The ghetto goes to college

Is there de facto segregation at URI?

by David Andrew Stoler

When Kenia Almanzar arrived at the University of Rhode Island for her freshman year, she was assigned to live in Burnside, the dorm named after the Civil War general whose own ornate five-story home is built into the side of Providence's College Hill. Almanzar, who is originally from the Dominican Republic, came to URI through the school's Talent Development initiative, a recruitment program that helps prepare inner-city Rhode Islanders for college. And though many of Almanzar's Talent Development compatriots also were housed in the dorms that make up the Roger Williams Complex, of which Burnside is one of six, the freshman wasn't exactly pleased by her new surroundings. Instead of the brick dorms circled by the grass of the upper campus, Burnside is a concrete building of low ceilings and dark, small hallways. Instead of grass, the dorm is surrounded by trash - empty beer containers, the occasional shoe, wrecked plastic chairs.

Indeed, conditions are so bad at some of the Roger Williams Complex dorms, Burnside included, that URI students commonly refer to them as the "Ghetto." It also so happens that many minorities feel forced to live in the dorms for social and economic reasons. Says Ramsey Piazza, a Latino graduate student who is the assistant hall director in Burnside, "From the backside, they [the Ghetto] look like projects."

Piazza also says these dorms get the least care of all the on-campus housing. "They don't know what to do with this place," he says, pointing out the cracked windows and the broken window frames, the lack of furniture in spaces he says the university fills in other dorms. "In other dorms, they have couches in these lounges, but they ran out," he says.

And so, unhappy with the decrepit conditions of her living space, Almanzar left the Ghetto after her freshman year, moving into a plusher dorm where most of her neighbors were white. When she talks about what happened next, the normally bubbly Almanzar grows serious, loses the smile and easy laughter with which she has been talking. She and her Latina roommate, she says, weren't met with the warmest welcome. "No, we would put up posters for our group [the Latin American Students Association], and people would tear them down, or they would erase our names off our doors, because, you know, we had different names," she says.

Then this past year, when a comic strip appearing in the URI student newspaper, The Good 5cents Cigar, set off a storm of minority protests and confrontations, things got even worse. Almanzar says that "nasty messages" started to appear on her door. "We had a flier up saying, `If you want to talk about this, we'll be having a meeting.' They tore down a bunch of them, and on the ones near my door, they wrote really rude messages: `Just get over it' and `You have no special privilege here.' "

Almanzar's experience seems to be par for the course on a campus that has been divided by racial tension and incident for years. In just these last two, a hate call to URI's Affirmative Action Office and an incident in which a white student allegedly urinated on a black disc jockey touched off protests and passionate student concern over the minority experience on URI's Kingston campus.

Unfortunately, those incidents represent only a small part of a past filled with troubling relations between URI's minorities and the traditional majority on campus -- relations that, since the civil-rights movement of the '50s and '60s, have often exploded into the kind of demonstrations the Cigar controversy only approached last semester. And this tension, students and minority leaders charge, has brought about a sort of de facto segregation on campus, where minority students feel most comfortable living with other minorities in some of the cruddiest, noisiest, and least well-kept dorms on campus.

Of course, it isn't as though segregation and separation on campus were anything new. From the very earliest days of integration, America's universities have either instituted or supported policies resulting in unfair housing practices. Still, at URI, where racial tensions seem particularly high, nobody involved with housing seems to care that many minorities on campus are afraid to live anywhere but in the Ghetto.

Instead, university officials call this "self-selection" and say that rather than being an indicator of the discomfort minorities feel on campus, it is a positive way in which people with certain interests and backgrounds can socialize and commiserate. Chip Yensan, director of housing and residential life at URI, says that minorities grouping together are like any other block of students choosing to live together. "Students will tend to cluster around what they perceive to be common interests -- like crew teams or, you know, Students for the Advancement for Saxophones," he says.

And, indeed, Yensan has a point. A look at most universities will show varying levels of the same kind of separation by ethnicity. The problem with URI is that while other universities work to make sure minority students at least feel comfortable living anywhere they want on campus, officials in Kingston don't even track what races are living in what dorms.

When students complained that more minority freshman were being placed in less desirable dorms at Brown University, for instance, university officials immediately teamed up with the ACLU to investigate. Soon after, they found the problem (it had to do with the way they were inputting student information into their room-assignment software) and fixed it. URI administrators, on the other hand, have known about the Ghetto for at least eight years, but nobody keeps track of whether school policies are pushing minorities to one section of the Kingston campus.

Similarly, while URI officials openly admit to the Ghetto's existence, and to the fact that, as Yensan says, it is "the most worn-out and most tired-out" group of dorms on campus, they are stunningly shady when it comes to details on the Ghetto's upkeep, except to say that URI devotes its resources equally. Although one might assume that Residential Life, like every other department at every other institution, would have to fill out a budget detailing how they spend their piece of URI's $285 million-plus budget, Yensan, through URI's media office, says that information would "take weeks to gather."

Now compare this to Harvard, where, according to Dr. Charles V. Willie, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, officials have taken action to stop exactly the kind of self-selection that is occurring at URI. In 1995, Harvard instituted a program they call "randomization," allowing small groups of sophomores to band together but then randomly assigning the houses in which these groups live. Set for the students' junior and senior years, these assignments assure that all campus housing reflects the Harvard population's diversity.

"We insist that guaranteeing diversity is an important component of education. You can't leave that up to the individual -- the institution and the individual have to complement each other," says Willie. "What you see [at URI] is that they have continued to act as if learning is an individual pursuit. It is not."

URI, in other words, isn't willing to take that kind of responsibility for the wide divides on campus. Asks Yensan, "What's the alternative? Quotas? Saying there needs to be a certain number of minorities in each dorm? I would have some philosophical issues with that."

Minorities in this country have never had an easy time of it in our university residence halls. From the very beginning of desegregation, they have come up against student and administrative barriers to an equal and comfortable living environment. In 1944, for instance, future civil-rights activist A. Leon Higginbotham, then a black student on a relatively liberal Purdue University campus, complained to Purdue's president that black students were forced to live in an unheated dorm. The president replied that black students didn't deserve better quarters.

Of course, since Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka overturned the separate-but-equal dictate of Plessy vs. Ferguson -- the 1890 Supreme Court ruling which said minorities could be legally separated from whites -- segregation on any campus has been illegal. And yet, it seems as if the University of Rhode Island, through a combination of subtle policies that include variable costs for housing, a biased recruiting practice, and an Office of Residential Life that doesn't even acknowledge self-segregation and its causes as a problem, may be continuing the long tradition of supporting a campus split along racial lines.

At this point, almost everybody acknowledges that things aren't quite right for minority students at URI. Indeed, last semester's protests and demonstrations over what some considered a racially offensive comic strip in the Cigar only served to highlight the charged atmosphere that has long been an undercurrent here. Earl Smith, who got his bachelor's degree from URI in 1989 and who is now the assistant director of the school's Multicultural Center, has seen tensions between minority and non-minority students since his earliest days in Kingston. "I can recall the first day being here and being called a nigger. Unfortunately, we do have a history of that. That climate has existed here for a long time," he says.

One of the main reasons why, of course, is the overwhelming number of non-minority students on campus. According to URI assistant professor of sociology Dr. Donald Cunnigen, minorities make up less than 4.5 percent of the total student population, although the university estimates that number at more like 10 percent. Either way, it's rather paltry compared to schools like Brown, whose minority population of 25 percent -- just a few points shy of the nation's 27.9 percent -- is generally considered averagely diverse.

As a result, students of color at URI feel as though most people on campus simply don't understand where they are coming from. This, in turn, can lead to misunderstandings based around ethnicity and a gulf between whites and minorities -- a gulf that makes minorities feel more comfortable living among themselves.

Cunnigen relates a story a white student in his class told about the lone black student in her dorm. "The girl said that there was one black person in the dorm and nobody spoke to that person. Nobody reached out to that person and they had to go out and find their own group of friends. I would hate to be thrown into a situation where I'm like the lone ranger," he says.

And it's not just the amount of white students on campus but the kind. While most people at URI agree that the university puts a fair amount of effort into minority recruitment, Cunnigen says that the university's approach actually skews the student population toward an even wider gulf of perspective, as the school tends to recruit whites from wealthy, out-of-state areas and minority students (through the Talent Development program) from poor, inner-city areas.

"You have a split campus as far as the socio-economics of students," says Cunnigen. "There are these fairly affluent kids from Long Island, and working-class, [minority] kids from in-state. You have these kids driving around in Saabs, and other kids have worked for anything that they have."

According to Frank Santos, Jr., a URI admissions adviser, the university does its damnedest to recruit in higher-income black neighborhoods across the US. But he admits that "a significantly large percentage" of minorities on campus come from Talent Development because other schools outbid URI for those other students. "When you have a school like Florida A&M stepping up and getting the backing of private businesses, saying they want to be more aggressive than Harvard, we just can't compete with that," he says.

But while this may be true, URI further widens the gulf between the have and have-nots by charging different prices for housing. Dorms, like apartments, are not only unequal in terms of upkeep and facilities but also in terms of cost. At URI, there are basically two different price schemes for the campus's 19 dorms. A standard double-occupancy room costs $3462, but a student can pay about $200 extra for a single or $300 extra to live in one of three buildings housing two-room suites with a private bath.

Problem is, of the remaining 16 dorms, six are either freshman-only or specialty dorms aimed at a specific group of people, like women or honors students. And of the 1800 available spots left on campus, 1100 are on the Roger Williams Complex. As a result, the Ghetto dorms wind up the primary choice for the campus's poorer students. Says Marc Hardge, a URI student and a member of Brothers United for Action, the group that led last semester's Cigar protests, "There's a certain dollar amount that's attached to living in the Ghetto, [and] economics are a big concern for . . . students of color."

Combined, these socio-economic and cultural differences often mean that even your average, day-to-day roommate problems between a minority and a non-minority student have the potential to turn into a racial issue, whether it began that way or not. Graduate student Kenny Dovale has both lived and been a residence counselor in and out of the Ghetto. Of the years he didn't live there, he says, "There were certain problems with understanding music and hygiene, and those problems could lead to other problems. My suitemates were mostly white, and I played my rap music. They didn't like it. They'd turn up their rock music. I was cool about it, because that's the type of person I am. But things can just blow up."

Belkis Mercedes, a Dominican senior who came through the Talent Development program, knows exactly how cultural misunderstandings can lead to problems. Last year, she was living in Barlow, a non-Ghetto, hall-style dorm made up of mostly white students. "Some Caucasian girl . . . she didn't like me, and she came by and threw water under my door. I didn't even know her." When Mercedes complained to the hall counselor, she found out that the girl, who spoke no Spanish, thought that Mercedes was talking trash about her in Spanish. "I was like, `I don't even know you.' "

Both Cunnigen and the university's Affirmative Action Office have heard of other incidents like these as well. "There's a lot of tension in the dorms," Hardge says. "A couple of friends of mine had messages written on the [shared bathroom] mirrors and on their doors -- `Nigger go home.' There are kids who have never had a relationship with students of color, not to mention live with them."

In response, Yensan says that he is getting no indication of harassment in dorms. In fact, the Affirmative Action Office reports no official complaints of ethnic incidents in the past year. But students say that this is because they've been turned away in the past or because they feel that URI just isn't determined to change things. "I went to residential life and told them about [the gratified posters], and they didn't do anything," says Almanzar. "It's so frustrating to know I can't do anything about it."

And so the Ghetto: a place where, though the grounds may be strewn with trash and dorm conditions deteriorating, the feeling of not being welcome or understood, of not having a place to go can disappear. Says Cunnigen, "Black and Latino students . . . feel that they'd rather be in a setting where they're not always fighting the good fight."

Starting from the beginning of their freshman year (after Talent Development kids have bonded from their summer work together) students get to list their building and roommate preferences. Feeling the discomfort, trusting each other, minorities simply choose an undesirable dorm, one where they know there will be little competition for rooms and where they will be able to live around other minorities who share core beliefs and perspectives.

The question, of course, is what's wrong with a hugely disproportionate number of black students deciding to live in one of the most run-down dorms on campus? Why isn't it just like any other special-interest community, like Yensan's Students for the Advancement of the Saxophone?

The standard argument is that there are many ways in which students of like backgrounds or even interests self-select into group-living situations, and if minority students feel more comfortable living in a big web of minority support, they by all means should, even if that means just slightly less of the stuff of which universities are supposed to be made -- i.e., discourse and dialogue.

Fran Cohen, URI's director of student life, chalks it up to human nature. "If you and I went to live in Saudi Arabia, we'd probably live together, eat with other Americans and socialize with an American community instead of getting a full cultural experience," she says.

Except, of course, that our university campuses aren't supposed to be like Saudi Arabia. Nor are we talking about people who love reed instruments and simply want to spend their time together toot-tooting. Like everyone on the URI campus, minorities are trying to get a rich educative experience, but because of a university environment that at times ignores and even enforces the separateness of its minority students, they don't feel comfortable living anywhere on campus but in the Ghetto. Faced with paying extra to live in a dorm in which ethnicity-based misunderstandings and miscommunications are the norm, where they could be welcomed by racial tensions that they can't count on the university to address, many URI minorities are basically forced into segregating themselves into the poorest dorms on campus.

"The university is touchy on [addressing these kinds of issues]. It's a good school -- I've grown through this school. But this is an area that they have been very hesitant to touch," says Dovale. "You put them in a situation where they have to react, like with the Cigar, and they do. But it's not like they start it themselves." And this apparent reluctance to act reinforces the preconceived notion that minority comfort is just not that important to the university.

Yensan says that URI is fighting this as best it can through diversity workshops and the aggressive recruitment of minority residence advisors, and that there is always room for improvement. "I'm up for any discussion that will build a better community, but we don't want to take the choice out of the student's hands."

But, as Harvard's Willie says, this may be just what an institution needs to do to take responsibility. Cunnigen, frustrated by the racial high-tension wires strewn across the university, frustrated that minority students at URI do not feel comfortable enough to move outside the Ghetto, notes the consistency with which the housing issue fits into a university rife with racial controversy. "This particular university," he says, "is a particularly difficult place for a minority to negotiate."