Three College Leaders on Hope, Despair, and the Killing of George Floyd

In the days since George Floyd died while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, college leaders have been issuing statements of anguish and solidarity with protesters. As Pomona College’s president, G. Gabrielle Starr, put it, “A virus drove us indoors. A violent death drove many of us into the streets.”

On Monday afternoon, The Chronicle’s Jack Stripling talked with Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin College; Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington; and Timothy P. White, chancellor of the California State University system, about the singular challenges of our unraveling moment, the role of higher education in such times, and where hope might be found. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stripling: This is a conversation with three higher-education leaders about leading an institution through an unprecedented crisis. Lordy, are we in one. A lot of people are really hurt right now. We are seeing the backlash after the death of George Floyd in police custody. Dr. Cauce, I’ll start with you. I’m curious what you think the role of higher education is, and what the role of college leaders is, in holding the country together?

Cauce: There’s no question that these are difficult times. The pandemic has revealed a lot of other issues that we have in this country, the very deep racial inequities, and when you have those kinds of inequities, and the systemic racism that undergirds them, they do boil over. And that’s what we have been seeing in the last few days.

Our job is to reach out to our students and faculty, particularly our students of color, and in this case particularly our black students and our black faculty, because they can so readily identify with what’s happening out there. Our students are terrified to go out if just jogging could lead to death. They’re also angry.
It’s so difficult to communicate during this time. Normally we’d be bringing them together on campus, and it’s very difficult not to do that. Those of us at public universities with a public mission are preparing students to be citizens in the world, and we have a responsibility to create a place to have difficult conversations.

Stripling: President Ambar, some presidents have put out communications — they’ve tried to reach out to their students. Have you done any of that? And more broadly, what do you think students and faculty want to hear from a college leader right now?

Ambar: I issued my communication yesterday. It took me some time, because I had to digest it personally. The black community has been experiencing this for quite some time, so it feels like just another injury that’s been longstanding. In my email, after I talked about the anguish that is really palpable in the African American community, I talked about where my hope is. And my hope is in what makes me hopeful every September, which is students who come back with an insatiable level of curiosity, a commitment to difference that generations before them didn’t necessarily have, and a desire to do good in the world. What I got back was all of these notes and messages saying, What can we do to be a part of it?

People want to know that you recognize and see them. They want you to identify with the pain. They want you to acknowledge that it’s a challenge. But they also want to do something about it. We shape society by the types of young people we send out into the world. And our ability to talk effectively about these issues is a way to help them be prepared. As I said in my email, I want them to have the courage to meet the world as it is — and then to change it.

Stripling: You said students want you to identify with their pain. We have all seen this horrible video of George Floyd underneath the knee of a police officer. What was your reaction when you first encountered it?

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Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin College

Ambar: It’s a natural inclination when you see someone in agony to want to avert your eyes, but this is not the time to avert our eyes. This event is not isolated, and it is not singular. That’s the piece that’s so painful. And I’ll speak as a mom of color. I’m one of these college presidents that have triplets; they’re 13 years old. I have two sons, and for black families thinking about all of their children, but black men in particular, it feels like they are unprotected in a world that should protect them. The conversations that black families have with their children about their interactions with police are very different than the conversations that white families have with their children. I was talking to my son about this: When little white children are in elementary school and they identify a police officer, you go and you get help from that person. That’s not how black families talk about how those interactions with police play out. So this is painful, and yet I’m hopeful. I do believe that there is a way forward, and we just have to have the will as a society to do it.

Stripling: Chancellor White, you’re in the Los Angeles area, which has seen some of the bigger protests, and it does make me think about crises on top of crises. You had already made the decision that California State, really the largest public four-year in the country, was going to be mostly online come fall, because of Covid-19. And this situation has shown all of us just how fluid and unpredictable everything is right now. I wonder what you think college leaders will face in the fall, when we are going to be dealing with potential civil unrest along with Covid-19, along with maybe the most contentious election we’ve seen in a generation. How does one even begin to plan for this?

White: Carmen, your comments have given me chills. The lens of you and your boys is different than the lens of me and my 16-year-old kid, and we have to remember that.

This is a confluence of events of historic proportions: the pandemic itself, the morbidity and mortality, then this devastating economic impact on so many families and students. We have 482,000 students, and our campus is really 800 miles long, from Humboldt State, up in Arcata, down to San Diego State, just north of the Mexican border. Some are in urban areas, some are in more frontier or rural areas, and there’s huge variability in the local context. But this issue of racial injustice, of protest, which I support, and violence, which I don’t support, coupled with the next six months of a vitriolic campaign, is going to be a very difficult time for the university.

But like Carmen and like Ana Mari, I am hopeful. And I want us to remind ourselves about the role of the university at moments like this. Our society and nation have been pulled apart by powerful centrifugal forces of hatred and intolerance, bigotry and ignorance, selfishness and greed. But the California State University, with our size and number of campuses and amazing faculty and staff and students, who are the most diverse economically, racially, and ethnically in the country, will continue to serve as essential wellsprings of centripetal forces — things that will bring us back together and hold us together.

At this moment there is a sense of helplessness. The role of the university is to create hopefulness for all.

Cauce: If I might add, in my communication to the campus community, I talked about those before-and-after pictures that we’ve seen during this pandemic. Before, a building or an arch is surrounded by pollution, and you can barely see a foot ahead of you. And then, after the pandemic, you can see that behind that building, in some cases you have beautiful mountains, in some cases you have squalid, overcrowded houses. This pandemic has created a moment of clarity in which we can see better what’s been there all along. Racism, tensions with police, this is not new. But we’ve got to take advantage of this clarity and to move to more productive action. We can all understand the grief, the anguish, the pain, the anger — that is absolutely natural. How do we go from weeping to action?