COLUMN: "A Dearth of Diversity"

From Mike Ingenthron's "Cheesecake Truck," Fall '92 No, it's not your gender-determining organ, it's Locust Walk. And Sheldon "Bad Case of" Hackney is being pressured to "diversify" it. Diversification, as any dictionary-totin' person will tell you, merely means "to give variety." So why doesn't the University just throw a Der Wienerschitzel, some amusement park rides and a petroleum jelly factory on the Walk? (Which, coincidentally, is what I feel would make Penn the perfect campus.) Actually, sniveling, politically correct diehards feel that the only way to diversify the Walk, and thus the entire campus, is to let them live there and make the penis-wavers go elsewhere. What a fabulous plan! The main problem here is that the whole issue requires the involved parties to be open-minded -- which they aren't -- so the whole issue is moot. But supposing it wasn't, I'll address it further. Whether Delta Gamma Asthma or the SW Botswanian Armadillo Catching Association or the Swedish Supergroup Abba lives there makes absolutely no difference -- unless they produce large quantities of Vaseline, of course. Being "diverse" is just a matter of being open-minded. It requires seeing and listening to other people without prejudging. Molest me if I'm wrong, but it has nothing to do with whether you can see Steinberg-Dietrich Hall from your bedroom window. The only difference that moving the fraternities out and other people in will make is a little more business for U-Haul. It's already bad enough that every conceivable minority has formed a group in which members of that minority meet with other members of that minority and talk about themselves and discuss their undesirable position on the Penn campus. As a white Anglo-Saxon, I can obviously not be a member of one of these groups and -- because of my inability to sing a cappella -- I'm left groupless. The belief that any of these groups can individually promote diversity is quite a foolish idea, most likely brought on by some hallucinogenic substance. Furthermore, it's preposterous to kick fraternities out of their houses in the name of diversity. Although the University owns some of these houses, few landlords (I would hope) would evict a tenant because some reality-challenged folks outside are complaining. Actually, it was probably the plot of an episode of "The Jeffersons" or "227," but it seems rather unsubstantiated in reality. So who should live on the Walk? Why don't we send all involved parties to a distant beach, and whoever makes the better sandcastle and collects the prettiest shells wins? Because it doesn't matter at all. As a matter of fact, why doesn't someone ask the West Philadelphia homeless who should live on Locust Walk? I guess what I'm trying to say is, each person is approximately 1.8 ten billionths of the world population, with no person any better than the next person. If you're going to spend four years of your insignificant life whining about some topic, why not whine about something of considerably more importance or consequence? While we're on the topic of diversity, why don't we diversify Walnut Street? Currently, Walnut Street provides almost exclusively Asian food trucks. How about a cheesecake truck, or a White Castle truck? Mike Ingenthron is a junior Accounting major from St. Louis, Missouri. "Cheesecake Truck" will appear alternate Mondays.