Collegiate Times

Management major Erin Mosher takes out her negative feelings on the punching bag where she attached a word she associates with hate.

This week the Graduate Life Center will host the Tunnel, a program designed to promote diversity awareness at Virginia Tech.

The Tunnel, in its third year at Tech, is an interactive journey that strives to make participants more aware of social stereotyping and hateful attitudes. Attendees are challenged with displays and presentations about the diversity issues that can appear in the Tech community.

The event is sponsored by Hokie F6, a Residence Life group that provides campus residents with social programming for the first six weeks of the school year.

Matthew Grimes, assistant director of Residence Life and Hokie F6 organizer, initiated the program after observing similar "Tunnels of Oppression" programs at schools around the country, and he modified Tech's own version to fit with the university's Principles of Community.

The principles are the university's guiding values on issues of diversity and expression. One of the principles is the rejection of "all forms of prejudice and discrimination."

The first Tunnels of Oppression focused on exposing prejudice and hate throughout history. Grimes took that concept and created an event that made participants examine solutions to social problems in the Tech community.

"We try to make it interactive," Grimes said. "How can you get to know your community better? How can you appreciate differences?"

Visitors will be guided around the Multipurpose Room in the GLC to several exhibits that focus on diversity in different ways.

One section provides displays about prejudice throughout history and information on the variety of stereotypes present in the Tech community, from sorority girls to corps members.

Grimes and Hokie F6 do their best to make sure that the Tunnel offers something fresh each year. One of the new interactive exhibits is "Punch-out Hate."

Visitors will have the chance to write down a word they associate with hate, tape it to a punching bag, and pummel it as much as they would like.

"It's a fun event that says, 'Remember when that happened to you, and it made you feel bad? Get rid of it right now, knock it out,'" said Grimes, with a smile on his face.

"Guess Who?" is a section of the Tunnel where participants are asked to identify anonymous faces based on a set of clues about that person, such as their major or where they're from.

The game is meant to examine the judgment calls that players make about complete strangers, said Christopher MacDonald, associate director of Residence Life.

The Tunnel is the largest diversity event sponsored by Residence Life, and it attracts about 500 visitors each year. Many of these visitors are freshmen, so organizers of the event see the necessity of getting the message of diversity awareness out as quickly as possible.

"We have people with different backgrounds coming to this community," said Leon McClinton, director of Residence Life. "We want to help students become knowledgeable of the differences that are on this campus."

The success of the Tunnel is another step in promoting diversity at Tech.

"We realize that Virginia Tech places a lot of emphasis on the Principles of Community that talk about respecting differences," McClinton said. "We hope that this program will help support that."