ALL THE VOICES (Part I)

By Professor Dick Allen (Excerpted)

Recently, my wife and I watched the television presentation of Disney Studios' Pocahontas. At one point, during the lovely song, "All the Colors of the Wind," we simultaneously turned toward each other and said, "It's like UB!" The song's lyrics go on: "You think the only people who are people / Are the people who look and think like you. / But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, / You will learn things you never knew you knew."

That is teaching at what is perhaps America's most truly international mixture of college undergraduates, at UB. We have increasingly grown accepting of the differences and similarities in nations, cultures and people. When I give a guest lecture or poetry reading at some other much less heterogeneous college or university, I often feel out of place, for I'm speaking to what has become to me a non-representational segment of global undergraduates. Where are the Russians, the Nigerians, the Japanese, the South Americans, the Chinese, I wonder? During question-and- answer sessions, why don't I hear wonderful mixtures of differently accented English? Why doesn't my audience look like a rainbow, painted "with all the colors of the wind"?

What's so distinctive about UB is that here the international students are not isolated in pockets nor are they the "different" ones in a classroom. They are here in such numbers that they do not feel out of place or "foreign," and the campus is as truly theirs as it is the Americans'. International students and American students work side by side, sharing responsibilities in virtually all campus activities, from Student Congress, dormitory government and the campus newspaper to S.C.U.B.A. (our campus intellectual organization) and dozens of clubs.

How else to describe it?

Imagine being in an "Introduction to Poetry" class where a South American Dental Hygiene major flawlessly reads a poem by Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish and then helps the rest of us understand the nuances we miss in our English-translation version. Imagine too a discussion about communism, when an American student puts forth the advantages of Marxism, two Russian students strenuously advocate capitalism, and then one quietly observes, "Communism seemed fine in theory, but why did my country have to try it?"

Imagine talking about Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, when a Muslim student from Malaysia raises her hand to say she understands and admires the American family-values of the nineteenth-century, for her family's values are like that today; and what happened to American morals in the interim?

"Maybe it's television," an American student answers. "Or all of your cars," a student from the Dominican Republic puts in.

Imagine a discussion of urban poverty as an American student from the inner city Bronx and a student from Bangladesh swap vivid stories, and the American student becomes appalled at a depth of slum poverty he'd never imagined. "Maids?" he says, "you hire maids as a way of helping the poor?" And then it strikes him that without such a job an entire family might starve.

Imagine speaking about war and there's a marvelously gifted Bosnian Muslim student, already a published poet, who has experienced war firsthand. She quotes the Nobel Prize- winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska to help the class understand war's unreality and horror. At UB, she has not only very close American Catholic friends, but is close friends with those who come from Croatia and Serbia.