CommentsRACE IN AMERICA-Now former University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe (photo left) in a moment of rare candor for someone who just fired himself admitted what has been probably one of the worst kept secrets at American colleges. His words: “Racism does exist at our university, and it is unacceptable.”
During the past decade hardly a week has gone by without a report somewhere of hanging nooses, white hoods, racist graffiti, racial slurs and taunts aimed at minority students. The colleges that have been called on the carpet for the racist acts read like a who’s who of American higher education.
Clemson University, Auburn, Lehigh, Tarleton State, Texas A&M, University of Texas, Austin, University of Connecticut, Johns Hopkins, Whitman College, the University of Oklahoma, UCLA, UC San Diego, and the University of Maryland, to name only a very a handful. Months before the firestorm at Missouri, the Harvard University Voices of diversity project found campuses rife with subtle and no so subtle “microagressions” against minority and women students.
The pattern is always the same after a racist outburst. Teary eyed, enraged students confront campus officials. The officials, in turn, issue the obligatory indignant denunciation of the racial offense. A legislator or two may chime in with equal indignation.
If it’s a frat, as was the case in 2014, at Oklahoma University, the fingered lily white fraternity will issue a quick statement disavowing any knowledge or responsibility for the racist act of a few of their members.
If students squawk loud and long enough, campus officials will convene campus wide sensitivity sessions where students vent and rage at the administrators and at each other.
If the students continue to squawk, campus officials will pledge to institute new diversity training, recruit more minority students, and hire more minority teachers and administrators, and maybe even an ombudsman.
At first University of Missouri officials used this template to the letter. Why not, it’s a time tested formula for stonewalling protest, and dissipating student anger. Campus administrators know that time is on their side. Students have to take exams and finals, write, term papers, hustle grades, and search for jobs.
It didn’t work at Missouri only because members of the elite, bread and butter, cash cow football program said “no.” to the racist abuse. The horror of losing millions in on and off campus revenue that a big time football program rakes in was too much to bear. When it’s a question whether a university president or a football schedule will be sacrificed, it’s no contest which will go.
But there’s a problem, really three problems, with this. Time, promises, and token efforts to change won’t magically make the hate and ignorance that spawned the racial offenses at their schools disappear.
The propensity of some students to slander, slur, mock and insult black and Latino students mirrors the hate acts that occur virtually daily in society.
Meanwhile campus officials wring their hands about the paucity of black and Latino students at many of the nation’s top colleges. In the last decade, admissions officers at a large number of major universities report significant drops in the number of incoming freshmen at universities in nearly every area of the country.
{module [1177]}The gut and elimination of affirmative action programs, shrinking financial aid, soaring tuition, and half-hearted to non-existent recruitment and outreach efforts at local minority high schools have been the big factors in the plunge in black and Latino students at many campuses. Missouri is a near textbook example of this.
Black students comprise eight percent of the students there, and an even smaller percentage of the school’s school faculty, administrators, and staff personnel.
University of Missouri officials in the wake of Wolfe’s resignation probably do want to see an end to the hostile environment black students complain about. They are undoubtedly well-intentioned, and offended by the acts, and really want to see more student diversity at their school.
But good intentions, ritual denunciations and diversity workshops are not enough. Often they are loath to take the one step that will send a real message that hate on campus won’t be tolerated. That step is to name the offending students, and then take immediate and firm disciplinary action against them as well as race baiting fraternities and other organizations. This could be suspension, expulsion, sanctions, and even prosecutions. There’s no evidence so far that University of Missouri officials have sternly disciplined anyone.
The failure of campus officials to take tough disciplinary action against hate acts sends the subtle message that these acts rank only slightly more grievous than student panty raids, water balloon fights, and stuffing telephone booths. It’s just a case of boys will be boys, and girls girls, little harm, and maybe no foul, at least not enough a of a foul to get a student or an organization booted from campus.
Protesting Missouri football players and students took matters into their own hands against the hate on their campus. It was a crucial teaching moment for other campuses that also flunk the racism test can learn from.
(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is President of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.)
-cw
