Diversity program held in HUB

By ALEXANDRA RODRIGUEZ
Collegian Staff Writer

With more than 450 student groups on campus, the pressures of funding can yield unfair results.

To help students understand this situation, Project Growth and Terrell Jones, associate vice provost general and academic officers, presented the program "Diversity by Design" yesterday in the HUB Ballroom.

Project Growth is a group of undergraduate students that seeks to increase visibility of cultural issues on campus.

Jones focused on the way student organizations receive funding. The program began with Jones auctioning one-dollar bills to the students present.

Caught up in the excitement of competition, students offered amounts between 50 cents and $9.

"By what we are doing, he is illustrating the underlining motives behind the decisions that you make," Vladimir Mariano (graduate-computer science) said. "The object of the bidding was not to acquire the dollar, but to outbid the other person."

Jones said many student groups have to go through the "competition" process to receive funding.

"Once you get the dollar, the object of the bidding is lost," he said. "Understanding diversity is logic. People are not always logical."

In his second exercise, Jones gave the students a varied list of mock student organizations, which included an environmental group, a sports group, a theater group and several minority groups. The students were divided into three groups and were asked to divide $2,000 between the organizations, deciding which ones deserved more money.

"What he is trying to say is that things are unjust before they start funding," said Erik Malewski, coordinator and adviser of the Office of the Vice Provost for Education Equity. "For diversity to work, you have to give support to those groups that are marginalized."

Erich Fitschen (senior-marketing) said the organizations presented could all be considered diverse.

"I think of (them) all as diversity groups because they all require different types of people," Fitschen said. "Just because the topic is about a specific culture does not mean that it does not include others."

"Diversity by Design" was designed to help improve communications between these student organizations and Student Activities, said John Hurst, assistant director of Student Activities.

"There's always tremendous discussion about self-segregation of organizations on campus," Jones said. "We purposely created a dynamic that makes people think about these organizations."