Every freshman at the University is now required to sit through the hour-long I-Connect diversity workshop, and because attendance is mandatory and recorded, I had to forget about my lifelong propensity for laziness Monday night and actually go.

About 30 of us were thrown together into a classroom in the Armory at 8 p.m. That’s possibly the worst time to ask college students to actively participate in something they clearly don’t want to. The program’s leaders didn’t seem to have much invested in it, either, as they zoomed through what was supposed to be an hourlong presentation in a little over a half-hour.

We were divided into groups of six or seven and were asked to respond to theoretical scenarios — finding out a roommate was gay, being invited to a ghetto-themed party — that would clearly require sensitivity and thought if we were to encounter them in reality. Because it was 8 p.m. and we all wanted to get out of Dodge, our answers were just as forced and artificial as the questions were. We said what we knew the school would’ve wanted to hear, and then we were done.

I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it was sorely lacking in both style and substance. It was — as almost everything University-mandated is — an inane, useless exercise in mediocrity. Telling students, in the words of the immortal Jackie Moon, “everybody love everybody!” on a campus as functionally segregated as the University’s is futile. Just a month into my first year here, I’d already separated myself from many of my fellow students — as nearly 6,000 others have — by pledging a social fraternity; others chose to involve themselves in RSOs, service fraternities, journalism, music, theater, volunteering or athletics. We’re always going to be divided, and no attempt at forced inclusion is going to change that. It’s just a way of life at a school as large as ours.

I don’t want to spend too much time on alcohol abuse, as my fellow columnist Renée Wunderlich wrote an excellent piece on it in time for last week’s Unofficial festivities. But the University treats it just as they do campus diversity and to comparably little effect.

Remember ACE IT, that annoyingly acronymic waste of time? It was supposed to educate us about an obviously pressing issue. Instead, most of my peers, myself included, browsed Facebook on their phones until the programs were done. Something so easily ignored won’t have any effect on our perpetual desire to get messed up; it’s pretty much a fact of life in Champaign that every Monday (Monday Night Joe’s and dollar drinks at Lion), Tuesday (wine night at Cly’s), Thursday, Friday and Saturday will see a multitude of students descend upon the Green Street bars. Many will drink absurd amounts of alcoholic beverages, many will black out, and many will repeat their itineraries the next night.

The University, as it should, has a problem with this. It would be irresponsible not to. The Intrafraternity Council is required, as part of its risk-management initiative, to provide Kolusis monitors for wet Greek events; in theory, they would effect some moderation of alcohol consumption. Our student fees help fund SafeRides and SafeWalks and student patrols to get the messiest of the hot messes home safely. Perhaps I’m getting into pure conjecture, but I’d venture to guess that not one of these programs has deterred a sufficient number of people from getting irresponsibly intoxicated, just as I-Connect probably hasn’t done much to get us all to love one another.

These ham-fisted responses are symptomatic of a deeper-seated problem at a school that professes to value diversity and inclusion as highly as it does education and research. They pay only lip service to treating their undergraduate students with respect. The school rakes in millions of dollars meant to benefit the undergraduates here, but instead of using that money to get to the core of the concerns so widespread among the student body with the care they truly deserve, the school throws money at them and hopes for the best.

In the eyes of the administration, we’re really nothing more than UINs and bills receivable.

Adam is a freshman in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected].