We attended a graduation ceremony for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga students recently. It was filled with the kind of pomp and ceremony one might expect at any graduation.
Musicians played in the graduates-to-be, who marched onto the floor of McKenzie Arena in their blue gowns and took their place, row by row, in two sections of chairs that covered what is normally the school basketball team's playing surface.
Creative students decorated their mortar boards both to display their individualism and to let Mom and Dad in Section 238 know which one was their graduate, the one for whom they'd paid four, five or six years of higher education.
The chancellor spoke words of welcome, words perhaps earnestly written but words that went in one ear of all attendees and out the other. An invited speaker challenged the students to do their best, live their dreams and strive their hardest, but even he admitted no one will remember his words because that is not why they were there. They were there either to graduate - to move their tassels from the right to the left once they received their pretend diplomas (the real ones come in the mail) - or to support the graduate and perhaps shed a tear in the doing.
After all students crossed the stage, each name duly announced, the school alma mater was played and dismissal announced.
UTC segregates its graduations these days out of physical necessity. On one day, a graduation was held for those receiving master's, specialist and doctoral degrees. On the next, in the morning, a ceremony honored graduates picking up bachelor's degrees in the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Engineering and Computer Science. In the early afternoon, a graduation was held for students who earned bachelor's degrees in the College of Business and the College of Health, Education and Professional Studies.
In the ceremony we attended, the last of the three, the arena was nearly full, more full than it has been for a UTC basketball game in many, many years. To have put the degrees together - 253 graduate students and 1,166 undergraduate students and their supporters - would have required an arena at least twice the size of McKenzie.
Columbia University also segregates its ceremonies. While the school offers a main commencement, students also have the option of attending individual ceremonies for black, Latino, LGBTQ, Native American and Asian students. This year, for the first time, the school also had a ceremony for students who were the first in their families to earn a degree.
Since the ceremonies are so specialized, we wonder how much purity is demanded. For example, must Native Americans be 100 percent, or would someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. (who listed herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory and who a genealogist has said could be as much as 1/32 Native American) be welcome?
Where would a student with a Latina mother and a black father fit? Are those who are first in their family to earn a degree the first in their immediate family or the first in their lineage? Must they present their genealogy to a fact-checker to be admitted?
The various segregated ceremonies at Columbia are organized, according to Campus Reform, through a collaboration among various student groups and the school's Office of Multicultural Affairs, which is said to exist to promote diversity, inclusion and social justice among students.
So, yes, it might be said the segregated ceremonies are staged to promote inclusion.
Confusing, isn't it?
The Human Rights Campaign says schools that offer separate graduation ceremonies for LGBTQ students - and they will occur on at least 124 college campuses this spring - do so to "provide a sense of community for minority students who often experience tremendous shock at their impersonalized institutions."
Impersonalized institutions? Colleges and universities are so customized these days practically any student who wants to be special has a niche.
At UTC, for instance, there are organizations for blacks, Hispanics, international students, Saudi students, LGBTQQIA students, students who love Japanese cartoons, film fans, women who like computer science, League of Legends players, pro-life students, students who love gaming and students who enjoy fly fishing, just to name a few of the more than 120.
We wonder how this cleaving of people into races, sexual orientations and other designations will help the graduates once they join the working world. Will it make them believe that world should be so divided? Will it make them claim they can only work with people like themselves? Will it make them feel they should be treated differently because of their separateness?
Life is not like that, though. Black surgeons do not operate only on black patients. Asian lawyers do not represent only Asian clients. First-in-their-family graduates will be hard-pressed to be entrepreneurs whose start-ups serve only first-in-the-family graduates.
Following the UTC graduation we attended, we spoke specifically to three students who were there to celebrate a milestone reached, a job well done. It didn't occur to us until later that one student was white, one black and the third Muslim.
The sooner we come to grips with our homogeneous world, the better off we'll be.