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The Rice Thresher
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by Elizabeth Decker Thresher staff
About 150 people attended the discussion, moderated by Sociology Associate Professor Michael Emerson. The five panelists each came from different ethnic backgrounds. The panel was organized by Sid Richardson College senior Sonja Gee and Hanszen College junior Mustafa Dohadwala to address why a disproportionately high percentage of black and Hispanic students choose to live off campus. The discussion began in response to a research paper by Hanszen junior and Student Association President-elect Jamie Lisagor and Hanszen sophomore Carolyn Shulman that found 75 percent of black and Hispanic upperclassmen live off campus as compared to 40 percent of white upperclassmen and 37 percent of Asian upperclassmen. The paper was done for Emerson's Sociology 309, Race and Ethnic Relations. Baker College junior John Lin, an Asian panel member, introduced the idea that the number of minority upperclassmen living on campus could be increased by encouraging students to transfer between colleges to ensure that minority students were surrounded by other students that they felt comfortable with. Lin cited a low concentration of minority students at each of the residential colleges as a primary reason minority students choose to live off campus. "I think because the college system restricts the people you can live with to the people in your college, and if you're a minority then that pool of possible roommates is severely limited," Lin said. "I think your only alternative is to move off." Lin suggested giving minority students more flexibility in choosing their roommates. "I don't know if that would mean freeing up a little more how people can move from college to college - just not making the residential pattern on campus so rigid and structured, giving people a little more option, that if they want to live at another college, it doesn't have to be a huge ordeal," Lin said. Hanszen College junior Isaac Allison, a black panel member, agreed, saying it could take a long time to find students to identify with. "If I'm standing in a dorm where only two people are in my major, and four people are of the same race, and only two people know my background and where I come from, after I found those three or four people, there's no reason to stay," he said. "So after you find these few select people that have this commonness with you, you might as well live off campus, and have that freedom to just visit them. You know exactly where they are, to enjoy their company." However, Will Rice College freshman William Price argued from the audience that one of the college system's major tenants is putting people of different races together in the same environment. "Our college system is divided where there is a small percentage of minority students at each college, which makes each college predominately white, but that also keeps us from having minority groups over the years migrate to a specific college," Price said. "Are you eventually going to end up with a college that's one race or another?" Lisagor said this would create a new problem for the college system. "That basically transfers the problem on campus, as opposed to fixing the problem because when you're talking about diversity and increasing diversity in the true sense of the word, you're talking about having friends over racial lines to the point where it doesn't even make a difference," Lisagor said. Lovett College junior Atul Maheshwari, a South Asian panel member, agreed, saying the goal of the college system is diversity. "My personal feeling is if we do allow that, then it just allows for more segregation between colleges, and that's exactly what we're trying to strive against," Maheshwari said. Gee said the college system should be changed so students won't want to transfer. "If the college system is more sensitive to people's backgrounds and encourages people to meet each other on their grounds of who they are, then people won't need to transfer," Gee said. Currently, students wishing to transfer between colleges must obtain the approval of their own college master and the master of the college they wish to transfer to. If these two masters approve the change, then it must be approved by the rest of the college masters. Fewer than 10 people transfer between colleges annually, Student Affairs Divisional Administrator Barbara Eudey said. The panel also discussed how the college environment contributes to minority students' decisions to move off campus. Hanszen sophomore Jose Ramirez said he moved off-campus because his Hispanic background differed with other students' backgrounds. "I wouldn't say it's because I'm Hispanic that I can't get along," he said. "It was just the differences of lifestyle and the kind of people that I was used to surrounding myself with and the way we did things and the way we lived that I was so used to all but disappeared when I got to Rice. "It was a big culture shock, and the fact that I wasn't afforded any kind of help, anyone to talk to, I didn't have anyone to relate to, I think had a lot to do with me moving off," Ramirez said. Allison agreed that it was difficult to stay on campus as a minority because minorities may feel less comfortable than other students. "You had some statistics about how 40 percent of Anglo and Asians stay on. I'm guessing it's because they feel more comfortable, I'm guessing the majority of the school is Asian and Anglo, so if, I guess, if they were reversed, and we were 60 percent African American, I might stay on campus," Allison said. In the college system, minority groups are expected to work harder to become a part of the college culture, Lisagor said. "Instead of everybody bending, certain groups are being asked to bend more than others, or become more a part of something that's alien to them," she said. Hanszen senior Lindsay Germano, a white panel member, recognized the difficulty for students to both maintain their own culture and become part of the college culture, but said she believes both can happen simultaneously. "The big thing with a lot of minority groups is that they don't want to be assimilated and they don't want to lose their culture," Germano, the outgoing Hanszen president, said. "But they can share their culture with me much more easily if they're living in an environment with me." Germano said that it would be necessary for students to be open to expanding their environment and being pushed beyond their level of comfort. "I think it is something that's going to have to come from both sides, in saying, 'OK, I am going to want to go out there, and maybe I won't be in the exact same environment that I'm coming from in high school, maybe I won't in the exact same environment that I was in middle school,'" she said. "That is going to be a little bit of a different change, and a lot of that is what college is about." Lisagor said the college system can accommodate these changes. "We think that the college system as it stands is really a great tool, and it just needs to be used better to integrate more people," she said. "The solution is to create a college culture that more people want to be a part of." Black Student Association President Audrey Ette, an audience member, agreed that the college system needs to balance between making minority students feel comfortable and having all students be a part of the college culture. "The big question is, what do we want to trade off to make this work?" Ette, a Baker junior, asked. The panel also discussed specific challenges to participation in the college system faced by minority athletes. Allison, a football player, said that it was difficult to bond with his college while being involved as an athlete. "From the very beginning, most of the people that we had close relationships with are people who are either active in sports or who reached out to us, and in response, we reached out back to them, but it was very difficult to try to reach out to everyone and get rejected." Allison said. Germano, who was a varsity swimmer for her first two years at Rice, agreed that it was difficult to find time to bond with other college members because she was busy with sports. "If you want to be a part of the college system, the time that it takes to do that, it doesn't come out of your studies, 'cause you can't to that, it comes out of your sleep," Germano said. "That's a really tough decision to make when you've come to a university and your goal is to perform the best at your sport." Ramirez said minorities' feelings of alienation from the college system often begin during Orientation Week. "It all has to start with O-Week," Ramirez said. "If they had built up Rice the right way in the beginning, it probably wouldn't be that much of an issue, you might have been able to participate, you might have gotten more into it than you really did just because you knew what to expect and knew what was going on, as opposed to being left alone, and you're having issues and there's no one to confide in." To help athletes become a part of their college, Baker College Resident Associate Greg Marshall suggested that athletes be given the week off to fully participate in O-Week activities. "I wonder if possibly the football program couldn't look at giving us those freshman athletes, letting us do our very darndest to assimilate them better than we have, and let them catch up with the team in their remaining four years," Marshall said. Ramirez said having more minority advisers during O-Week would help. Lovett junior Adam Keith, a 2000 Lovett O-Week Coordinator, said that it was very hard it is to get minority students to apply to advise, and that made it more difficult to increase the number of minority advisers. Baker Resident Associate Alex Byrd, an assistant history professor, asked why it was so difficult to get minority advisers. "Why can't they? Why won't or why aren't African Americans and Hispanics signing up to be mentors?" Byrd said. Germano, who was a 1999 Hanszen O-Week Coordinator and the 2000 student director of O-Week, said even if minority students didn't enjoy O-Week as freshmen, they can be advisers during future O-Weeks. "Very few people are stepping up to that challenge," Germano said. "[Most are] just taking the easy road out of, 'I feel alienated; I'm not going back,' when to improve it you have to go back, because you're the person who knows what hurt you the most." Maheshwari said there is already a diversity facilitator at each college during O-Week for students to talk to if they are having problems. While they were not that prominent this year, they becoming more and more important, Maheshwari said. Director of Minority Community Affairs David Medina then asked, "Would it help to have more minority masters and more minority RAs to help welcome minorities in?" Jamila Nelson (Sid Richardson '00) questioned how helpful a minority RA or master could be for all minority students at one college. "It's one thing to just talk about groups and who you feel comfortable with, but it's another thing to talk about, on a base level, what kind of personality do you identify with and the type of people that you really trust," Nelson said. Allison suggested having an upperclassman minority representative at each college for underclassmen to be able to talk to when they are having problems with the college system. Overall, organizers and panel members said they were pleased with the forum. "The big turnout, to me, shows that there are a lot are a lot of people that really care about the subject and that are really passionate about sharing with others their experiences, or for others, just learning about others' experiences," Gee said. Byrd said he was glad students had addressed the subject. "I was happy that people were talking," Byrd said. "I was delighted that there had been the beginnings of some real research on the question of whether a disproportionate number of African-American and Hispanic students move off campus." Gee and Dohadwala are planning a facilitated discussion in each of the colleges for next week during dinner to involve everyone who is involved in this issue. "More than anything else, we just want people to be talking about it," Gee said of the future of the issue. Lisagor and Shulman plan to conduct follow-up research on this issue next semester. They will work with Director of Multicultural affairs Cathi Clack and Byrd to obtain more specific data and to identify possible solutions. Byrd is optimistic about the results of future research. "One, I hope that the research is developed further so we can be more certain of what the student research has found, and two, that in the process, while that's happening, that we just generate as many ideas as possible in order to address what looks like it's a problem," Byrd said.
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