The forum "Diversity and Democracy: A Conversation on Race in American Life" last week drew nearly 600 enthusiastic students, faculty and administrators to Low Rotunda, elevating and illuminating the Columbia community's dialogue on issues of race and diversity.
With standing room only, students listened to, responded to, questioned and at times cheered the panelists who were unified in their concern about the nation's racial inequities and their awareness of the complexity of the problem.
Columbia's Manning Marable, professor of history and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, set the tone of the evening by declaring that society's racial problems can only be overcome by "the deconstruction of race, and the redefinition of the democratic ideal."
The panel included Kweisi Mfume, president and CEO of the NAACP; George E. Curry, editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and professors Michael Eric Dyson, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Evelyn Hu-Dehart, of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The panelists were at turns scholars, preachers and activists. Dyson rallied the crowd with his staccato oratory: "Democracy is indivisible from slavery and the surrounding culture of color. In our own contemporary era, the decline has led us to believe these issues are clearer than they are."
Mfume recalled the words of Abraham Lincoln, who warned the nation in 1848 against dehumanizing African-Americans, because the hatred would destroy everyone.
"Lincoln's words, uttered over 140 years ago, in many respects have gone unheeded," Mfume said. "After centuries of slavery and poverty, we find ourselves in this vast climate that gives comfort to racism, sexism and anti-Semitism."
Hu-Dehart pointed out that issues of race will change as the Latino and Asian populations grow in the U.S.
"Race is not just a black-white affair," she said. "And racial conflicts will take on previously unfamiliar form."
But the evening did not belong to the panelists alone. Once they delivered their introductory remarks, students were invited to ask questions from the floor.
"Having this discussion here is really positive," said one student who identified himself as Latino. Several students expressed frustration with the process of incorporating a multi-cultural curriculum into the College.
"Why is it that schools like Columbia are so slow in starting ethnic studies departments?" asked Tomio Geron, CC'96, "Why do they try to instead move toward a more diluted form of multi-culturalism that does not focus on students of color?"
Marable answered, "It's important for us to take an historical perspective." He said that the concept of multi-cultural education is still new: In 1946, there were only 1,600 African-Americans graduating from American colleges and universities.
Hu-Dehart added, "University leaders have really not been prepared for all that has recently come upon us." She recognized that to young college students, a few years can seem like a long time, and that their impatience was understandable.
She said, "The good news is, most colleges and universities have made progress."
The Mar. 18 event was the first in a series of diversity forums announced by President Rupp in January in commemoration of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The second forum will be held Apr. 22 in Low Rotunda.
Columbia University Record -- March 29, 1996 -- Vol. 21, No. 21