As student culture centers continue to grow on college campuses, questions about funding them have arisen, especially in a climate where parents and students are paying higher tuition each year.
The answer to who pays for these centers varies from campus to campus and may even vary for each culture center. While the trend for various culture centers on campuses across the nation has continued to grow, Native Americans sometimes find themselves without a culture center to call their own. Or, if they do exist, they may be underfunded.
What is a culture center?
Although culture centers can be in the same building as the campus student union, it shouldn’t be confused as such. Student unions are typically a place where students buy textbooks and participate in campus activities. Student culture centers also shouldn’t be confused with student organizations or clubs, which are usually not funded by the school.
Student culture centers have been described as “safe havens” for students of certain ethnic or cultural backgrounds to gather, discuss challenges they face and celebrate a particular cultural heritage. Although some culture centers have existed on campuses for decades (maybe under different names), culture centers really began taking root and spreading on college campuses around 2000.
Former University of Missouri student Jeffrey Beckham Jr., who is Black, described the purpose of cultural centers best in an interview with radio program Marketplace. After describing instances of cultural and racial insensitivity, he told Marketplace that the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center on campus “effectively provided a social environment and a community that allowed you to connect with other students to do the ultimate thing that we were there for, which is matriculate through college and get a degree.”
While the definition of culture centers should be universal, the way colleges and universities fund them are not. According to various sources, Black, Latino and Native American culture centers emerged on campus in the 1960s and early 1970s during the various civil rights movements. As college student populations continued to grow more diverse, larger campuses began to add more culture centers; smaller campuses may have established multicultural centers that serve all ethnic groups.
