To me the comic is about reluctance to work with a newcomer. This could be anyone - a person from a different city who finds it hard to work with people who have known each other for quite sometime. I think it is natural for people to work with someone they know already than with someone who is new. I understand discrimination as being unfavorable to someone based on their race, color, nation and other affiliations. When it comes to doing it unintentionally, this usually happens due to some of the general assumptions people usually make based on these associations. Something like, K's country is stereotypically called as lazy, therefore every student assumes that K is also lazy, avoiding K. Somehow, not including someone to be a part of the group does not sound discriminatory without its reason. In my 5 years in OVGU, I have luckily never experienced any scenarios where I felt left out. Once I stumbled into a German session in acagamics and the students where kind enough to translate every word in English for me.
Comments by faculty members and students showing different views on the comic strip and the topic in general
In my experience it has always been the case that diverse teams can use this diversity towards their success, provided they are motivated to succeed. The new idea from K is usually a perspective change, which challenges groupthink. I think it is an important aspect about why diversity helps: usually others see things we cannot see, and we can solve problems better thanks to that :) When in a team I agree that it is very valuable to be able to understand and leverage the different ways of the team members. I think that discrimination, specifically in terms of explicit avoidance might be possible in students. But I have not seen it among the students that I have worked with. Instead the problem that might make a student not find a team might be just that the crowd over-relies on their current preferences: everyone might pick people they know, and might tend to "exploit" but not "explore", making them form less diverse teams at the end.
In my opinion, this is a good way of highlighting such events that go undetected in the world. We all have done this in our lives once or maybe more. The reason is we don’t think of it as a big issue. As of my experience, I have also been in this kind of situation because sometimes people only trust someone that they knew from the past or who have a common past, so when they meet a new person they keep a distance and don’t welcome until that person helps them or do something useful. What we should try to do is that, to know people based on their knowledge instead of how they appear or from where they belong. And this comic is depicting a powerful message on the inclusion of diversity which is very important.
As per my experience, yes, people generally do avoid mingling with those who they perceive as different, be it in a good way or bad. It's probably human nature since people feel more comfortable with what is familiar to them. But the most efficient and effective way to survive and improve is to accept the diversity of being. Being different doesn’t make anyone inferior or lesser than the majority. The readily we accept our divisions’, differences, and diversity, the more easily and quickly we can tackle the myriad new challenges and ills this world is facing. We all are different but equal.