As the Master Plan leaves the conceptual stage and moves into a formative one, its ideas and developments for the future have left many students and organizations asking what their status on campus will be in 30 years. Most recently, the plan to put a parking garage on the east side of campus has made the African American Cultural Center and the Women’s Center ask these very questions as they face the possibility of having to move. While these organizations try to figure out where they will be in 30 years, one burning question remains: Where, physically and ideologically, will campus diversity be in 30 years?
Currently, the Women’s Center and the AACC share what many would consider prime locations on campus, being located on Dalrymple and Raphael Semmes Drives, respectively. Along with other centers and organization, proponents for both have had similar goals of informing students of their particular issues and, most importantly, improving diversity on campus through forums, center events and student activities.
When examining the individual contributions of both centers, and campus organizations such as these, one has to wonder what they could do together. This question, furthermore, only makes one wonder why the University has not built a single, large facility to be used as a diversity center, thus meeting the needs of all groups involved. Such a center could really unify the various cultural groups on campus by creating one large voice informing students not only of individual cultural issues, but of diversity issues in general.
While the idea of a diversity center would be new to LSU, it is certainly not new across the country. Universities such as Mississippi State and Lawrence University in Wisconsin have had such facilities that provide offices for various cultural centers on campus but also a meeting place for smaller organizations. When looking at these centers’ activities and mission statements, they sound invariably like those of the LSU’s own Office of Multicultural Affairs. According to the OMA’s mission statement, it desires to promote “a supportive and friendly environment that is welcoming and attractive to all persons regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, gender/gender identity, religious conviction, sexual orientation or disability status.” In this long list of desires for this “environment” that OMA wants to create on campus, a diversity center would be a dream-come-true in uniting and accepting all of these groups together.
The one way LSU would differ from these other universities in creating a diversity center is that Mississippi State and Lawrence Universities did not have the Master Plan as an aid in determining the physical aspects of their centers. By becoming part of the Master Plan, organizations could play an active role in determining what, where, and how they want their center to be. Since the interests and activities of the Women’s Center and AACC overlap so much now, it is easy to see how they and their counterparts could share a huge, state-of-the-art facility with recreational rooms, conference and meeting rooms and offices for their respective organizations.
In looking at what many consider to be a serious lack of diversity on campus, it is interesting to wonder what one facility, and one voice, could do to unify the many cultural and minority groups on this campus. While the question of where to put this center remains to be answered, the Master Plan has physically allowed this question to exist in the first place, and the existence of this question shows how the Master Plan does not only involve shaping this campus’ physical future, but its cultural and ideological one as well.