PLATFORM : Social Diversity

We’re going to have enclaves. We’re going to have the black students over here and the white students over there and never the twain shall meet. We said, look, this is a university, surely we can have it both ways. Can’t you conceive the possibility of being (for example) both Asian and also part of a larger thing called the University of California?

In some ways the report has had as much of an impact outside the campus as it has on campus. What we’re suggesting not just to the campus and to the university but in some visionary way to the world is that rather than thinking that “the way” is to shed differences that maybe we could have it both ways.

We’re doomed as a nation if all we can do is have these two images; that you either have turf wars--that your differences are barriers--or that you shed the differences. A better way of thinking about this is to talk about a university, a world, a state in which people affirm their differences and find ways to relate to each other.