enact the change it insists it wants. But until it sees solutions in terms other than committees and rhetoric, it will never have any leadership. It will, however, have plenty of dorm transfer requests.