Election campaigns would not be what they were without eye-catching slogans and a deluge of promises.
It is all well and good to speak of enhancing communication, improving the quality of student life, increasing student services and promoting campus unity.
Indeed, I have no doubt that programs to accomplish the above goals can go a long way in bridging the gaps of the cliquish campus society in which we now exist. Yet I remain disillusioned.
Not only do certain campus institutions reinforce the idea of cliques and belonging to a clique, but it seems that the people resident here are quite comfortable with the idea.
If you want to live in what is presumably the best housing on campus you must be part of a group. What becomes of you if you do not become part of a group?
One must languish under the discrimination and restriction of visitation policies. After all, a 328-bed facility cannot begin to provide accommodation for all the upperclassmen who live on campus. But that is an aside.
How do you change people’s culture when it programs them to think and act in a certain way toward people who are perceived as different?
Ethnic or otherwise, these are the people who fall into the ill-fated category of other.
How do you get people to question their own choices?
Many of the candidates in the recently concluded SGA elections spoke of improving diversity or addressing diversity and racial issues on campus.
Yet I wonder how many of them will be present at the International Student Association’s Scholarship Banquet. Scholarships are great way of introducing diversity.
It has been my impression that to gain any kind of respect on this campus I must affiliate myself with a group.
The respect therefore is not for a singular person but for the group or community with which one identifies oneself.
Failure to do this leads one to be ignored because or being the forgotten minority.
However, grouping people is the cop-out which many of the nefarious leaders of previous eras took. Men like Hitler and Milosevic used this method.
Indeed, I would hate to see this campus dragged any further into the dank mire of tribalism.
Thus I exhort not only the newly-elected SGA President and deputy to stick to their campaign promises, but each and everyone of us to see the world of Loyola through the eyes of another.
