A Nearly All-White Video Drew Attention to Diversity at Wisconsin. Here’s How Other Flagships Measure Up.

A promotional video produced in September by the homecoming committee at the University of Wisconsin at Madison drew ire for not featuring students of color, and it resurfaced on Wednesday as the subject of an article in The New York Times.

The two-minute spot, titled “Home Is Where WI Are,” showed students — almost all of them white — cheering at football games, eating pizza, dancing, and singing a cappella. But when the video was shared on Facebook, a member of the historically black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had been asked to participate in the video shoot, noticed her organization’s footage had been omitted.

The homecoming-video incident carried undertones of another diversity-related snafu at Madison nearly two decades earlier. University officials admitted in 2000 that an image used in an admissions brochure had been doctored to include a black student in an effort to make the institution appear more diverse to prospective students. The student whose likeness was used told The Chronicle in 2001 that the situation offered Madison a chance to “revitalize” its image. But the campus has been plagued by racial-discrimination incidents since.

The homecoming committee deleted the video the week it was released, issuing an apology “that our video failed to show the full breadth of the university.” But outrage continued as screen recordings of the video circulated, and students of color proposed creating a new video to show at halftime at the homecoming game. The result, posted on the university’s official YouTube channel, was narrated by the president of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

In the following weeks, racial tensions continued to simmer at Madison. A copy of the student newspaper with the words “UW 4 WHITES ONLY!” was taped outside a prominent building on the campus, and students of color who’d orchestrated the new homecoming video staged a later protest. On Thursday the university republished statements on the video in response to the Times article, which it said “did not fully document the university’s response to the issue.”

The homecoming-video incident also points to larger questions of race and belonging on college campuses. According to Chronicle data, 48 states’ flagship public institutions enrolled a lower percentage of underrepresented minority students in their freshman class than resided in their home state. Madison was among that number; in the fall of 2017, the share of first-year minority students enrolled there was 10 percentage points lower than the share of 17- to 21-year-old underrepresented minorities living in Wisconsin.

Julia Piper, an editorial associate at The Chronicle, contributed to this article.

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.