Although the American college machine is seen as a global pillar in education, our institutions are still susceptible to U.S.-centrism. Insofar as we have chosen to ignore or accept this and have asked our peers to subvert the parts of their identity that don't flatter the American state, we've left our community still broken along international borderlines.
One anonymous Tufts student from Asia has been an immigrant since he was four years old. Despite the strong influence each culture in which he's lived has had on his identity, he doesn't feel allegiance to a particular state or government.
"Tufts' internationalist outlook is so academic we focus a lot on nations and states and not enough on cultures and peoples," he said. "You're treated like an ambassador of where you come from - a really crude way of representing someone's identity." He noted that the classroom lens is very U.S.-centric: Take a foreign policy course, and you'll be graded on how well your memos reflect U.S. supremacy, rather than humanitarianism or globalism.
Khaled is a freshman at Wheaton College who, this summer, can't return to his home in Yemen. After protestors attacked the American embassy in Sana'a, diplomatic channels between the two countries were clogged. "It will be very challenging for me to apply for a student F-1 visa, and I have to renew my visa every year." Wheaton has accommodated Khaled's need to stay through the summer. "Students are not allowed to remain on campus unless they have jobs, but the college gave me an exception," he said. But with the bridge between America and his home country broken, he still can't see his family for at least a year. International conflict has forced him to connect with the political ramifications of his background, whether he wants to live politically or not.
But that political background isn't always appreciated, implicitly or explicitly. Sophomore Munir Atalla, a host advisor for International Orientation, noted that the academic systems that bring international students to schools like Tufts are there, it often seems, to parade them in front of American students who haven't had much intercultural experience - to help facilitate the track to the State Department. "Look at how diverse we are! But when we start pointing to the structures that brought us here, it's like, 'shut up'- especially with the Middle East." Atalla noted that Middle Eastern students in particular are expected to bifurcate themselves: to silence the political half of their identity and to assimilate the social. "You're asked to leave those experiences behind."
And the risks of not doing so can be petrifying. "My friends from the West Bank are starting to feel guilty," Atalla continued. "All these great applicants [from their high school] are getting turned down, and they're worried it's because they're getting involved in pro-Palestinian activism." One student activist from the West Bank recalled that her school feeds into the Ivy League, yet of the few students able to go to college abroad, she knows of only one who has been accepted at Tufts. Her guidance counselor has begun dissuading students from even applying. "He encourages them to go to 'Palestine-friendly schools' that give scholarships like Harvard, Yale, Guilford, Earlham and schools in Canada," she said.
Our community is diverse, but still fragmented by our own biases. If we deafen our ears to the experiences of our peers - especially those that might be unflattering to U.S. civil religion - we sacrifice opportunities for growth, both intellectually as individuals and spiritually as a global society. The student from Asia concluded: "I always thought of internationalism as a giant patchwork of nations: The closer you look at it, the more you realize how complicated and beautiful it all is."
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Walker Bristol is a junior majoring in religion and philosophy. He can be reached at walker.bristol@tufts.edu.
