Academe’s Disturbing Indifference to Racism

On a Saturday night earlier this fall, approximately 300 Northwestern University students gathered to march for the abolition of the university police force. A Whole Foods window was smashed, campus and community buildings were spray-painted, and a Northwestern banner was removed, burned, and left at the home of Morton Schapiro, the president.

The following Monday, Schapiro emailed the campus: “I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the overstepping of the protesters. They have no right to menace members of our academic and surrounding communities.” Schapiro condemned the defacing of property, and also chants that he said went into the early hours of Sunday morning: “f— you Morty” and “piggy Morty” — the latter of which he suggested bordered on anti-Semitism. “It is an abomination and you should be ashamed of yourselves,” he wrote. “If you haven’t yet gotten my point,” he continued, “I am disgusted by those who chose to disgrace this university in such a fashion.”

“Abomination,” “disgrace,” shame, disgust — it is rare to hear a sitting college president sound off with such vehemence. Indeed, it was exactly such passion and moral abhorrence that was lacking from college presidents’ anodyne statements on police violence earlier this summer (“a true master class in the passive voice,” wrote Jason England and Richard Purcell in The Chronicle Review, of one such statement).

Nowhere in Schapiro’s nearly 700-word email did he disclose that students had first presented their concerns about campus police on June 3 following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Nor did he mention that months had passed since Northwestern administrators promised to release their police budget to the public, or reference reports that show Black students representing only 6 percent of his university’s enrollment while Black people account for up to 40 percent of police stops initiated by campus officers.

Faculty members in the Department of African American Studies were quick to respond:

It is only when your own pleasant suburban life was disrupted by student protestors that your expression of outrage and dismay to our university community rose to a level beyond the banal, the tepid, and the timid.

Pushback also came from Jewish students, faculty members, and alumni, who dismissed his anti-Semitism claim, calling it “a cudgel to denigrate Black radical protest.”

What are we to make of this incident?

Some will fixate, as Schapiro would have them, on the details of Northwestern students’ behavior. But that would miss a larger point. What the incident reveals is that presidents still too often shy away from the moral authority their institutions grant them — except when opportunities to police student dissent arise. Is it surprising that the destruction of property and uncivil behavior animated Schapiro more than police violence and racial injustice? In a word, no. His actions — and inactions — fit a pattern of modern academic leadership more concerned with safety, civility, and reputation management than with enacting meaningful social and racial justice.

Look back to another moment when racial equality and civil rights were roiling campuses: the 1960s. In July 1963, President John F. Kennedy called on college presidents for assistance: “The leadership that you and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity today will influence American life for decades to come.” Some academic leaders rose to the historic challenge, but many shrank from the task of directly addressing racism.

Consider George W. Beadle’s situation at the University of Chicago in January 1962. After decades of complaints from the Black community about racially restrictive housing covenants, students and alumni were raising similar concerns. (At this time, only 2 percent of University of Chicago students were Black.) Through the expansion of its footprint, the university now owned several apartment buildings where demonstrated incidents of housing discrimination had occurred. Beadle, new to the job, praised his predecessor’s expansionist policy:

Lawrence A. Kimpton made a … major contribution to the health of the university … partly by helping to reverse the trend toward physical and cultural deterioration in the neighborhood. He recognized that faculty and students will not stay, nor come, to an environment that is not decent and safe.

Urban renewal was “a noble goal for a noble university,” he added. When students launched a multiweek sit-in in Beadle’s office to end racist practices in university-owned housing, he was aggrieved. He preferred a gradual approach to integration over an “abrupt” one that might endanger the university in some way. Besides, the sit-in was “emotional,” and the university “cannot ‘negotiate’ with any group of students.” Beadle attempted to make the student’s methods the story, though such tactics were made more difficult when the university’s public-relations staff accidentally mailed its internal talking points to members of the media.

For Beadle, a reckoning with university-supported racism was a time for misdirection and a slowing down of anti-racist fervor. An aversion to controversy and banal, conservative managerialism was the focal point — not racial justice. In this case, as in the recent incident involving Morton Schapiro at Northwestern, a common approach of the self-proclaimed liberal university becomes clear: Convince the public that the issue at hand is about anything other than racism.

The ’60s also offer a notable counterexample. In 1963, shortly after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four Black girls, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, a segregationist, came to speak at Princeton, invited by the Whig-Cliosophic Society. Princeton President Robert F. Goheen denounced Barnett’s views while defending his right to free speech. The appearance itself went off without violence, and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Barnett was booed 15 times and applauded 32 times.

Goheen was in Washington, D.C., for an American Council on Education meeting during the talk, and returned to Princeton to a mailbox full of indignation from conservative alumni. Alarmed by Barnett’s chilly reception, they announced the end of donations, the desire to send their sons elsewhere, and disgust for Princeton. Confronted by all this, Goheen went into action.

He wrote zingers back to disgruntled alumni, sending them Princeton’s admissions guidance for Black students. He gave a passionate 30-minute address to an audience of 1,200 on “the no longer excusable, no longer postponable, no-longer-to-be-met-with-lipservice need” for racial equality. He also ended any business deals with housing organizations known to employ discriminatory practices and doubled down on recruiting Black students.

He met with the Board of Trustees, read them the introduction to his address on racial equality to “make his personal conviction on this matter very clear,” and suggested a summer institute for underserved youth. Goheen expanded the university’s fair-employment standards and committed university personnel to ensuring equal racial opportunities across housing, admissions, and employment.

Shortly after this, a committee of Ivy League registrars formed to better recruit Black students. “Everyone realized … they had to do more than just talk about attracting capable young Negroes,” explained the dean of the college at Princeton. “They had to actually do something about it.”

The same diagnosis is applicable today.

It is not enough to simply talk about racial equity and social justice. Today — as in the past — college presidents must ensure that campus policies and practices match their public proclamations if they want to effectively address racial justice.