One Student's Call for Assigned Seats (2007)

Most obviously in my sociology classes, I have noticed a distinct racial division in who sits with whom. Even at the recent panel discussion on Perceptions of Race and Inequality at Grinnell, it seemed that, ironically, the audience was not truly integrated. These divisions are symptoms of a large problem. It is one thing to have a multicultural (or multiracial or multiclassial, etc.) campus, but it is an entirely different thing to have a campus free of racial divisions, stereotypes, and tensions.

While Grinnell has recruited a diverse student body so that we eat in the same dining hall and attend the same classes as people wildly different from us, how many people still make an effort to meet new peers after the third week of our first semester? While many events and activities gather diverse groups, the groups often remains divided in the audience, at the discussion table, or in the classroom.

Bridging racial and economic divides requires more than just placing a collection of people on a small plot of land in Iowa, and so, I believe that one of the best and most direct ways to address the segmented student body is to manually force us to sit together through the institution of assigned seating. By our second semester, we all have our friends that we search for on the first day of classes. We create an unofficial seating chart and that is that. The boys sit together, the girls sit together, international students sit together, white students sit together, and so on. In my mind, a little institutional help could push the student body, slowly and surely, toward a more unified campus.

I do not mean to say that students have not attempted to take strides toward solving this problem – student groups constantly bring parts of the campus community together to view cultural movies, listen to foreign music, and eat foreign foods – but conditions on campus still leave much to be desired.

Seating charts in every class (maybe even ones that shift every three to four weeks) would constantly expose us to new people and would, bit by bit, take a bite out of the problem of insularity on our campus. Classes are the place where we often first meet the people who later become our friends. Even if we do not become friends with everyone we sit next to, we are more likely to sit next to them at a concert or at least smile at them in the loggia. Furthermore, working with people we would not otherwise interact with forces us to accommodate different working styles and a wide range of opinions.

A counterargument to assigned seats and groups might articulate that we work better with people we know and, therefore, learn more. But Grinnell is a liberal arts school, and if we never break out of our comfort zone, what are we really learning?

Bibliography

Fletcher, Michael A. "Diversity or Division on Campus: Minority Graduation Galas Highlight a Timely Issue," Washington Post, May 19, 2003, pp A01. Available http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/wmay6.html.

Humphreys, Debra. 1999. "Campus Diversity and Student Self-Segregation: Separating Myths From Facts." Diversity Web. Available http://www.diversityweb.org/diversity_innovations/institutional_leadership/
campus_climate_culture/student_segregation.cfm.