What’s Religion Got To Do With It?

• In Event: Radicalized, Fundamentalist, and Terrorist: Muslim College Students and Their Ascribed Identities

Abstract

In this paper, using mixed methods, Cole examines how Muslims contribute to diversity on college campuses. Cole merges over 30 years of UCLA’s CIRP survey data (Cooperative Institute for Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles), which includes college experience data for over 12,000 Muslim students from 1970 to 1998 across several hundred colleges and universities – with over 125 online survey responses, 10 focus group interviews, and individual interview data on 55 Muslim college students across 10 universities in 4 states with large domestic and international Muslim populations. Cole finds that Muslim students have significantly enhanced the religious and ethnic diversity of student experiences in American colleges and universities. Since the 1970s, Muslim college students report attending religious services less frequently than Christian students, but more often than Jewish students (Cole & Ahmadi, 2010). Muslim students are also more Liberal in their political orientation than Christian students, but not as Liberal as their Jewish peers. Muslim students spend more time attending racial/ cultural awareness workshops, having a roommate of a different race/ ethnicity, socializing with someone of a different racial / ethnic group, and participating in a racial/ ethnic specific organization when compared to Jewish and Christian students. Muslims also report participating in organized demonstrations with goals of influencing social values and promoting racial understanding more often than their Jewish and Christian peers. In fact, racial/ ethnic diversity has been and continues to be central to the Muslim student college experience, despite significant shifts in the demography of this ethnically diverse religious group. Consequently, the religious diversity that Muslim students bring to campus adds a dimension to the scope and complexity of campus diversity (Cole & Ahmadi, 2010).
Thus, Muslim students are an integral part of the campus community and embracing their presence can lead to diversity-enriched campus environments. The contribution of Muslim students to campus diversity is not only in their presence, but also in the extent they interact with peers who are ethnically and religiously different from themselves and vice-versa. If we are instructed by our Federal government that we have a compelling interest to eradicate all forms of discrimination and we need to abide by the Constitution of the United States, then as leaders in institutions of higher education shouldn’t we consider including religion in general, and Islam, specifically in the human diversity that every campus strives to acquire as an institution of learning? If so, what are the implications for practice and how should campus diversity initiatives be implemented to promote religious diversity as an aspect of campus diversity? Cole discusses each of these questions and provides recommendations for policy and practice.

Author

• Darnell G. Cole, University of Southern California