by Sara Russo

A new survey by the New York Civil Rights Coalition has concluded that college programs that segregate students by race or ethnicity promote divisiveness and deny minority students the full range of opportunity to interact with their non-minority peers on campus.

Titled The Stigma of Inclusion: Racial Paternalism in Higher Education, the study examined policies and programs at 50 prominent public and private colleges, including Georgetown, Yale, Amherst, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The survey was conducted by Ramin Afshar-Mohajer, an undergraduate at Harvard, and Evelyn Sung, a Harvard graduate. The report on their findings was co-written with Michael Myers, the executive director of the NYCRC.

The methodology of the study consisted in reviewing the ways that colleges described their own minority programs on official websites, and in college publications, bulletins, and course catalogues. According to the study's authors, the language used in many of these official documents is startling in its open endorsement of separatist dogma.

Prospective minority students at the University of Pennsylvania, the study describes, are sent a list of cultural organizations at the school, described as "a sampling of offerings that are of special interest to students of color," some of which explicitly state that they're intended solely for minority students. "Publications like Penn's The Vision claim to 'serve as a vehicle of communication for minority opinions on current issues encompassing both the campus and the world,' but give no justification for marginalizing these students' opinions in a separate publication and assuming that all minorities share the same opinions," note the survey's authors in the report.

At Georgetown University, minority students are singled out for special academic assistance and remedial education by the Center for Minority Educational Affairs, which promotes "educational excellence and racial equality at Georgetown by serving the interests of African American, Latino, Asian Pacific American and Native American students" by "work[ing] to ensure that they graduate, and that they do so prepared to lead meaningful, self-sufficient lives and to make positive contributions to society."

"The colleges offering these services do not explain why remedial services are not offered to all disadvantaged students, including whites and Asians," notes the study. "Rather they lump together minority students who may have had exceptional educational backgrounds with less fortunate minority students, implying that something inherent in their 'race' requires special academic support."

Another area of concern for the study's authors was the existence of racially-segregated dorms at many universities. Cornell, for example, offers minority students the option to live in one of three ethnicity-based dormitories: Ujamaa, for black students, the Latino Living Center, for Hispanics, and Akwe:kon, for Native Americans. At MIT, African-American students can choose to live in "Chocolate City," and minorities enrolled at Oberlin can live in the "Third World House." Stanford University also offers several ethnic-living options, including Muwekma-Tah-Ruk (for Native Americans), Okada (for Asian-Americans), Ujamaa (for African-Americans), and Casa Zapata (for Chicano/Latino students).

"MIT's Chocolate City makes it very clear in its mission statement that its goal is racial consciousness and separatism," note the study's authors. "The primary purpose of Chocolate City at MIT is the promotion of black culture," reads the school's description of the dorm. "Chocolate City at MIT also strives to maintain our African-American community, promote our ethnic identity, encourage social and intellectual improvement, and provide support for our brotherhood throughout and after our years at MIT."

"Segregated housing, courses and programs disseminate poisonous stereotypes and falsehoods about race and ethnicity. They limit the interaction between minority and non-minority students, and reward separatist thinking. They deny equal interaction on campus. Although they claim to have minorities' interests at heart, these colleges in fact take the civil-rights movement giant steps backward," concludes the report.

The prestige of the schools that were studied had little to do with the amount of emphasis placed on racial classification, the study points out.

"Race and ethnicity considerations permeate almost every facet of campus life," states the survey's executive summary. "Both public and private colleges, from CUNY-Queens to Princeton University, have fostered this kind of racial and ethnic separatism. In doing so, college officials who ought to know better confuse the goal of 'diversity' with the deification of race as a factor for treating students differently."

"These practices are insidious because they betray the real purposes of higher education," commented Michael Meyers, the executive director of the NYCRC. "I thought the whole purpose of higher education was to remove narrow constrictions of the mind, extirpate prejudice, and remove barriers to the open pursuit of knowledge. But we found that many of these schools are mainly reinforcing the notion of separatism."