A university’s high-profile decision to suspend dozens of sections of a diversity and ethics course two months ago rested on a troubling allegation: that a student had been made to feel “humiliated and degraded” in class “for their beliefs and values.”
An outside law firm investigated the incident, at Boise State University, and a report on its findings was released on Monday. The law firm said that it couldn’t substantiate that such an incident had even taken place.
Here is what happened, according to the report:
On March 15 an unnamed “concerned community leader” contacted the Idaho university about a troubling incident he had seen in a video on a friend’s phone: A white Boise State student, this person said, had been forced to apologize in front of a class for being white or for having white privilege. The student, this person further alleged, had been taunted and called names by other students. The word “stupid” was used, and the student left in tears.
University officials deduced that if the incident were real, it would have happened in a “University Foundations 200" course because the class was discussing structural inequality, economics, and white privilege — topics covered by those mandatory courses on diversity and ethics. The officials hadn’t seen the video themselves, but they said that the nature of the claim and the fact that it had come from the community leader — whom the university’s president, Marlene Tromp, described in an interview with The Chronicle as a “very trusted person” but did not identify — led Tromp to suspend the classes. They resumed a week later, while the investigators did their work.
In their inquiry, students were asked to report any questions or concerns about the UF 200 courses. An email address was set up and shared with the 2,820 students who were enrolled in the courses in the fall or spring. The Boise law firm, Hawley Troxell, monitored the email address’s inbox. Many students praised the courses, and those who raised concerns were invited by the law firm to be interviewed. In the end, the lawyers conducted interviews with 30 students who either had concerns or said they wanted to speak with an investigator.
Not one of the interview subjects said that a student had been asked to apologize for being white and then left the class in tears amid ridicule. “We were unable to substantiate the alleged instance of a student being mistreated in a UF 200 course as described,” the investigators wrote.
But the lawyers heard about one episode that they said “matches some of the elements of the reported incident,” though they could not confirm that it was the incident in the alleged video. During the week before the “concerned community leader” contacted the university, there was a UF 200 class, held on Zoom, that students said had focused on “structural inequality,” “capitalism and racism,” and “race and economics.” The students described a heated exchange between the instructor and a white student, possibly about universal health care. The student, who spoke to the lawyers, said she’d noticed an inconsistency in the instructor’s argument. She “struggled to find the right wording” and ended up saying out loud that the “instructor’s logic was stupid.”
Some other students reacted by saying, mostly in the chat box, things like “you can’t call the instructor stupid” and “not cool,” according to the lawyers’ report. The instructor, seeing what was happening, told the class that the student hadn’t called the instructor stupid, only the instructor’s logic. Frustrated with her classmates’ responses, the student left the class early. She was crying.
After the class, the instructor checked in with the student, who said she had no problem with the instructor’s treatment of her. And that was that.
What about the complainant, the “concerned community leader” who reported a video showing a different set of events? The lawyers wrote that after several failed attempts, they were able to interview him. He spoke about “concerns that BSU is indoctrinating students,” the lawyers wrote, and said he was “aware of multiple inappropriate interactions between BSU instructors and students.”
He declined to go into detail, however, or to identify any student. All he could say was that it was “really inappropriate.” He said he didn’t have the video that he’d said he’d seen, and would not give any information about how the lawyers could get it.
“We did not receive reports,” the lawyers concluded, “of any other incidents that came anywhere near matching the alleged incident as it was described by the complainant.”
‘A Mounting Chorus of Voices’
When asked in an interview whether the episode sends the message that a secondhand report with no evidence can stop her university from teaching 55 classes to nearly 1,300 students — a drastic measure even if it was temporary — Tromp pointed to the egregiousness of the claims. She noted that the provost and the Faculty Senate president had supported her decision. The law firm also wrote that suspending the courses temporarily was “appropriate and warranted,” given the nature of the allegations.
When she heard about the claims, Tromp, a former English professor, said she had been reminded of moblike behavior in a book she’s often taught: The Handmaid’s Tale. She described a scene in which a group of women chant at one character, telling her it’s her fault that she was raped and bringing her to tears. Tromp decided the university should “hit the pause button” and figure out what had happened.
Tromp also said that she’d been hearing concerns from lawmakers about the UF 200 courses for months.
“What people would tell us,” Tromp said, “is, Our constituents have told us this class is a problem.”
The concerns were never specific, she said. But “there was a mounting chorus of voices, and we were hearing it everywhere.”
Some Idaho lawmakers have grown antagonistic toward Boise State because of what they perceived as its liberal social and political agenda. In 2019, when Tromp took office as president, lawmakers sent her a letter that listed Boise State programs they considered “antithetical to the Idaho way,” such as graduation ceremonies for Black and LGBTQIA students, and fellowships for underrepresented minority students. This year they debated whether to cut millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to send the message that they didn’t want the state’s public universities spending their money on social-justice programs.
In April, Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, signed into law a bill that prohibited public higher-education institutions and schools from compelling students to “affirm, adopt, or adhere” to what the Legislature wrongly suggested were the core tenets of critical race theory. The law echoes bills making their way through state legislatures across the country that take aim at critical race theory.
Tromp suggested that professors may need to adjust how they teach to accommodate the distrust of higher education that is coming from the right. Boise State’s UF 200 instructors have been trained in the new law and its intent.
“We need to make sure that folks have an understanding that with this wave of ideas that is sweeping the country, the classes they may have taught for decades might need to start in a different place,” she said. She wants professors to try not to lose the students who think they’re being indoctrinated, so they should start where those students are. In a letter to the university community about the investigators’ findings, she noted that “critics of higher education had publicly advised students to record their classes.”
“Things that we could have presumed were shared assumptions?” Tromp said in the interview. “That presumption may no longer hold.”
