What College Activists Want

There was a time when stripping a racist’s name from a building would have been celebrated as a breakthrough for racial justice in higher education. Today, it’s accepted as a starting point.

As the Covid-19 pandemic and outrage over police violence converge, college students are demanding radical change. They want Confederate symbols toppled, police departments defunded, coursework diversified, departments restaffed with people of color, and a host of other actions.

“We’re past the point of conversation and reforms and panels,” said Maliya Homer, president of the Black Student Union at the University of Louisville. “We can’t panel our way out of this oppressive system that controls us.”

For students like Homer, these issues are personal. On a daily basis, they face fear, frustration, judgment, and ostracism because of their race and ethnicity, and their demands are shaped by those common experiences.

The Chronicle spoke with four student activists, each shedding light on a single demand.

The demand: Sever ties with the police.

The activist: Maliya Homer, president of the Black Student Union at the University of Louisville

Dean Lavenson for The Chronicle

When Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was shot to death by Louisville police officers who crashed into her apartment in the middle of the night, it was a jarring reminder for Maliya Homer of how vulnerable she felt as a Black woman.

Homer, president of the University of Louisville’s Black Student Union, had been disturbed for years about accounts of local police officers questioning Black and brown students for behavior that wouldn’t have raised suspicion if they were white. A Mexican American friend, wearing a hoodie and walking to the library, was asked where he was heading. A white student driving with two Black passengers said a police officer pulled out her gun when they asked her for directions.

But Taylor’s death marked a turning point for Homer. “Breonna’s murder was the last time I was going to even entertain ideas of reform,” she said. It “made me feel like Black women are dispensable.”

On May 31, Homer and the Black Student Union called for the university to sever ties with the Louisville Metro Police Department. “Nothing about being in closer proximity to state-sanctioned violence makes us any safer,” Homer wrote in the statement.

Helping impoverished neighborhoods near the campus meet food and affordable-housing needs would be a more equitable and effective way, she said, to improve public safety. Policing, Homer believes, contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline. She might have ended up there herself if the police had been summoned during her years as a strong-willed middle-schooler, she said.

Louisville’s president, Neeli Bendapudi, sympathized with Homer’s concerns but wrote in a response on the university’s website that cutting ties “would be an insufficient answer to a very complex problem.” The university relies on the local police to help investigate crimes, the president wrote. Its criminal-justice department houses a police-training institute.

Bendapudi promised that campus police officers would lead most investigations and that de-escalation or cultural-sensitivity training would be required for all officers hired to work on campus.

To Homer, those steps fall short. “It’s a slap in the face,” she said, “when you have Black and brown students asking you, begging you, telling you we don’t feel safe” with the metro police department, “and you talk about reform.”

The demand: Remove symbols of oppression.

The activist: Tyler Yarbrough, student senator at the University of Mississippi

Andrea Morales for The Chronicle

Tyler Yarbrough couldn’t believe the image in his Twitter feed.

The University of Mississippi student senator was about to drive from his college town of Oxford to his hometown of Clarksdale for a Juneteenth event marking the end of slavery. And his university had just released plans to build what looked to him like a “shrine to white supremacy.”

The picture on his phone showed an artist’s rendering of the campus cemetery to which the university planned to relocate its statue of a Confederate soldier. The project involved upgrading the cemetery into what the historian Anne Twitty described as a well-lit “park-like setting” with a path and new Confederate headstones. It wasn’t what the student government had envisioned when it voted to banish the statue from the campus’s front entrance to this run-down and isolated spot.

In late-night video calls, Yarbrough and other activists hashed out a plan to fight back.

As a public-policy student, Yarbrough sees Confederate statues as symbols of deeper systems of racial oppression: an educational system that barred Black students from his university until 1962, a legal system that acquitted the white men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

Yarbrough grew up about 20 minutes from where Till was killed, in a Mississippi Delta city so segregated, he said, it felt like “an apartheid state.” His mother received food stamps while studying to become a nurse. His father drove a truck. His great-grandmother could point to the field where her family had once worked as sharecroppers. None of the wealth generated by that land was passed down to his family.

Yarbrough became an activist in part because his campus has been regularly plagued by what he calls “racist scandal.” Notably, a photo emerged last year of fraternity members posing with guns in front of a bullet-pocked memorial sign to Till.

Yarbrough and a classmate responded to that by creating an image of their own. They placed the shot-up Till sign in front of the university’s Confederate statue.

Yarbrough sees a parallel between the murder of Till in 1955 and the killing of George Floyd in May. Both events ignited social movements to tear down the racist systems represented by Confederate statues.

Last month, Yarbrough and others organized a protest at the future home of Mississippi’s Confederate monument. The crowd faced police officers and security guards as Yarbrough gave a speech demanding the university work with students to come up with a new relocation plan.

Such demands will get louder. Yarbrough is creating a new group uniting student leaders at colleges across the state. His goal: Next time something happens, all will respond.

The demand: Hire people of color.

The activist: Ishiyihmie Burrell, student at Juniata College

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

When the Covid-19 pandemic forced Juniata College to send students home, Ishiyihmie Burrell left the rural liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania and returned to the familiar bustle of Queens, N.Y.

From the ethnically diverse, historically Black neighborhood where he grew up, Burrell spent two weeks with fellow students remotely crafting 26 pages of diversity recommendations for his majority-white college. Among their key demands: Students need more minority faculty, staff, and administrators they can feel comfortable confiding in and seeking advice from.

Support for students of color, they said, had been shattered when the college’s dean of equity, diversity, and inclusion left after being furloughed.

Burrell, the son of a Caribbean mother and African American father, said he was often the only Black student in his classes at Juniata and felt that he was “either not being seen because of my race or only being seen by my race.”

The environment was different, he said, in the classes he’s taken with Black professors. “I felt comfortable sharing my perspective as a Black person without feeling like it’s being looked at as the experience of all Black people,” he said.

Burrell said he can admit to his Black professors when he’s tired from juggling academics with social-justice activities. He’s more likely to ”sugar coat” his emotions when talking to white professors so they won’t see him as “just another ‘lazy Black person,’” he wrote in a social-media message to The Chronicle.

“I don’t see myself as an activist,” Burrell added. “I see myself as a Black person doing what I have to do” to get the same college experience his white classmates enjoy.

In response to the diversity recommendations Burrell had worked on, an anonymous student emailed college leaders, faculty, and staff last month condemning the demands as “loathsome.”

“The problems you have aren’t because of your skin color,” the student wrote. Instead, he said they stem from “a lack of personal responsibility, lack of growing up in a stable two-parent household, or a general disinclination for learning of the college variety.”

The student was suspended and issued an online apology after his identity was traced. But Burrell would like to think that if the student had been exposed to more diverse professors and advisers, his racist beliefs might have been challenged.

“Even though he was in Juniata’s care,” Burrell said, “there was no one who was able to change his views.”

The demand: Diversify the curriculum.

The activist: Martha M. Robles, senior at California State University at Northridge

Martha M. Robles began college as a struggling student whose high-school teachers had dampened her ambitions and alienated her with what she describes as a Euro-centric approach to teaching. She will graduate this fall from California State University at Northridge as a high-achieving student-activist who hopes to be a professor.

David Zentz for The Chronicle

She traces her transformation to one Chicana/o-studies course.

Taking that night class at Pierce College, part of the Los Angeles Community College District, “incited a fire within me,” she said. It wasn’t just how the course upended the Mexicans-as-villains historical narrative she’d studied growing up. It was how it made her feel: seen and heard in class for the first time.

Lately, Robles has directed her fire at one goal: getting state officials to adopt a law forcing students in the California State University system to take an ethnic-studies course. That fight puts her at the vanguard of a growing national push to diversify curricula.

Ethnic-studies classes use interdisciplinary methods to study race and racism and to “interrogate and dismantle systems of power,” Tracy Lachica Buenavista, a professor of Asian American studies at Northridge, said in an email. The field takes varied forms, she said, and can include Black studies, American Indian studies, Asian American studies, and Chicana/o studies.

Robles’s battle for the state law is the latest in a longer struggle to expand access to classes that changed her life.

Robles came of age in North Hollywood, raised by a single mother from Mexico. She grew up among people who had been involved in what she calls “the street life.” Teachers saw little potential in her.

Angelita Rovero was different.

Robles saw herself in the Pierce Chicana/o-studies professor’s dress and demeanor. Studying with Rovero, she felt newly grounded in her Chicana identity. She stopped working full time, to focus on college. She became a leader in a Chicana/o-student group.

Robles’s activism sprang from frustration with the limited Chicana/o studies courses at Pierce, which forced students to commute long distances to take classes at other colleges. Through petitions, protests, and meetings, Robles and her peers waged a campaign — ultimately successful — to expand Pierce’s offerings.

Robles is now pursuing a bachelor’s in Chicana/o studies at Northridge. Last semester, she traveled to Sacramento to lobby lawmakers for the state ethnic-studies mandate. She sees such classes as crucial not just for people of color but also for educating white students about their own privilege and converting them into allies.

An ethnic-studies mandate, she added, would also solidify departments that are vulnerable to budget cuts.

“We may not be able to see the fruits of our own labor,” Robles said. “But the reason why we do it is so that the following generations are able to reap those fruits.”