First, I would like to thank everyone who has responded to my article from the Feb. 27 issue (“Comparisons with Carleton on Minority Students Inaccurate”). No, really! One of the problems that our campus has sometimes is a lack of open dialogue about things that are very important to large numbers of students. One of the respondents, Hannah Palmer, remarked that many of these issues (raised by Erik Morales in his column “Quietly and Mostly to Myself”) are often discussed in the Cultural House basement. If nothing else, this dialogue has gotten these issues out in the open, where the entire campus can read about them and discuss them.

I would like to respond to several of the statements made in last week’s Mac Weekly regarding this issue and my original article. First, I will respond to Haris Aqeel’s comments about photography and students of color (SoC) at Macalester. In my original article, I compared the photographing of SoC at Macalester with the photographing of any other specific academic or extracurricular group. I used the examples of photographing athletes and musicians to recruit members of these two groups. Aqeel characterized this comparison as “naïve, if not offensive.” Unfortunately, I believe that, while I may have been naïve, he was reading too deeply into my comparison of SoC with members of a particular major. In a strictly “representational” sense, Admissions must seek to create an image of a college where everyone is welcome and where every prospective student would want to come. Just like you photograph the choir in their formal outfits in the concert hall, you photograph students of many different ethnic groups to create an image of acceptance. This image may not be accurate, but neither is the image of the musicians: they are portrayed in formal-wear, under favorable lighting and with smiles on their faces. But, within the current framework of Admissions publications, this is how SoC are recruited.

This may not be the correct method. In fact, based on the comments of many last week’s respondents, it probably isn’t the correct method. What is the alternative? Perhaps a system whereby many different represented groups would be able to comment on the way they are portrayed in college publications or perhaps another system. If the system is broken, we all (not just the SoC, the entire college community) must try to fix it. But someone must propose a workable alternative.

The same holds true with the problem of multicultural admissions. In response to Hannah Palmer and Ana Najera-Mendoza, I remain opposed to the acceptance of the Posse program at Macalester for several reasons. First, as I mentioned two weeks ago, I value the current “individualized” admissions system Macalester uses. Indeed it is a personal value judgement whether or not that system should be compromised in order to recruit a more diverse student body—I believe that it should not. One reason is that it is too easy. Any college that accepts the Posse program has effectively “bought” multiculturalism. In exchange for funding this select group of students, for the time the students are in attendance at the college, all of their statistics on SoC attendance look fabulous. Did the institution have to change anything? Was institutional racism challenged? Did the attitude of the college towards SoC change at all? I don’t think so. Instead of this, a more complicated process of attracting more SoC to our current admissions system is a goal that will improve the diversity of Macalester while creating dialogue and changing the attitude of the entire school towards SoC.

In closing, I would encourage anyone with suggestions or complaints to contact the Admissions Office. Maybe wait a couple of weeks, as they are currently completely swamped with applications, but do contact them. The Admissions counselors and staff members want to fix these problems as much as you do. The problem is finding workable solutions. I have been in and out of Admissions many times in the last week, and you will not find a group of people anywhere who are more concerned about finding solutions to these very problems. But, like most people on this campus, they are squeezed for time and resources. I would restate my earlier call to Morales, except this time I send it out to the entire campus. If you consider these issues to be important, offer concrete, workable solutions to specific problems. Send an e-mail, write a letter or go talk to an Admissions counselor. Attend a dialogue on multicultural admissions (I hope this discussion will provoke some!) or simply continue to write articles offering suggestions. This is a huge, complicated problem, and only with all of us working together can we begin to solve it.