The Reality of the Auburn Family-Personal Blog

By: Kaitlyn Neese

The Auburn family, that is why I chose Auburn. The feeling that everyone is united, everyone’s voice is heard, everyone has each other’s back. That is what I wanted to be a part of.

I was a high school senior in a small town called Greenville, Alabama. For most seniors, visiting colleges is the most exciting part of senior year. Walking around the campus, imagining your new freedom, excitement coursing through your body.

The only emotion coursing through my body was sadness. My first college visit was Auburn. Everything was perfect: the greenspace grass had more pigment than anything I had seen before, the architecture of RBD was like a dream, and the tired but beautiful bricks on the concourse made it feel like home. But everything was a little too perfect.

Auburn has always been my dream school, but it was simply that: a dream. Neither of my parents attended college. My mom works in human resources and my dad restores old boats. They never discussed money with us because they never wanted us to worry, but I knew that Auburn’s tuition was out of their price range. I applied anyways, because who does not apply to their dream school? But deep down I knew that it was not going to happen.

My acceptance letter came in October, and my parents were so proud. My dad is a die-hard Auburn fan, so just the letter itself meant a lot to him. But that letter angered me. It was like putting a chocolate cake in front of a diabetic. You can look at the cake, but you cannot taste it. I could get accepted to my dream school, but I could not attend. I remember my mom wanted to take my picture, because she is that type of mom.

“Why do you want a picture so bad? It’s not like I can go anyways,” I snapped. But, she just looked at me and said, “You never know baby, there are still scholarships.”

She was right, there are plenty of scholarships available, but my ACT score was not super high because standardized tests are not one of my strong suits. I filled out the scholarship application with the amount of hope that could fill up a teaspoon. While I waited for good news, I visited other schools. None of them gave me the feeling Auburn did though.

About a month later, I started receiving small scholarships that were adding up to cover the majority of my tuition. My mom agreed to go meet with the financial aid office at Auburn to see if this was something we would be able to afford. The meeting went smoothly, so she went home to discuss it with my father. That is when they let me know my dream was turning into reality.

The summer was a whirlwind of dorm shopping and wondering what my new friends were going to be like. I did not worry much about finding new friends, because I thought the social setting would be similar to high school. But what I realized was my high school was filled with students like me, Auburn was not.

At my high school if your family was financially comfortable, you were rich. But when I got to Auburn, it seemed like everyone was comfortable, financially and socially. They seemed so at home on campus, but I struggled to find my place. All around me I heard people talking about their sororities/fraternities (which I could not afford to be in), where their parents went to school, what countries they traveled to, etc. I never seemed to fit into the conversation. I struggled to find people who I could relate to. It was like I was the ugly cousin in this beautiful Auburn family everyone told me about.

Thankfully, I received the TESP scholarship which is from the office of Inclusion and Diversity. At first, I complained about all of the success seminars we were required to attend, but then I realized that is where I could find the people like me. The people I met were experiencing the same feelings as me. While I was thrilled that I found my people, I was disappointed that there were so few of us. But what I could not get out of my head was the fact that so many of us felt like we were not a part of the Auburn family.

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“It felt like home.” That is why Joseph Howard chose Auburn. This is a common phrase to hear when you ask someone why they chose Auburn. The campus tour gives you the sense of comfort that you feel when you walk into your grandmother’s house.

Joseph’s dream school was George Washington University because he was drawn to Washington D.C.’s amazingly open space. But, 800 miles just was not a realistic distance for him to be away from his family. So, he began looking at schools that were closer to home, and that is when he discovered Auburn.

Joseph Howard is also from a small town in Alabama. Autaugaville, Alabama is about 25 miles to the west of the state capitol, Montgomery. While Joseph and I have similar experiences, his looks a lot different than mine. Joseph is at the intersection of three minorities on campus. He is a first-generation college student, he is part of the 4% of black students on campus, and he is a member of the LGBTQ community.

When we think about diversity we think about race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc., but we often don’t think about when they intersect and how that experience differs.

“It’s one thing to be black on campus, but it’s a completely different experience being black and gay,” Howard said.

The summer before his first semester, Joseph was a ball of nerves. Along with the regular worries of a college freshman, like making new friends, leaving home, and balancing class, he had bigger problems. While Auburn looked good on paper, and the tour was amazing, he was still a black student attending a predominately white university. This would be a drastic change from his small predominately black high school.

Joseph’s first month on campus was hard and a bit uncomfortable. In classes, he was often the only black student which made him feel like he stuck out like a sore thumb. When he walked on the concourse, he barely saw people who looked like him. He felt alone.

A lot of college freshmen struggle to make new friends, but it was unreasonably harder for Joseph. He wanted friends who accepted him for who he was, and also people who had similar experiences. It was like everyone else had a bowl full of people to choose friends from, but he only had a petri dish.

He had met a few people at an Auburn summer camp, so he reached out to them and started spending time with them. He also started attending Black Student Union meetings, where he learned that there were other black students that were going through the same things as him. Through BSU he learned about Spectrum, which is an LGBTQ alliance organization on campus.

It was really hard at first, but he finally found people who were like him and who accepted him.

“I just wish there was an easier way for minorities to find their place on campus, because it really sucks to not feel like you’re a part of the Auburn family,” he said.

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Dr. Garry Morgan, a special assistant in the Office of Inclusion and Diversity at Auburn University, has been working with diversity and inclusion for years. He sees diversity as the differences that occur between people, but where there is diversity, there needs to be inclusion. To Morgan, inclusion is action that is designed to create connection, involvement, and respect among people.

Inclusion is what makes students feel a part of the Auburn family. But when you have diverse students who feel like they are not a part of this family, we then have to question, is there inclusion on Auburn’s campus?

“As we become more diverse as an organization, we have the opportunity to say ‘Yes, we want these bodies here and what are the ways in which they feel welcome’” Morgan said.

In order to improve diversity and inclusion, you have to measure it. Morgan said there are a few ways institutions can measure diversity, one being demographics. He said inclusion is tougher to measure, so they use the AU Together climate survey to evaluate inclusion on campus. The last survey was done in 2016. As a result of that survey they had 17 recommendations that the school is currently working to achieve.

“When we talk about demographics we can talk about what students we have, but I think it’s also what does our cabinet look like and what does student leadership look like,” Morgan said.

Morgan feels that we are in a transformative moment for Auburn. We recently elected Ada Ruth Huntley as the first black female SGA president. Black women have been attending Auburn since the 1960s when Josetta Brittain Mathews became Auburn University’s first African-American female graduate. Yet, it took nearly 80 years for a black woman to be elected SGA president.

In the past we were an all-male college, and now the university is nearly 50 percent female. But when we talk about women and diversity on campus it is important to talk about which women. Of that 49 percent of women, only 6 percent are African-American.

An essential part of being an inclusive institution, is making sure all students see themselves represented in leadership positions. This helps students who are in the minority feel like their voice is heard.

On the Office of Inclusion and Diversity’s website, there is a diversity statement: “Diversity at Auburn University encompasses the whole of human experience and includes such human qualities as race, gender, ethnicity, physical ability, nationality, age, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, and veteran status. These and other socially and historically important attributes reflect the complexity of our increasingly diverse student body, local community, and national population.”

Morgan said that the second part of this statement is important because the social and historic attributes make it increasingly difficult when it comes to recruitment.

“I think about how Auburn is in the state of Alabama and has all of these native names tied to it, but our student number don’t reflect that there are native communities around us,” Morgan said.

In order to achieve true diversity, it is important for enrollment at Auburn to represent not only the state of Alabama, but the country as a whole. And in order to achieve true inclusivity, it is important for each and every student to feel like they are a part of the Auburn family.