Unify plans to bring campus together
By Meghan Louttit

Ohio University is your quintessential Midwestern college town; rolling hills, brick streets, sidewalks and buildings, lots of trees and friendly squirrels. What’s another “quintessential” aspect of this university nestled in the hills of Appalachia? It’s a serious lack of diversity that in recent years has had administration and students alike worried.

The administration has begun doing its part, along with its new urban scholars program; they also started the Diversify Your World Campaign, which is run by the Office of the Dean of Students. Diversify Your World was initiated during Pre College for the 2004-2005 school year, with an aim to get incoming students interested in diversity issues on campus.

After having mild success, a few students decided to take matters into their own hands. Micah Mitchell says that they felt the students had to step up and take responsibility for the issues facing their own campus. Mitchell, along with a couple other students and Open Doors Advisor, Mickey Hart, started Unify in the fall of the 2004-2005 schools year with a small-scale diversity conference.

There are plenty of groups on campus devoted to diversity in different ways, including STARS, Latino Student Union, College Democrats, etc. The purpose of Unify is to bring all these groups together in the hopes of accomplishing a goal of promoting total diversity in all areas of student life.

“But it’s not just diversity for diversity’s sake,” said Mitchell. “We want to sponsor events that will relate to and bring in all types of people, but not bring them in specifically for that purpose.” The outward goal of Unify is not to make students aware of diversity, but to promote it in less overt ways. As a group, Unify will enhance the diversity-related activities groups are already planning rather than create new ones.

However, Unify will also host diversity conferences with programs similar to Open Doors’ SafeZone program to promote understanding and they will also be hosting a Variety Show, where different organizations will put on acts of their own choosing. The acts need not have any type of diversity-specific topic, but mainly will be for fun and for entertainment to bring together all the groups in Unify to provide a night of leisure that anyone on campus will find entertaining.

Unify is a one-of-a-kind organization on campus and anyone may sign-on to help recruit organizations, brainstorm collaboration ideas and volunteer to help promote events. Meetings are held every Monday at 9 p.m. in Jefferson Library.

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For more information on Unify visit http://www.ohio.edu/~unify

And check out the Unify Picture Slideshow to see pictures from pervious Unify events.