I just wanted to add some further comments to our state of dialogue on campus now that I have heard further input from other students.
I think one big factor that hinders this is the greek life. In my opinion, having greek life on such a small campus is asking for cliques. Freshman year before Rush, I had a very diversified experience through titan orientation and other people that lived on my floor and building. I got to know a great new body of people. Even if the campus was mainly white, I did converse with a few people of color. Everyone just kind of hung out together and talked and it was a great experience. However, this quickly changed after everyone pledge for their respective greek houses. Everyone then became segregated. They mainly just hung out with the people in their sorority or fraternity houses. Friendships started floating away since I chose not to join the greek life on campus. I feel as if having greek housing sets a border or boundary. In my opinion, I believe that the state of dialogue would be much higher if there was no greek life.
I have a friend who goes to St. Ambrose in Iowa. The school is a similar size to IWU, yet there is no greek life. I've visited there a few times and the atmosphere is completely different. They do not have as many cliques and it seemed that everyone knew each other. I enjoyed my experiences there and wish IWU was more similar to that.
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hmm, you know what, your post definitely got me thinking about how greek life affects the state of dialogue on campus and i would totally agree with your stance on it. although i would not necessarily broaden the range of influence to all of greek life, i think you might agree that most of these sort of diversity-less cliques occur more in the sororities, than the fraternities. i feel like the guys involved in greek life are absolutely more open to diversifying their organizations than the sororities, and in that aspect i respect them. however, i do not want to sound like i hate sororities, because there are many things they do that are very beneficial to our community, i just don't really agree with how they handle the state of racism on campus.
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