For years, Iowa State has tried to diversify its campus. While recruitment and retention programs are at their peak, there is still a small representation of a multicultural community among the student body. Other universities nationwide have seen increases in students of multicultural backgrounds, but Iowa State still has a small percentage of multicultural students on campus. But we have no one but ourselves to blame. It’s not like this university is exactly multicultural friendly, anyway.

While campuses across the nation have renamed service offices for students of diversity to names such as Office of Multicultural Affairs, or to programs such as AHANA (African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American), Iowa State has maintained the name Minority Student Affairs. Minority. The connotation of this name alone seems to send a red warning flag: There are more of us than there are of you, and we like it that way. The Minority Student Affairs offices recently casually surveyed students on a possible renaming of the facility and the percentage of students who wanted to leave the name “as is” were, well, in the minority. But we have yet to see a name change or an announcement for plans to make our campus more politically correct and keep our multicultural community from feeling inferior.

Iowa State prides itself on being a land-grant institution and being the first university to be founded under the Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862, but the lack of sympathy for indigenous studies and indigenous communities is alarming.

Where do the regents and students think this land came from anyway? While alumni and staff fight to save Morrill Hall, which commemorates this man’s pioneering efforts to establish learning institutions such as ours, there is little to no support in creating a stronger indigenous studies program. While American Indian studies can be studied as a minor, the program is not offered as a major program of study at Iowa State.

Other universities offer studies in specific tribal groups, but here there is not even a major in a very broad indigenous studies program, nor an ethnic studies program. Universities nationwide offer at least an ethnic studies major, if not a major like African-American Studies, Asian Studies or American Indian Studies, which are still in themselves very broad programs. While students from multicultural backgrounds do not focus only in these areas, there are students who go to school to study these specific things. Without these programs at Iowa State, we lose many potential students who go elsewhere to pursue academics.

Students of multicultural backgrounds who come to Iowa State do their best to share their culture with other students on campus. Not only do we have many international organizations, but we also have many organizations based on the multi-ethnic composition of the United States. While membership in these organizations is not restrictive, they receive little interest from the student body.

Through annual events, many of them see comfortable pockets of attendants, but it’s barely a sliver of the student population. And even when students attend the organizations’ events, or even larger, university-sponsored events such as the Iowa State Conference on Race and Ethnicity (ISCORE), they are there for a class. They’re attending because they have to, not because they want to.

Students are weary of taking classes required for the diversity requirement. Often, these classes are required for students. I’ve heard in many a first day of class “…and I’m here to fulfill my diversity requirement.” Students are often nonchalant about this requirement, enrolling in whatever allows them to sleep in the latest or the course that seems the easiest.

Sure, it’s required, but there are still lots of options to choose from. Shouldn’t we be willing to broaden our horizons and learn more about other cultures outside of our own? Three credits is really not that much to spare.

Iowa State has the opportunity to expand and be a world-class institute of learning, not only in class, but outside of class as well.

There is so much to learn from the world, but this perspective is lost on a fairly homogenous campus like Iowa State. We must be supportive of enhancing and increasing educational programming, such as adding majors that do not currently exist at Iowa State to enhance our education from books. But we must also be supportive of building a multicultural campus to give us a learning experience outside of our books.