Thanks to Alissa Griffith for her Thursday column inviting OU alums to consider donating to minority scholarship funds (and thanks to The Post for running the column). I want to add that increasing the diversity of the OU student body is good for everyone. For many students, college is a first step outside the familiar environment they grew up in, into a larger world full of new people and experiences. If that world is populated with people from a wide range of backgrounds, and if it offers opportunities for those people to interact across lines that conventionally separate us, we become better able to appreciate the common humanity that underlies our differences. And when we move on from college to take up roles in the larger community, we are better prepared to shape the structures of our cultural and political systems that perpetuate, or dismantle, those troubling divisions. If, on the other hand, college is four more years of associating with only people like us
we become that much more rooted in the way things have always been and that much less able to envision and enact positive change. You pay good money for your years at OU ' a diverse student body is one way to ensure that it's money well spent.
Evan Young is spiritual director for the UCM Center for Spiritual Growth & Social Justice.
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Letter to the Editor
