By Steve Kolowich January 01, 2017

Last winter a Minneapolis-based newspaper declared St. Cloud to be “the worst place in Minnesota to be Somali.”

The university wants to be an exception to that rule. St. Cloud State prides itself on being safe and welcoming to students of color and to religious minorities, although this has not always been the case.

The student population at St. Cloud State is now more diverse than those of Minnesota and the country as a whole. But diversity alone does not erase boundaries. Seventy percent of students at the university are white Americans, many of them drawn from the mostly white counties around the city. And here, just as on many campuses, those white students can still sail through four years without spending significant time with people whose backgrounds differ greatly from their own.

The interim president, who came to St. Cloud State from Los Angeles in 2015, is enthusiastic about the “internationalization” that he sees as part of the university’s identity. He is bullish on study-abroad programs, and the university is pushing more students to incorporate international travel into their education. If he could afford to send all 15,000 students at the university to study in foreign countries, he says, he would. His realistic goal is more modest: to increase study-abroad enrollment from 450 to 700 over the next three years.

Mr. Trump’s victory was a reminder that big swaths of the population don’t cherish “safe spaces,” political correctness, or multiculturalism — to say nothing of fact-checking or the scientific method.