As College junior Lindsay Docto handed out flyers for a United Minorities Council forum on diversity, most students said Penn was already diverse enough - after all, look at all the people of different ethnicities walking down Locust Walk.
"Yes, but are they walking together?" Docto asked to start the student-led "Divided Diversity" discussion last night at Greenfield Intercultural Center.
About 50 students gathered on couches in the common room as they spoke about what intercultural unity means and how to achieve it.
The UMC, the umbrella organization for campus minority groups, held the meeting as a part of its annual Unity Week, UMC chairwoman Efe Johnson said.
College of General Studies graduate student and GIC intern Dyresha Harris, who co-facilitated the talk, began by discussing self-segregation.
"If there is an interest in intercultural space, why does it not flow more naturally?" she said.
Participants shared stories of finding comfort in shared struggles, noting that students take to familiar groups as freshmen, but agreed that new experiences were important to fostering interest in diversity.
"It's important to normalize intercultural interaction for freshmen so they can continue the trend," Johnson said.
Most attendees were active in other campus minority coalitions and grappled with issues like building student involvement and solving internal disagreements.
As the discussion reached its second hour, focus turned to the administration's role in fostering intercultural unity.
Some students noted a disparity between the administration's embrace of minority visibility like cultural performance groups and its ability to effect tangible change.
College senior and LAMBDA Alliance chairman Kevin Rurak discussed the fruitless nine-year push for Penn to conduct a campus climate survey on the way students perceive diversity.
"It's evident the University is not as interested in diversity issues as it says if it's not willing to acknowledge the problem and talk about it," he said..
Docto said she was pleased with participants' engagement and openness, adding that UMC hopes to expand its discussion programs in the future.
Wharton senior and Penn Arab Student Society President Mariam Ezz said the UMC provides one of the only forums where students from different groups can talk in a casual setting.
"It would be nice to have this sort of dialogue more than once a year," she said. "These issues don't go away."
