Hi PrincessDiana,
You raise a legitimate point. As much as our universities raise diversity and inclusion as battle cries as our nation goes through another awakening about our original sin of racism, the homogeny and exclusion that have plagued us for over two hundred years is still very much present in them. I will establish a caveat here: I am currently a university student, and I do currently live in a learning community. However, in this review, I will do my best to give you my critique of your rhetoric. You have good reasoning behind your personal decision - yes, go embrace new people and new things! Grow, learn, live! And I do think your idea for those rotating communities based on specific studies would be interesting - I would certainly not be opposed to something like that at my university. However, you appeal to two tools that are, in my opinion, flawed. First and foremost is the persistent cynicism in your reasoning. You seem to set as the basis of your argument that, well, people have always been unwilling to change (particularly when it comes to their views on people who are [rather superficially] unlike them), so continuing to let people form their own groups will just strengthen that inevitably. Yes, that does happen often, but it seems absurd to connect university learning communities to the Nazis, whose organizations were intentionally designed with the purpose of eliminating people who were Jewish, Slavic, homosexual, etc... If you're going to make such a bold - and cynical - claim, produce some evidence that learning communities don't work, and not just from your own experience. Research them beyond what your prospective university/ies (I assume you're a student preparing for college) have to say.
Now, back to my caveat. If I'm going to suggest using other experiences of communities than just your own, maybe I should offer my experience as a sample. If you aren't interested in it, goahead and ignore it. I just offer it in case you might want to read it. If you have any questions, or want me to review anything else, or want to discuss anything about learning communities further than this, send me an email!
Unfortunately, the empirical evidence from my experience might only support the negatives you mention. Like you, I come from a high school environment that was predominantly white, from predominantly conservative families, and predominantly socioeconomically stable. When I chose my university, I loved its apparent commitment to diversity. If you walk down the main thoroughfare of its main campus, you will see how beautifully diverse it actually is. However, I chose to live in a learning community that is predominantly white (there is not a single African-American student in the 100+ student community), and it is predominantly composed of students who come from well-to-do families studded with career accolades and college degrees. It seems odd to me that simply being a first-generation student and coming from, shall we say, a less-than-comfortable life, I am apparently a peculiarity in the LC's population. I took these concerns, in fact, to the head of the honors program, who teaches a course on developing one's "life story" that I was taking at the time. In response, he made a promise to alter the course to better reflect that not every student in the class was living in the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (as I put it). Of course, I'm not saying that professors will always respond like that, or that I have solved the problem of exclusivity and all that in my learning community. The LC is still just the same in its problems and separations and everything else. But the most important part that I have found in living in a learning community, and this is so crucial, is that it is your responsibility, and your privilege, to take ownership of your share in the LC and not only point out its problems but also act on positively improving them, even if you are acting alone and in very small ways. That is the real good that comes out of learning communities in my opinion. Now, of course, I would not have come to that conclusion if not for lessons I have learned from outside my community, but I am very grateful that I get to try to live up to that responsibility.
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