Who says you can’t go home again? The prestigious University of Connecticut is erecting a dorm that will take students all the way back to the 1950s and earlier.
The Blaze reports that the dorm, called ScHOLA2RS House, will be — drum roll! — segregated, available exclusively to black graduate students. According to UConn’s website, the facility, which is set to open this year, is envisioned as “a scholastic initiative to groom, nurture, and train the next generation of leaders to address grand challenges in society through the promotion of academic success in undergraduate programs at the University of Connecticut and in competitive graduate programs.”
The article quotes Erik Hines, an assistant professor of educational psychology and future faculty advisor to residents of the dorm, as saying:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It is a space for African American men to one, come together and validate their experiences that they may have on campus. Number two, it’s also a space where they can have conversation and also talk with individuals who come from the same background who share the same experience.
So much for sermons extolling the virtues of inclusiveness and diversity!
So how is the idea being greeted by students? One of them, a puppetry major(!) named Isaac Bloodworth, is quoted as saying:
You have people who are going to go against it because they are just racist and they see this as a form of segregation or that we’re getting better things than they are.
Bloodworth went on to articulate fears that the living space could lead to a racial divide on campus.
Another, Africana studies and political science major Haddiyyah Ali, told The Daily Campus:
I was not pleased, my immediate thought was ‘What?’ I know there had to be a lot of research that went into it … but just for me coming from a student perspective, my initial thought was what about black women and girls – what about us?
Just this idea that 43 black men get retention programming and everyone else is left in limbo….
