“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is today. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

Today, though, that noble dream is nowhere near being realized, and our colleges are not helping by fostering the separation of groups according to race and other personal characteristics.

Oregon State University, for example, emphasizes not that everyone is created equal but that people are different. The university does this by maintaining separate “cultural centers” for people of Asian, Hispanic, African and Native American extraction as well for women and for people based on sexual orientation (none for men, though, and none for straights), and now some of these centers need bigger or remodeled quarters at considerable cost.

Does America really need more splintering into separate groups? Let’s hope that some day, at OSU and elsewhere, people will “rise up,” in King’s words, and forge a country where people are equal and together, instead of apart. (hh)