Tufts basks in diversity. We pride ourselves on our international perspective. We welcome students from such disparate places as Cambridge and Colombia, Wyoming and West Palm, New York and New South Wales. We're lucky that way.
That said, Tufts has a clique problem. We tend to keep to our own - no member of the graduating Class of 2006 will deny that - and we do so to our own detriment.
The source of our segregation is, of course, ourselves. We demand culture houses and student associations for every possible ethnic, religious or cultural permutation.
We're most comfortable when we are surrounded by people who look and think like us, people whose life experiences most closely mirror our own. And there's nothing wrong with looking for comfort amid the shock and chaos of college. Sanctuaries are necessary.
Where our cliquishness does run afoul is in its restrictiveness. Ask anyone who studied abroad, and they'll almost always tell you that the most important knowledge they took away from their experience was not what they learned in the classroom or their newfound language proficiency. A subtle understanding of a different culture, be it as similar as Australia's or as unfamiliar as Ghana's, is the greatest lesson that we Jumbos learn abroad, and at Tufts.
By removing ourselves from our brethren, from that comfort zone where everyone looks the same, we can find new places and friends among whom we can be ourselves - and more importantly, expand ourselves.
That's what's great about Tufts: You don't have to leave the Hill to encounter people vastly different from yourself. We're a rainbow of ethnicities, cultures, religions and any other manner of categorizing people that one could care to mention.
For those of us graduating today, we're lucky enough to have an advantage over college students graduating from many other universities in 2006. Whether we wanted it or not, some of that Tufts diversity rubbed off on each of us, and as we prepare to enter the world and to commence our lives as adults, we are fortunate that so many of our classmates were so different from us.
Our separation, though, prevents us from taking advantage of our cultural wealth.
Do you know what country Tufts' largest contingent of international students is from? Not France, not Mexico, not even Hong Kong, where the next-most reside. The answer is Turkey - and yet there are scads of students who have never (knowingly) met a student from Turkey, a country with a fascinatingly diverse culture, literally at the crossroads between the East and the West.
The problem, and the reason so few of us know each other, is that Tufts' social scene is inherently conducive to cliques. We have the dying Greek system, the culture houses, all the various clubs devoted to cultural or ethnic binaries and a large portion of juniors and seniors living in houses off campus, which is itself reinforcing cliquishness. We're set up to fail when it comes to cultural incorporation.
What can Tufts do to draw together all those different strands of the student population? Is it possible for us to be diverse but not separated? The administration, unfortunately, is probably powerless to remedy the situation.
They could help a little - a less random, more intentional freshman roommate assignment system could bring together students who otherwise might never have met. At the extreme, Tufts could abolish the culture houses, but that move would cross the line between promoting and enforcing diversity.
No, the solution, as is usually the case, lies with the source of the problem - us. It's our own attitude toward diversity that needs to change. We accept diversity, but we don't embrace it. In addition to acknowledging that all the colors of the rainbow are beautiful, we must prevent ourselves from falling into the comfortable but confining tendency to look only at one.
