On Sunday I saw Northwestern as I’d never seen it before. Ryan Auditorium was brimming full of audience members ranging from grade schoolers to middle-aged parents. There were girls from historically white sororities like Gamma Phi Beta and historically black ones like Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. You could spot a Jewish man donning his Yarmulke a few rows away from a Sheil campus minister taking a break between the 5 and 9 p.m. masses.
It may seem like I’m setting the scene for some official gathering summoned to strengthen NU’s sense of community. Instead, I’m describing the National Pan-Hellenic Council’s annual step show, where members of NU’s traditionally African-American fraternities and sororities showcase their stepping talent in a dance competition. There was nothing university-mandated about experiencing this unique tradition, but the show sums up the essence of celebrating diversity.
Talk about increasing cultural interaction abounds among universities nationwide. Schools like to applaud their progress in this direction by lauding their growing numbers of minority students, ethnic studies curriculums and appointment of faculty to positions like “vice provost for inclusion and cross-cultural effectiveness.”
And they should nod to these crucial efforts. Without them, we’d have no launching pad for the embrace of various cultures at every university.
But such initiatives can also be dangerous if we get too mired down in their technical details. Sure, boosting minority enrollment to 35 percent is impressive, but substantively it means little if the majority of that 35 percent doesn’t interact with the other 65.
When I went off to college, my older brother told me one disappointment of his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois was that he ended up passing them primarily with people much like him: athletic, Midwestern-bred frat guys. I pledged that my own college years would be different.
And to some extent, they have been. At NU I’ve befriended students of different religious and cultural backgrounds and have been fortunate enough to broaden my perspective because of them. But I, like many others, could do more to take advantage of the multiculturalism that abounds here.
It’s all too easy to slink back into the familiar bubble of what’s comfortable to us. It’s traditions like the step show, more than anything, that bring us out of our own campus groups and unite us through our mutual enjoyment of art and our support of one another.
“It’s encouraging to expand (stepping) to someone besides the community that normally sees it,” said Leon Mayr, a Weinberg junior and member of this year’s step-winning Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. “You have to form friendships and get to know someone who does something different.”
That, in essence, is what diversity is all about.
