While Penn's campus boasts groups of students from many diverse backgrounds, some feel that these different groups rarely interact with one another.
The Christian Association Student Advisory Board held a forum on Monday to discuss this issue, along with other topics such as social injustice, segregation and interfaith relations on campus.
Most attendees quickly acknowledged the lack of communication between cultural groups at the University.
"I think that when we promote diversity at Penn, it's a very watered-down, trite term," CA Student Advisory Board member and Wharton sophomore Robert McRae said. "We are promoting diversity here because we have so many different cultures ... but no one is promoting the interaction between different people, which is really what diversity is."
Penn's campus is home to many different cultural groups, such as the Penn African Students Association, the Asian Pacific Student Coalition and the South Asia Society. Yet students pointed out the difficulty in joining a group that may not expect a certain type of student to participate.
"When you stroll down Locust Walk and people come up to you to hand out pamphlets, each person who asks you to join their organization assumes certain things about you," CA Student Advisory Board member and English graduate student Jonathan Hsy said. "And when you go to a table where they don't think you necessarily fit in, they give you these strange looks."
Although Penn groups are open to people of all backgrounds, CA Program Coordinator Ann Colley questioned the willingness of students to accept people of other cultures.
"If a group of white people decided to join the Black Student League, how warm and accepted would they really feel?" Colley said. "Really, how 'open' are they?"
Students discussed possible reasons for this self-segregation. One major point that surfaced was the notion of complacency. Students of South Asian descent, for example, tend to join the South Asia Society.
"I think that self-segregation is a survival mechanism needed in a community that marginalizes minorities," Colley said. "However, we need never forget that we are all a part of humankind and a part of a larger human race."
But students pointed out several instances when people of different cultures joined together on campus. For example, when College sophomore Warith Deen Madyun felt Penn police used excessive force in apprehending him earlier this year, a wide array of students joined a protest in support of Madyun's cause. Madyun, also president of the Black Student League, attended Monday's discussion.
"When a clear injustice happens," Hsy said, "people from different religious and ethnic groups can finally come together and act in solidarity."
About 13 people, ranging from Penn freshmen to graduate students, participated in the forum.
