Recent media has criticized Cornell’s cultural living communities for facilitating and encouraging segregated housing. While the housing initiative was clearly made with good intentions, many feel that the implementation of ethnocentric housing actually discourages the diversity Cornell aims to support, or, at very least, limits the interchange and interaction of people from diverse racial backgrounds.

In our discussion of symmetry breaking, we spoke about Schelling’s neighborhood model wherein, dependent upon tolerance to being in the minority, people self-segregate to be surrounded by similar peers. The simple idea is that people have only a certain tolerance to being in the minority and if this level of tolerance is exceeded, that is if the fraction of proximate similar peers is sufficiently low, then the person in the vast minority will move to be closer to those who share more in common. Similarly, the now vacant house of the displaced will be more desirable to someone similar to the majority in that area (i.e. the same group the other person had fled from). People are not necessarily fleeing any specific group intentionally; they just do not want to be in the minority. One obvious application for the analysis of this thought is race within neighborhoods and, taken a step further, dorms.

By this reasoning, if Cornell actually wanted to encourage diversity they would not provide the alternative of ghettoized housing arrangements. By segregating dormitories, even though that segregation was entirely voluntary and based on shared culture and interests, Cornell allows for a very low tolerance to being a minority. The way to maximize diversity in interchange instead of just numbers is to increase this tolerance. Being forced to live in a dorm with a variety of people unlike oneself creates an increased acceptance of being the minority and the realization that it does not have to matter. As was noted in discussion of statistical discrimination, if people think that type does not matter, then, in fact, type does not matter.

Forcing students of all types to integrate, especially during the crucial developmental period of college, will increase the tolerance for being a minority in a given setting and, in turn, tolerance for living, working, and general life situations.