Self segregation on campus (school, engineers, major, students)

[artsyguy]

What are your thoughts on self segregation.
The students congregating into groups of their own kind (race, ethnicity, or religion) is fine but when one person or another group tries to interact with them then hostility arises. The hostility is the problem. The unwillingness to interact in a respectful and friendly manner. Discuss.

[DrJoey]

I have been on a lot of campuses around the country and have never seen that happen.

[Pitt Chick]

Originally Posted by artsyguy

The hostility is the problem. The unwillingness to interact in a respectful and friendly manner. Discuss.

While I have seen/experienced the "congregating" on many campuses, I have not seen or experienced hostility and unwillingness to interact.

[Aconite]

I would suspect it depends on the quality of the approach. If a random someone walks up to a bunch of (e.g.) Mormon kids and says "hey, what's with the magic underwear?", or asks a bunch of women in niqab "gee, don't you feel oppressed by having to wear that stuff?" that someone isn't really deserving of open arms and sunshine smiles (though with a group of missionaries you might get them anyway).

[hsw]

Self-segregation is life

At places like Stanford, engineering students are often aloof from lib arts kids (whom engineers often view as morons; and lib arts kids often view engineers as socially-inept geeks)

At tech cos. like Google, major cultural divide between engineers and ad sales or management-types

Similar socio-economic-intellectual divides exist at any school or college or office or city or suburb in world; humans are free to choose with whom they prefer to associate or socialize....or barely tolerate or co-exist

[artsyguy]

I see that I am getting a lot of defensiveness here. That is interesting. Hostility means inability to bring into friendly accord. So I am assuming everybody has seen nothing but friendliness on college campus.

[artsyguy]

In regards to your simplistic story I think it is common sense to say that that person being sarcastic with the group of Mormon kids isn't truly trying to be their friend.

Originally Posted by Aconite

I would suspect it depends on the quality of the approach. If a random someone walks up to a bunch of (e.g.) Mormon kids and says "hey, what's with the magic underwear?", or asks a bunch of women in niqab "gee, don't you feel oppressed by having to wear that stuff?" that someone isn't really deserving of open arms and sunshine smiles (though with a group of missionaries you might get them anyway).

[Pitt Chick]

Originally Posted by artsyguy

I see that I am getting a lot of defensiveness here.

Why are you categorizing our experiences as defensiveness?

[artsyguy]

Because you are saying that there is not a disadvantage to it. There are advantages and disadvantages to almost every social construct.

Originally Posted by Pitt Chick

Why are you categorizing our experiences as defensiveness?

[dreamgirl84]

I read this book called, "Why are all the Black kids sitting in the Cafeteria" by Beverly Daniel Tatum. If youre really interesting in why this happens, it would be a great book to read. After reading this book Ive realized that many questions like yours cannot accurately be answered in one sentence, or even one paragraph.