Diversity program fosters community
Yvonne Chiu Hays
Anne-Marie Barrett, a junior, said she felt "on top of the world" when she first arrived at Princeton and more than a little bit scared. For starters, she was more than 3,000 miles from her home in Ireland. She also was carrying around a secret.
"My speech tonight is not about being an international student, but it is about being a gay student," she said at "Reflections on Diversity," a University program that takes place during freshman orientation and is aimed at fostering community.
"One of the reasons I decided to come to school in the U.S. is the much more liberal attitude to sexual orientation found here. But once I was here, I was still afraid of ridicule, personal violence and, perhaps most of all, of being ostracized from my peers," Barrett said.
She said she really wanted to come out, but fear was keeping her silent. What gave her more courage was the revelation by one of the speakers at "Reflections on Diversity" two years ago that she was bisexual.
"I was so stunned by the fact that someone would stand up in front of 1,200 people and announce that she wasn't straight," she said. "Such frankness was far from my own experience of having to hide my sexual orientation.
"That night was the start of a two-year journey that took me from being terrified of telling my roommate to standing here tonight in front of your class and saying, 'Hi, my name is Anne-Marie and I'm a lesbian,'" said Barrett, who is now a Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual peer educator and treasurer of the Pride Alliance.
"Reflections on Diversity" was introduced in 1992, and has become a permanent feature of freshman orientation since then. The program illuminates the diversity of the University community by relating the stories, experiences and backgrounds of several students and one member of the faculty. Following the class meeting, resident and minority affairs advisers lead group discussions back in the residential colleges.
"Reflections has been an extremely successful program and an effective vehicle in engaging students in thinking about community," said Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel.
Senior P.J. Kim, the president of Undergraduate Student Government, was also one of this year's speakers. He told the freshman class he had empathy with those who didn't feel the need for such an assembly.
"I remember when I was a freshman sitting out where you are now and I remember feeling very skeptical and pretty uncomfortable," he said. "I didn't quite understand whom these speakers were going to try and convince and I didn't know what the point of these speeches would be...because most of you are pretty open and accepting and a lot of you actively seek out those who are different from you."
Kim said despite his doubts, he walked away unexpectedly changed by the "Reflections" program.
"The speakers all spoke very movingly about their different experiences. And despite the qualities that set them apart from all their classmates, they all had a theme. Their theme was they all drew strength from their diversity, but not before it caused them a lot of pain, a lot of disappointment and not before they discovered how difficult it was to make diversity more than just a buzzword."
He urged the class to make an effort to get to know someone different -- no matter how awkward and difficult it is. He used the example of his freshman year roommate. Kim, who is not religious, would go to mass with his roommate, who, in turn, would go to Asian-American events.
"I know it sounds kind of crass, almost as if we were swapping religion for rice cakes," he said. "But in the beginning you really have to do things like that to kick-start what hopefully will be a self-sustaining process."
When it was his turn to speak, junior Afsheen Afshar, president of the Princeton Persian Society, challenged the freshman class to continue to explore interests and friendships as the school year progresses, even when the demand on their time increases significantly.
"It won't be long before you become engrossed in your Princeton life, where there isn't often enough time to do what you have to do, let alone what you want to do. But I think college is as much about gaining social knowledge as it is about gaining academic knowledge," Afshar said.
He acknowledged that it is easy to cling to people and things with which one feels familiar, but he said one of the goals of the class should be to try to sustain the interest and excitement they feel now for one another.
"Princeton does indeed have a very diverse student body. But to make it a diverse community, I think we need to have more intercommunication between the various groups we do have," he said.
Perhaps more than most people, sophomore Jessica Melore understands the preciousness of time, especially when life seems to be going at full speed. Melore suffered a heart attack in the fall of her senior year of high school without much warning. She was by all accounts a healthy teenager, but the failure of her heart in that one instant nearly killed her.
Nine months after the attack and before she received a heart transplant, she lived with the assistance of a battery-powered ventricular device.
"As if my situation couldn't get worse, the balloon pump that had been inserted in my left leg as part of a life-safety precaution was cutting off my left circulation. I soon developed an infection in my leg and because my situation was so critical, the doctors had no choice but to amputate it above the knee. I now wear a prosthesis," Melore said.
She turned down the option of postponing school for a year and graduated with her high school class. "I knew that I wouldn't get anywhere by sitting around and moping in my room all day. So a week after I got out of the hospital, I returned to school and resumed all of my activities with the exception of tennis," Melore said.
Since her heart attack, Melore has worked actively to promote organ transplantation and handicap awareness. At Princeton, she is a singer in Tigressions and an Orange Key tour guide.
"I appreciate each day so much more now that I have been given a second chance. The best advice I can give you is to make the most out of each day at Princeton. You are being given an amazing opportunity to meet people from all over the world and take classes from world-renowned professors.
"Your college experience is what you make of it. Get involved. Meet as many people as you can. Each one has a story and they're the ones from whom you will learn the most," Melore said.
While many of the students focused on diversity inside the walls of Princeton in their speeches, Professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, who holds a joint position in the Office of Population Research and the Department of Sociology, asked the incoming class to keep in mind the differences they will encounter outside of Princeton.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to have to take this opportunity to remind all of us that in this country of great abundance, unprecedented in the history of the universe, there are 35 million people living in poverty who are not necessarily for the most part represented here," she said.
She challenged the class to recognize when diversity becomes "a platitude, a euphemism and empty shell to conceal serious inequalities."
In this country, poverty is a function of our decision not to incorporate certain groups, she said. "Will you actually sit around the table and say what they should do? Or are you going to be the kinds of people who are going to go out of the walls of Princeton University in order to encounter yet another dimension of diversity, the diversity represented by the large inequalities that still plague our society -- racial as well as class inequality?"
"Follow the hero's path. Decide to be heroes," she advised.
Related story
Orientation packs in activities
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October 2, 2000 Contents • Shapiro
to step down at the top of his game • President Clinton address to keynote academic conference • Invitation
touches Berry • Orientation
packs in activities • Calendar
of events
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