I was sitting in my Sec Ed 204 class when the question about whether or not English should be the National language was presented to us for a little discussion.

A few of the members in class flat out said yes, leaving no room for ifs, ands or buts. That’s when I laughingly said, “That’s because ya’ll already speak it!”

Well, that’s when things got really interesting.

The looks I received chilled me, and it sparked a debate on why we would or wouldn’t provide bilingual education to our students, both native and foreign, so we could all understand one another.

Mind you, the people in this class would like (for the most part) to be teachers some day.

One of the women who had been very “to the point” with her opinion that if you were going to be in this country, you’d learn to speak our language, turned to me and stated, This country was founded by English-speaking people and, just like every other country, they should learn to communicate with me, not the other way around.

My jaw practically hit the floor. Please, somebody correct me if I’m mistaken, but I recall the Native Americans being here LONG before any English speaking people invaded this land, and most of my descendants, who arrived fairly soon after the founding of this country, all spoke German as their native language.

This mentality isn’t rare on this campus, this state or this country.

We invite international students over from their homes to share knowledge with us, yet we spit on them, curse them and occasionally go so far as to make them wish they had never set foot on American soil.

Issues come up that are concerns for minority students, and we laugh at them, call them radicals, ignore the messages they are trying to send and blow them off while maintaining a happy degree of apathy for everything and everyone that doesn’t affect our lives in some way.

A lot of the students on this campus aren’t here to “learn,” they’re here to get a slip of paper that will allow them to get anywhere from approximately 20k to 40k more a year than if they didn’t have it, and that, my dear students, is a crying shame.

We can create all the retention programs we want at ISU, but the fact of the matter is, the real problem isn’t going to go away that easily.

We’ve got to change from the inside before we can truly improve the outside, and until that happens, this campus will never truly have a positive, diverse climate.

Angie Chipman

President

ISU LGBTA Alliance