The EMU ballroom comes to life every time a student group ignites a cultural festivity for the campus community’s pleasure. There have been ancient dances performed, eclectic foods served, exotic animals presented and even an international comedian brought to campus – all for our enjoyment.

These cultural nights bring entertainment in ways no other outlet in town does, but there is a discrepancy. On a campus of over 24,000 students, student organizers only expect a few hundred people to attend their long-planned celebrations. More students and staff should take advantage of the various culture groups on campus and should attend these celebratory nights because of how beneficial they are.

“People get a brief snapshot of a culture through our events and that’s pretty cool to have, especially with the Filipino culture, since there’s nowhere else on campus to learn about our traditions,” Luis Palomar, director of Kultura Pilipinas, said.

Student groups start planning their culture nights months in advance; the whole process begins when they receive funding from ASUO. This year, Students of the Indian Subcontinent asked for the largest sum of money that any cultural group on campus has ever requested, all to make their heritage night more appealing to a wider audience.

“We asked for the $15,000 to bring the Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj because he isn’t just entertaining for Indian-Americans, but he can be a real treat for the entire student body,” Meghna Agarwal, co-director of Students of the Indian Subcontinent said. “Our main goal with the culture nights has always been to share the Indian and South Asian cultures with Eugene, but every year, we try to find ways to integrate different people and bring together a larger and more diverse audience.”

Agarwal and Students of the Indian Subcontinent are hoping for a turnout of around 500 people for their 2016 spring term soirée, a number that only accounts for about two percent of all students on campus.

“It really surprises me how few people know about the culture events and groups on campus,” Agarwal said. “All of the student organizations at UO are so vibrant and we’re such an interesting community that people who just don’t have an invested interest in a specific culture never realize we exist.”

College is a busy time and incorporating extracurricular activities and events isn’t always easy. But there is a greater problem at UO that goes beyond time management when it comes to cultural awareness.

One organization that recognizes this lack of overall cultural mindfulness among our community and strives to collaborate with the various student groups is the Multicultural Center.

“The Multicultural Center is really important to have to promote cultural diversity on a campus like ours that is so famously white and homogeneous,” said Vickie Gimm, who works as outreach coordinator at the Multicultural Center. “We have to acknowledge cultural diversity and the fact that people come from different ways of life, because if we whitewash everything and promote colorblindness, then that’s not productive in the pursuit of equality and equity, in general.”

Whether it is Kultura Pilipinas, Students of the Indian Subcontinent, the African Student Association, the Vietnamese Student Association or any other group, the cultural events that get sprinkled around our campus throughout the year bring our university to life. Each celebration helps contribute to spreading a larger message of equity that is much needed.

“I think it’s so important to step out of your own culture and learn about a different group of people who don’t look like you or who you’ve never heard of because it broadens your worldview and that’s significant to becoming a better, well-rounded person,” Palomar said. “It was around the time of the Filipino-American War when Mark Twain said, ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.’ ”

And Mark Twain was right. The cultural nights on campus offer travel from one way of life to another without getting on an airplane. People can go one step further and join a student group on campus that is geared towards a specific heritage, which can reduce things like prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, all unreasonably prominent in our world today.