Enhancing Campus Climates for Diversity

Research has found that a campus' climate negatively affects students of color. There was a longitudinal study of Latino students, for instance, that "perceptions of racial tension in the first year had a negative effect on academic and psychological adjustment" in the rest of their college career.
With such repercussions, campus climate is an important component of study when searching for solutions to the lack of informal interactions of diversity.

Campus climate is made up of internal and external factors. The internal factors stem from an institution's history of discrimination, or lack thereof against people of color, its structural diversity, and its psychological and behavioral climate. Psychological climates are the attitudes students hold for other races while behavioral climate is the actual intergroup friendships. Since people are found to be most affected by their friends, the psychological climate is most affected by the fact that most people do not have cross-group friends. The external factors are involved with governmental involvement, such as legal decisions on segregation and affirmative action, and the sociohistoric influences, such as current events that bring issues of race and ethnicity to the forefront.

Some solutions or methods to alleviate the issues campus climate perpetuates are to create and execute culturally educational programs that address stereotypes and myths about other sub-groups, to have clear policies set in place to manage racial issues when they arise, to regularly monitor the climate in an effort to maintain a good campus climate, to ensure culture organizations are adequately funded and staffed, to find staff that would professionally support students of color, to oblige students to make peer groups with people of differences in class, and to raise faculty's awareness of their racial biases and how this affects students. Other possible solutions or methods of alleviation include clearly expressing the expectation, based on the university's high value of diversity, that students engage with people different from them along with providing students with on-going safe environments to do so where all participants are regarded as equal and the aura is one of cooperation rather than competition. Furthermore, professors could implement cooperative learning activities to encourage cross-group friendships and consider how to reduce competition in the classroom. Finally, the university can implement more multicultural programs and activities and enlist the support of campus leaders to emphasize the importance of such programs and activities.

When it comes to culture clubs, studies have shown that cultural organizations help people feel more comfortable with their identity and that a possible result of this comfort is an increased penchant for cross-cultural activities. Studies showed that students who were members of culture clubs were more likely to attend diversity workshops and report more diverse informal interactions.