When Thomas J. LeBlanc, president of George Washington University, was asked this month if he would have the institution divest from fossil-fuel companies if the proposal had student support, he reached for an analogy to argue that such pressure wouldn’t matter. “What if the majority of the students agreed to shoot all the black people here?” he said in an impromptu sidewalk meeting that was recorded on video. “Do I say, ‘Ah, well, the majority voted?’ No.”
The racial analogy upset students who said the comments reflected deeper problems at the university. If a university president can say something like that, “the problem of racial sensitivity and racism on this campus is clearly something that is deep-seated and requires serious self-reflection from the decision makers of this university,” Joe Markus, a member of a group dedicated to reducing fossil-fuel dependence, told The Washington Post.
College presidents can find themselves in hot water for comments that offend. As a nationwide push to diversify higher education continues, college presidents — who remain overwhelmingly white and male — are learning anew that analogies about race and slavery are inadvisable.
LeBlanc apologized for his comments. “I regret my choice of words and any harm I unintentionally inflicted on a community I value greatly,” he said. He is far from the only president who has created controversy with comments about race in recent years.
In 2013, faculty members at Emory University were outraged when its then president, James M. Wagner, held up the “Three-Fifths Compromise” as a model for reaching an agreement.
The Three-Fifths Compromise was an agreement at the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention that allowed for each slave to be counted as three-fifths of a person when determining population for congressional representation. It was enshrined in Article I of the Constitution.
“As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution — ‘to form a more perfect union’ — the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation,” wrote Wagner in a controversial column in Emory Magazine. “Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.”
Wagner later apologized and clarified that he believed slavery was wrong, but faculty members demanded a more-thorough correction of his argument.
In September of last year, Harvard University’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, was called “tone deaf” after he likened the university’s wealthy donors to slaves. He said that individual schools within Harvard could no longer “own” their alumni donors, making a comparison to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. He also apologized for his comments.
College professors are often seen as mouthpieces for their institutions, said Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, a historically black university in Louisiana. What a president says “will hold a level of weight that no other person or entity can have,” he said.
“There’s been tension on college campuses in terms of race for a while, and it’s been heightened under this administration,” Kimbrough said. “That’s part of what puts people on edge. So any time you use those kinds of analogies, I think it’s just magnified based on the climate that we’re in.”
As college presidents increasingly find themselves under a microscope, with their every utterance recorded and documented as LeBlanc’s remarks were, why would they choose to reach for racial analogies? Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, in Washington, D.C., said it might happen because they are often unfamiliar with African-American history and have difficulty relating to and understanding the experience of students of color.
College presidents remain overwhelmingly white and male as diversity on the nation’s campuses continues to grow. According to the 2017 edition of the American Council on Education’s American College President Study, which is released every five years, 83 percent of college presidents who responded were white, and 70 percent were male.
“Those of us who have backgrounds of white privilege, we have to acknowledge our white privilege,” McGuire said. “And we also have to acknowledge that most of us, unless we are historians of African-American history, we don’t know the history, and we don’t really know the context. We need to be careful that we’re not offering commentary about things we know nothing about.”
She cautioned that presidents should never analogize race or any other form of identity, especially when talking about something that has nothing to do with that identity, like fossil fuels. They need to address race and identity directly when needed, she said.
Kimbrough couldn’t explain why LeBlanc had chosen to use the hypothetical killing of black people as an analogy, but he said a president’s background can affect his or her cultural competency. Kimbrough, who is black, has a background in student affairs and, as president of a historically black university, is often involved in discussions about inclusion and diversity.
But LeBlanc, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is white and a computer scientist. Kimbrough said there is a steep learning curve for many presidents when it comes to cultural competency.
“There is a lack of cultural competence around those issues, because there isn’t some kind of mandatory training that a president would have,” he said.
While he understands why people look to presidents of universities and demand action from them in difficult situations, Kimbrough said it’s important to remember that they’re individuals who can do only so much to change the culture at their institutions. Real progress, Kimbrough said, requires a group effort.
“The role of the president is important, but in terms of day-to-day culture change, that one person is not going to change a culture,” he said.
McGuire said she had spoken about the video of LeBlanc with some of her colleagues. She hopes it’s a learning moment for everyone involved, she said, adding that it serves as a reminder that university presidents need to be careful with their words.
“When it comes to race issues in particular, we don’t have the luxury of making mistakes,” she said. “We represent institutional values that are about equity and justice. The values of the institutions that we’re the stewards of will be questioned if our own behavior doesn’t uphold those values.”