Turning Back the Clock, Universities Embrace Segregated Graduations

A common refrain about President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan holds that it’s a racist dog whistle baying for the era of Jim Crow laws, yet those who presume canine hearing are deaf to universities trumpeting segregated graduation ceremonies.The Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform watchdog group reports that three dozen institutions from Yale to Ohio State are returning to the days when “mixing the races” was a secular sin, implementing policies that would make the most avowed Confederate grin.Last year, California Polytechnic State held nine ceremonies beyond the official commencement. These include events for Indigenous, Asian Pacific Islander, Black, “Chicanx/Latinx,” disabled, Jewish, and “Southwest Asian North African students,” a “decolonial” term for the Mideast.Not every group gets a separate party, with Campus Reform reporting that Asians and Native American events are “comparatively rare.” Others seem random, such as Columbia’s for “low-income” students.Cal Poly also hosts a “Lavender Commencement” for LGBTQ+ graduates. According to the Human Rights Campaign, there were more than 45 of these held by 2001, and other groups have since picked up the trend.Grand Valley State in Michigan hosts separate-but-not-quite-equal rites recognizing “traditions of our diverse identities and cultures” including for “Latino/a/x” and “LGBTQIA+” students, cooling the “melting pot” of a distinct American culture.In 2018, Harvard began holding Black commencements — small comfort to Asian students who have taken their discrimination case to the Supreme Court or to Jewish students whom Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting in 1922.Harvard once sought varied applicants, expressed in 1900 by its president, Charles W. Eliot, who said it was “diversity of condition that makes the experience of meeting men here so valuable.” They’d graduate their first woman, Linda James, in 1917.In 1870, Richard Greener was the first Black student to earn a Harvard sheepskin. The Chicago Sun-Times reported he “initially struggled but eventually thrived.” Only 63 had followed in his footsteps by 1973. What might those students think of today’s Balkanized ceremonies?Like calls to like, and off-campus gatherings may well make sense, but giving university sanction to the idea that DNA is destiny closes the path that enriches all of society, eliminating opportunities to foster unity and create allies. Thanks to Taiwanese classmates, I get goosebumps from the scene in “Fists of Fury” where Bruce Lee, in an act of defiance against Shanghai’s Japanese occupiers, kicks apart the sign reading, “No dogs and Chinese allowed.” A roommate from India often peppered me with questions about Greeks. Eschewing the caste system of his birth, he lamented that many of his countrymen immigrate to America and create colonies. “I didn’t move halfway around the world,” he said, “to talk to someone from Delhi.” The university system once upheld this same ideal. Students celebrated graduation based on friendships and majors, not backgrounds, and dorms shoved them together without regard to race, religion, or gender. At least they used to, before they too began bowing to neo-segregationists with housing. It’s not that every pair of roommates becomes lifelong friends, but opportunities to learn from someone of a different worldview are lost with each move to divide. By being forced to find common ground and step outside comfort zones, new foods are experienced, melodious words of a different language added to vocabularies, and social missteps made in ignorance committed to memory so they can be avoided in the future. One of the main strengths of a liberal education, in the classic sense, is exposing young people to the buffet of an intellectual dining hall. It’s there that they can meet peers from different places, belief systems, and ethnicities on the road to becoming well-rounded citizens.“Education,” Socrates says, “means bringing out of the idea of universal validity which is latent in the mind of every man.” He saw young minds, with so much free space in their hard drives, as vessels to be filled with knowledge beyond their factory-installed operating systems. It’s time for universities that set “diversity” as a goal to consider whether they’re advancing it by encouraging and even hosting ceremonies emphasizing group identity, or whether by embracing a version of Jim Crow for the TikTok generation, they’re helping to make segregation great again.

Turning Back the Clock, Universities Embrace Segregated Graduations

Turning Back the Clock, Universities Embrace Segregated Graduations

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