For William A. Smith, 1991 brought a watershed moment. The first edition of The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education — which chronicled the consequences of campuses’ failures of inclusion — was published. To Smith, then a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the text broke barriers.
There had been relatively little scholarship with this kind of comprehensive analysis, he said, decades after many historically white institutions integrated their student bodies. Years later, when Smith was an assistant professor at the University of Utah, he was brought on to edit the book’s second edition, published in 2002.
Smith, now chair of the education, culture, and society department at Utah, is now revising the text again, for a third edition. There are new chapters, but the core issues remain the same. The number of Black professors hired by universities is paltry. Completion and debt rates show systemic inequities. The quad of the American college campus has racism at its root. It is a culture. It is a tradition.
This is about people’s lives. This is about their health and their lives.
Now, in a moment of crisis for the sector, college leaders at historically white universities are being called to dig into their pristine grounds. Scholars and students are sharing stories of discrimination, pulling these institutions into the national conversation about the ingrained white supremacy of American systems, all amid a pandemic that could threaten lives — disproportionately those of people of color — on campus. Three weeks ago, those campuses were focused on the coronavirus. Now they are being pushed to reckon with racism.
College leaders talk widely about how their institutions are a force for good. They impart this sense of purpose to the next generation of leaders. As many residential, historically white universities gear up to welcome students back, their leaders will face a historic test on multiple fronts.
“What is at stake is their reason for being,” said Ibram X. Kendi, poised to start Boston University’s new Center for Antiracist Research. “Part of the reason for being for any university is that relationship with the community, is that trust from the community. If that bond is broken, it’s almost equivalent to the bond that has long been broken between policing forces and communities.”
In the last weekend of May, college presidents sent letters, issuing words supportive of protesters and critical of police brutality. On his front porch, Smith, too, started to type out an email to graduate students and faculty in his department.
He felt tired and angry. He couldn’t get rid of his headaches. His research had a term for this feeling: racial battle fatigue.
Racial battle fatigue, Smith has found, redirects students’ and faculty members’ energy toward coping with the stress of racism, instead of funneling it toward their work or success. These colleges still struggle to support Black people — students, faculty, or staff — and they are calling back much of their campuses for the fall.
Who are these campuses for? Colleges, Smith said, have been part of the problem — home to the same beliefs and practices that America sees at large. “We can’t divorce,” he said in an interview, “just because it’s higher ed and it’s supposed to be about a social good.”
That Saturday, when Smith was writing his letter on the porch, a truck passed, with Aryan paraphernalia and an American flag poking out of its bed. He’d read local news reports, warning of white supremacists coming to the area. They may have seen him — a Black man — on his porch. Quickly, he gathered his things and moved inside.
Scores of universities spoke out in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in police custody in Minneapolis. Presidents showed sympathy. They expressed pain. Some named Floyd. Some said Black Lives Matter.
Amaan Charaniya read a statement from his alma mater’s president, Jere W. Morehead at the University of Georgia, and was disappointed. It was three sentences long. It didn’t mention Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, or the police. Charaniya, who has worked as a technology consultant since graduating from Georgia in 2018, and a friend began compiling and comparing as many statements as they could find. The result was a 190-institution spreadsheet, coding mentions of everything from the word “murder” to any described future actions. By their metrics, Georgia earned a 0.
Initially Charaniya hoped Georgia’s statement was one of the few that were so poor. Maybe campuses up North, or the more selective ones, would be better, he thought. That wasn’t the case. “It was clear to me it didn’t really matter where you went to school. This was a higher-ed problem,” he said. Morehead later issued a more forceful statement, naming Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery. Charaniya didn’t code it. “It didn’t really matter to me at that point,” he said. “I know what their first instinct was.” (A spokeswoman for Georgia said Morehead’s first post was meant to be a “brief comment” while he was composing the full statement, published the next day. She said the president is dedicated to listening to students and community members.)
The instinct to collect data, analyze, and publish, demanding better results, in many ways echoes this last decade in campus activism, an era where students’ research on and demands for their own campus leaders could be quickly compiled and globally circulated. And, as was the case after protests in previous years, weak responses to students carried consequences.
Dominique J. Baker has researched student activism, interviewing participants and studying administrative responses. She’s seen some patterns. Sometimes, administrators would dilute messages into something palatable to the board or state lawmakers, challenging transformative change. Other times, campus leaders called on black students, faculty, and staff to talk about their pain — and then made no structural changes.
Students relayed to Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, that when campus presidents expressed solidarity without action, trust eroded “not just on this topic but on all topics, which is very dangerous at a time when you have a pandemic,” she said.
“I was going to say I don’t know how the stakes would be higher, but 2020 would take that as a challenge,” she continued. “This is about people’s lives. This is about their health and their lives. And that matters, a lot. And that ties in the fact that if you don’t think your institution values you as a person, if you don’t think your institution sees your humanity, why would you believe that they’re looking out for your best interests when it comes to a pandemic?”
Institutions that get this wrong, she said, may see faculty members leave and students choose not to enroll. “If we want to say we are a force for good, then that means we have to hold true to being a force for good.”
Even campus leaders can see that their collective statures, nationally, have changed. M. Lee Pelton, who is the first Black president of Emerson College, recalled a time when the nation’s university presidents spoke out at times of national and global crisis. Derek C. Bok, president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991, criticized the Vietnam War, opening his office to student protesters. The Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, was an outspoken supporter of the civil-rights movement.
Pelton, starting his 23rd year as a college president, came to the position in part because he felt it would give him an opportunity to speak out on big issues. It excited him then, and still does. He advocated for stronger gun laws after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, drawing the ire of Second Amendment supporters, and he called a Straight Pride Parade in Boston a “perversion” in 2019. But over the years, the trust that many people have in colleges has eroded. The Boks and Hesburghs, he felt, have become harder to find, as their circumstances and the vision of governing boards shifted. Students felt hopeless — including at Emerson, where protests two years apart on issues of diversity highlighted deep frustration with the status quo. Emerson’s student body is 4 percent black.
In late May, Pelton couldn’t stop watching the video of Floyd’s murder. In a letter to campus, he called the video a legalized lynching. He wrote about the countless times he has been pulled over, including twice in a single night. The fact that white people had called him the N-word in every state and city he’d ever lived.
He closed the letter pledging to gather the community to talk plainly about what they could do to confront racism, “beginning first of all with an honest appraisal of who we are and what we stand for.”
Part of that effort, he said, will be listening to students. He said he can understand why students feel hopeless after administrative inaction, and he pledged in an interview with The Chronicle to move faster and listen.
“Students,” he said, “should continue to agitate and push college leaders to do the right thing.”
That advocacy is challenging when it seems like change is slow to come. The University of California at Riverside speaks widely about its diverse student body and its high rankings for social mobility. But some students there say they feel they are used for pamphlets without their concerns being taken seriously.
“The trust in the institution has been gone for a while,” said Kalin (KP) Pont-Tate, the co-chair of the Black Student Union. Late at night on the Saturday after Floyd’s killing, he and a few fellow student leaders began drafting a list of demands. One day and a flurry of group-text messages later, they published a petition urging, among other things, divestment from the campus police department. It has reached nearly 18,000 signatories. Students and faculty have fought for support for black communities for years, students told The Chronicle. The attention makes this feel like a high-profile moment. But there are still structural problems.
“As a university and as an academic institution, you can say we are against systemic racism. But you as an academic institution are systemic racism,” Pont-Tate said.
As a university and as an academic institution, you can say we are against systemic racism. But you as an academic institution are systemic racism.
A group of student leaders at Riverside told The Chronicle that they are committed to seeing change through, and that surface-level agreement from administrators won’t suffice. “We want lasting change. We don’t want fluffy comments. We want administration to take accountability for their actions,” said Evelyn Kennedy, another Black Student Union co-chair.
A group of campus leaders, including Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox, later responded to the students’ demands, according to a letter provided to The Chronicle. The leaders expressed sympathy, writing that disruptions to campus due to Covid-19 and the trauma of recent killings put “an extreme burden on Black students.” Recommendations on two items raised by the students — campus safety and support for Black students — are forthcoming, the letter said. A spokesman said discussions with students about further action is ongoing.
It’s not just students who feel unheard on issues of health and race. More than 800 people told The Chronicle they were not comfortable coming back to campus in the fall given the risks of Covid-19. “I feel like older faculty are being sacrificed,” one said. Students will “wipe out our towns and campuses,” wrote another. “My gut response is fear and dread.” Performatively reaching out to faculty felt coercive when leaders would reopen campuses anyway for the bottom line, professors said. About two-thirds of about 950 campus plans reviewed by The Chronicle indicate college leaders are planning for in-person instruction.
For days after Floyd’s killing, professors shared stories about what it was like to be Black in academe. Having to show your ID to prove that yes, really, you could park in the faculty lot. Knowing the long odds of landing a job, but still avoiding positions in small college towns with scarce racial diversity. Being the first person who looks like you to hold your position. Knowing how many diversity committees you’ve served on that rehashed the same issues.
For Richard S. L. Blissett, that number was four in just a few years at Seton Hall University. Blissett, an assistant professor of education policy, has been part of countless similar conversations. As his university responded to Floyd’s killing, he looked back on his emails from after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. There is something very tiring, he came to realize, about being in another brainstorming session. People propose fact-finding missions. But many education researchers — and similar past committees — have already found these facts. “We’re not,” he said, “walking in blind.”
He recently spoke with Baker, a coauthor with whom he went to graduate school, about the issue: In higher education, he said, there is not a crisis of ideas but “a crisis of cowardice.”
Institutions, he realizes, are weighing risks before they act. Taking antiracist actions or publishing statements may alienate powerful donors at a moment when money is tight. But it could also attract new support elsewhere. And inaction may also be damaging.
“The distance created between students and universities in the wake of this crisis will change the way people see higher education,” he said. “Right now is an opportunity for universities to show whether they are or are not a public good.”
This is all playing out as higher education is battling external challenges. Budgets are tight, and state finances look grim. Public opinion in polls by the Pew Research Center and Gallup shows skepticism for the concept that colleges are a source for good in American society. That means college leaders must operate with the awareness that their campuses are “not always viewed as an automatically trustworthy voice in relation to big public issues,” said Gretchen Ritter, executive dean and vice provost at Ohio State University and an expert on democracy and citizenship. Campus leaders must not always assume that their words will be taken as true and valuable, she said, and they must listen to those who are more skeptical.
The conversation inherently loops universities into the structures society must reexamine for inequities. Institutions including colleges “perpetuate the oppression of minoritized peoples,” said Kofi Lomotey, a professor of educational leadership at Western Carolina University, a former chancellor of Southern University and A&M College, and another editor of The Racial Crisis in American Higher Education.
Smith, the Utah professor and Lomotey’s co-editor, has a full house during the pandemic. He and his wife, both professors, are working from home, too. Much has changed in their daily lives. They celebrated a grandson’s eighth-grade graduation on Zoom. They’ve eaten their meals at home. Over dinner, they come together in conversation. Every so often, the value of a college degree comes up.
Smith isn’t sure it benefits all populations equally. He wonders what environments might be most supportive, or productive. They’ve started talking to their grandson about attending a historically-black college. His mom had him research the colleges’ history and the programs that hold his interest. There are clear benefits. At an HBCU, Smith said, it is almost guaranteed that he would be treated with the whole of his humanity.
Francie Diep contributed reporting.
