A student at St. Olaf College in Minnesota observes that the college's push to diversify its overwhelmingly white student body seems to be producing a racially segregated campus where there is great pressure to conform to certain orthodoxies about race and oppression:

The question I would like to raise is, with the influx of minority students, is our campus actually becoming more diverse?

Not long ago, I would have replied with a quick, indubitable yes. Now, my experiences in the course of Modern Latin America cause me to speculate. My expectations were completely blown apart early on.

With six multiracial students in class, we heard about a personal example or experience relating to our topic nearly every day. For a while, everyone appreciated having these real-life examples of oppression in Latin American countries and of issues we discussed.

Soon, however, a division grew in our little classroom. I, and others, began to notice how quickly minority students criticized white students for daring to rationalize the actions of historical Europeans and Americans. This criticism happened only a few times, but the threat of attack was enough to instill a fear of speaking one's mind.

In contrast, white students regularly left inflammatory comments by these same multicultural students unanswered for fear that as a nonminority contradicting a minority they might sound racist. At one point, a student of Latin American heritage even went so far to say that minorities deal better with power because they have more sensitivity toward the rights of others.

When did one's ability to lead become based on what happened to their ancestors hundreds of years ago versus their intelligence and leadership skills today?

At that point, our professor stepped in to clarify that the actions of those in power are human nature, not due to their ethnicity.

This separation of multicultural and white students doesn't end at the door of the classroom, either. Since taking this course, the segregation has become more visible to me. In the cafeteria, everyone recognizes the tables where the multicultural population sits. Of course, there are some minority students who branch out and sit with others, but on the whole, a distinct schism exists. It would be highly unorthodox for any nonminority student to sit at the multiracial table without an invitation.

I've also heard stories of harassment from the multiracial crowd toward other minority students because they were too like white students. Last year, one minority student continuously bullied a first-year Asian student who had been adopted by white parents at a young age because "[she] couldn't even speak Korean ... [she's] not really Asian." This tormented student transferred at the end of last year to escape persecution. I've also heard of another student who has an on-going feud with some of the multicultural students because they believe he is "white-washed" and not adequately connected with his roots.

I'm unfamiliar with the use of "multiracial" as euphemism (as opposed to its usual meaning of "mixed-race" -- it presumably means "black"? Or "black and Latino"?

I'm asking partly out of curiosity, but it does make a huge difference to the net contribution of "multiracial" to the class. To the degree that these "real-life" examples involved students talking about having their village burned or their cousin killed -- the contribution to learning about Latin America probably outweighs a bit of white student discomfort. On the other hand, if it was just general yammering about oppression, that's a different story.

It's hard to tell from the way the column is worded -- although the contortions the author goes through to not commit any deadly sin of incorrectness is revealing in its own right.

What a shame, and what a sham. In any reasonable scheme of "diversity", a small school with strong ethnic/religious ties like St. Olaf would itself be an exhibit of diversity. But no, even such minor places have to be levelled into a uniform mass of multicultural angst. Bleah.

I taught mathematics at St. Olaf from 1965-1971 (ABDs don't get tenure at selective liberal-arts colleges) and my (late-ex) husband also taught math there until he retired in 1995, so we often talked about these issues.

St. Olaf is a great school and consistently comes tops in the national rankings for sending students abroad to experience multiculturalism when they're the outsiders. But it is neither prestigious nor rich enough to bid successfully for the extremely limited pool of African-American students comparable to the white students who matriculate there.

The consequence was that many of the black American students who arrived in Northfield as freshmen were woefully unprepared.

Academically, first. When I was teaching there, 75 percent of freshmen took calculus; many of the "diversity" students among the packets faculty advisers got every September had barely passed middle-school algebra. (Any course called "college algebra," isn't.)

And secondly and more importantly, socially unprepared. Not that anyone was mean to them, or resented their presence. It was just so different, in ways they didn't know to expect.

An example, not having to do with Americans -- my husband and I were walking back to the math building one glorious fall day, the trees ablaze, the first nip of winter in the air. The temperature, maybe 45 degrees. Just ahead of us, an international student from somewhere in equatorial Africa was saying to his friend, "I knew it got cold in Minnesota, but I didn't know it got *this* cold."

Poor guy, he had another 90 degrees Fahrenheit to go.

Another temperature anecdote: The year I taught in Shanghai, my students who had already received political approval to study abroad constantly badgered me about the climate of places like Lincoln, Nebraska. It took me a long time to figure out why; they were afraid of freezing to death.

In China (then, 1987, if not now) it was illegal to have heat in public buildings south of the Yangtse, where the university was. That Minnesotans, who live in a much harsher climate than any they have imagined, treat it as something between a nuisance and a challenge proudly surmounted, just doesn't occur to them.

"Well, of course there will be a thermostat in your dorm room."

"What's a thermostat?"

But no one ascribes cold weather to white oppression.

Like ex-pats everywhere, the diversity admits tended to hang out together, never learn the language or culture and leave with a chip on their shoulders even bigger than the one they brought with them. Not all of them, fortunately, but too many.

The true ex-pats, of which we also had a fair number, mostly did much better, I think in part because they knew they were in a foreign country and thought themselves fortunate to be where they were. They were more willing to adapt, and less likely to think that was an unfair expectation.

This story suggests that's no longer true. If so, very sad.