Breaking Racial Barriers: Part I: Interracial Student-Exchange Programs
E XCHANGES between students in Northern and Southern colleges have been taking place for five to ten years, but only in the last three years has great interest developed in this form of education. The colleges taking part in exchange programs have given various reasons for their participation. Not all of them subscribe to the same goals, but essentially they all hope to promote better understanding and co-operation among college students, provide new educational and social experiences for residents of the campuses and the communities of the North and the South, enable students to study critically the cultural patterns of sections of the country that are particularly interesting to them, and foster understanding between the races. Not all schools undertaking student-exchange programs have as clear-cut a rationale as this statement of purpose might indicate. Some schools, furthermore, expect entirely too much to result from studentexchange programs and tend to distort the enterprise by the goals they set. They have the misconception that they will eliminate racial prejudice by sending Northern students to the South and will enlighten students socially and educationally by bringing Southern students to the Northas prejudiced a position, though more subtle, as open rejection of exchange between races. Rarely do students enter into an exchange program to overcome their prejudice, though the opportunities for interchange between the races upon a campus are abundant. A more realistic conception of the potential of student interchange is that there is a strong likelihood that the experience of living together and studying together will diminish prejudice among persons of different races. Four basic plans have been devised over the years for student exchange. The first of these is a short-one-week or week-end-interchange in which a group of students journey from a predominantly white Northern college to a predominantly Negro Southern institution and a comparable group from the Negro institution goes North to visit the college predominantly for whites. During this time, and usually under student leadership, the