Contemplating Diversity

It’s sometimes amazing how much more time you have to think when you sit and eat a meal alone for a change. Sitting here the in the University Center (people who’ve read my blog by now should know I’ll forever call it the UC) gorging on my BBQ riblet sandwich, I suddenly realized just how diverse this College is.

And I don’t mean “diverse” like what the College always boasts about in its Press Releases. I’m talking about a different kind of diverse.

While surrounded by the football players behind me, the sorority girls to my left and the couple of guys who always debate whether Romulans or Klingons are the superior race to my right, it suddenly hit me. And as I intriguingly notice how these surroundings are also a broad, but appropriate, metaphor for my life, I also suddenly realized the one thing all these groups had in common: friendship and camaraderie.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that people who share similar interests with you can be found at the College fairly quickly. But I think that part of what makes our College so diverse and special, is, rather paradoxically, the fact that at the same time, people have interests that are so diverse, you probably couldn’t count them with the largest calculator in the world.

I’m not going to say that William and Mary is the only place where such a thing exists. Any university one may look at has this characteristic of “diversity.” But maybe, just maybe what makes the College of William and Mary so special, is the fact that here, they’re easier to find.

But in the end, what is diversity anyways? What does it all mean? A lot of things could be diverse, flora and fauna, people, even the type of thread that went into making the chair I’m sitting on.

Perhaps, just perhaps, “diversity” in a college isn’t measured by the number of countries and ethnicities that are represented by the student body, but rather, the number of different personalities and quirks of people there are on campus. It’s all “diversity”, but perhaps the most important fact of life is that the College of William and Mary has all of them.