Posted on 06/08/2025 8:10:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When it was recently reported that protesters disrupted Columbia University’s graduation ceremony, one might ask: which one?
In addition to its main commencement, Columbia hosts no fewer than 10 separate graduation ceremonies, often referred to as affinity graduations. These include distinct events for black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQIA+, Jewish, native, international, disabled, and first-generation/low-income students.
While Columbia claims that it has a “long history” of offering race-based and other segregated graduation ceremonies, this practice only dates back to 2005.
To put this in perspective, Columbia was founded in 1754. For more than 250 years, the university held a single, unified commencement ceremony for all graduates, celebrating their shared academic achievements without division by race, ethnicity, or gender identity.
Rather than continuing to use commencement to reinforce the institution’s collective mission and foster cohesion around a common student experience, Columbia has chosen to separate and segregate students based on race and other identity-based characteristics.
Columbia is not alone. Numerous institutions, including Princeton University, American University, Penn State University, University of Colorado, Fresno State University, and the College of William and Mary, host graduation ceremonies based on what a student looks like, their sexual preferences, who they pray to, or their ancestry.
These programs prioritize individual identity over the collective and common student experience, separating the campus into demographic silos and undermining the shared values, accomplishments, and sense of community that higher education is meant to cultivate.
Segregating students in this manner is not just limited to graduation programs. Across higher education, students are sorted into housing, orientation programs, and campus organizations based on their race and other identifying factors.
The National Association of Scholars has described the practice as “neo-segregation,” resembling a modern, albeit more palatable, version of the discriminatory and unconstitutional “separate but equal” doctrine.
Aided by college institutions, minority students are “simply conscripted to the new racially segregated normal.”
What is astonishing about this practice is that it’s being carried out by the very same higher education industry that has long proclaimed the indispensable value of achieving student body diversity and inclusion.
We have been told for years that creating diversity in higher education is essential to the educational experience and prepares students to participate in an increasingly complex and pluralistic society.
According to Lee Bollinger, former president of the University of Michigan and Columbia University, racial diversity “is vital” to the student experience. “Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-rounded education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare.”
Paul Alivisatos, president of the University of Chicago, regards racial diversity and inclusion as essential to his institution’s educational mission, describing it as “foundational to our academic success” and “providing a transformative education for our students.”
Yet while higher education continues to champion racial diversity as fundamental to its mission, its current practices reveal a troubling contradiction.
Institutions cannot achieve the fundamental promise that diversity fosters greater connection and mutual understanding between students if they are promoting or permitting division and disunity based on the very characteristics diversity is purportedly intended to embrace.
If diversity is to have any real value to the educational experience, it cannot be realized by dividing students into demographic groups and “celebrating” them in isolation.
Rather, it requires bringing people together—across lines of race, class, gender, and ideology—to engage in the hard, messy and challenging work of learning from one another as individuals.
More than two decades ago, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, issued a blistering dissenting opinion warning higher education against segregating students based on race under the pretense of promoting student diversity and inclusion.
Skeptical of using race as a factor in college admissions to engineer diversity, Scalia strongly denounced “those universities that talk the talk of multiculturalism and racial diversity in the courts but walk the walk of tribalism and racial segregation on their campuses through minority-only student organizations, separate minority housing opportunities, separate minority student centers, even separate minority-only graduation ceremonies.”
At the time, some may have discounted Justice Scalia’s warning as the cynical musings of a conservative jurist. Now, with the benefit of time, his words appear prophetic and cast a long shadow over the current trend of racial segregation prevalent throughout higher education.
Scalia’s cautionary note also raises legitimate questions about the value and necessity previously attributed to achieving student body diversity if, once attained, students and their institutions conspire to impose self-segregating programs and activities.
Ultimately, higher education cannot have it both ways. It cannot, on the one hand, champion diversity as a unifying force, fundamental to its educational mission, while on the other promote and encourage practices that fragment students along lines of identity and difference, undermining the very mission it claims to uphold.
Justice Scalia was prophetic, indeed.
* * *
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Thank you very much and God bless you.
I don’t know why people go to University, if their desire is to remain so isolated.
It doesn’t look like Americans have their own events at these ceremonies.
Because it’s a Marxist indoctrination center?
Because whites end up with their own graduation by default.
Yep, real inclusive there!…rolling eyes
Martin Luther King dreamed of a color-blind society. That has become anathema to the Left.
That’s the correct answer.
DemocRATS love to divide, divide, divide. They just love finding more and more ways to divide us up, and then pit one group against another. They are, after all, the party of segregation and the KKK.
Stanford University, while touting and celebrating ‘diversity’ has developed segregated housing: Ujamaa House is for African-American; Okada House is for Asians; Casa Zapata is for Chicanx and Latinx (99% of Spanish speakers do not like the new Latinx phraseology, and they do not speak Latin either).
The Stanford University website explains: “”Our ethnic theme communities have a rich and long history of engaging students at the highest levels of intellectual discovery and advancing diversity””
‘Advancing diversity’ by segregation. Sounds right out of 1984.
“black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQIA+, Jewish, native, international, disabled, and first-generation/low-income students.”
Hmmm...which group is missing from that list?
Where’s the Hamas/Houthi/Hezbollah/Gazan graduation?
What about tenth generation low-income students? What’s so special about first-generation poor? It takes a sustained effort for a family to stay poor for ten generations.
The left wants everybody fighting with each other. Conflict everywhere. Then comes the man on the horse to unite us, and voila, dictatorship. It’s coming.
So the celebrations can and ought to be free to be segregated or not.
But it is Columbia ITSELF that makes several separate CEREMONIES, which are designed to incite divisiveness.
Marxist tactic.
Columbia and the Ivies are Communist Seminaries. The Ivy League is the Communist Vatican.
It would be fine with me to just give blacks their own graduation ceremony.
Each designated tribe must be treated separately from the others.
"United we stand. Divided we fall."
~Aesop~
~Robert Grosseteste~
~Patrick Henry~
~Winston Churchill~
~Syngman Rhee~
~State Motto of Kentucky~
“ These include distinct events for black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQIA+, Jewish, native, international, disabled, and first-generation/low-income students.”
Once again people who think they are turtles are left out .
Blatant discrimination
No problem.
Whites can just go to the White Affinity graduation, right?
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