At U. of Kentucky, Faculty Look to Deepen a Campus Conversation on Race

Student voices have dominated protests and discussions about the racial climate on college campuses this fall, with professors sometimes standing in solidarity but keeping their own opinions relatively quiet. At the University of Kentucky that usual dynamic was upended this week after more than 150 faculty and staff members signed an open letter to senior leaders offering ideas for improving the racial climate at the flagship.

The letter offers Eli Capilouto, the president, and other top leaders a list of “concrete steps the university can take if it is sincere in its stated goal of improving the experience” of black students, faculty, and staff.

Before the letter, students had already raised concerns about the campus’s racial climate. But Melynda J. Price, a professor of law and director of African-American and Africana studies, says it was important for faculty members to contribute to the conversation since “faculty of color have similar hostile experiences as students of color.”

Wayne D. Lewis, an associate professor of education and a signatory of the letter, says that during his seven years at Kentucky, he has seen the university make efforts to improve the climate for minorities. But, he adds, minority faculty members sometimes don’t feel valued, and students and faculty and staff members alike experience conscious and unconscious bias.

While it’s not the faculty’s primary role to improve the racial climate at Kentucky, Mr. Lewis says, offering suggestions for specific ways to improve it could make things better for everyone and is more productive than saying, “Well, I’ll leave and go somewhere else.”

Potential Career Risk

For minority faculty members to raise their voices on race collectively is rare, even amid the current wave of protest. While they have an important stake in improving their institutions, speaking out also means taking a potential risk with their careers, even among those with tenure.

Most minority faculty members are fully aware of the racial problems on their campuses, and are frustrated by the inaction of senior administrators, but “they feel powerless to do anything about them,” says Shaun R. Harper, founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He says that the current momentum of student activism over campus racism may not inspire many open letters from faculty members like the one at Kentucky. But it could “open a window for faculty and staff of color to say, Hey, we experience this too,” he says.

At Kentucky it wasn’t just about expressing solidarity with students, professors say, but also about trying to make the conversation more substantive.

As with many of the campus protests this fall, the controversy at Kentucky was fueled by a historic artifact — a 1934 fresco covering a wall in a venerated building near the heart of the campus. Painted by Ann Rice O’Hanlon, an alumna, the 40-foot mural depicts a panorama of Kentucky history and includes images of black slaves stooped over crops.

In November, Mr. Capilouto met with a group of about 25 black students to discuss their concerns, among them the mural and its prominent reminder of slavery. Afterward, Mr. Capilouto announced that the mural would be covered by a white shroud until an appropriate long-term solution could be found.

Within days, Mr. Capilouto re-evaluated his decision. He announced on Monday that the mural would be left uncovered and that efforts would be made to present it “in the explicit and accurate context of the sober realities of our shared history and our advancing understanding of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity.”

Ms. Price says that her colleagues in the program in African-American and Africana studies hold “vehemently opposing views” about the mural. Some want it covered, while others, like her, feel it should be left alone and used as a teaching resource.

But she and her colleagues were surprised that they had not been consulted about the painting’s fate. They also agreed that the mural was “low-hanging fruit in the discussion about diversity on our campus,” she says, and that if the racial climate were to improve, “it was important to say there’s more here that can be done.”

A core group of 12 faculty members drafted the letter, which was sent to Mr. Capilouto and posted to the African-American and Africana studies website late last week. “Instead of just pointing fingers, we wanted to offer concrete solutions,” Ms. Price says.

Some of the letter’s 11 suggestions overlap with demands made by Kentucky students, such as requiring a class on race and ethnicity for all students and improving hiring and retention of minority faculty members. But the faculty list goes further, and offers more specifics, including better tracking of incidents of racial harassment, hiring a dedicated admissions counselor to recruit minority students, and hiring mental-health counselors to help deal with and mitigate the effects of campus racism.

One of the faculty requests builds on existing diversity plans at the university. Kentucky’s current five-year strategic plan, which was adopted in October by its Board of Trustees, includes several goals on minority inclusion. For example, it calls for doubling by 2020 the portion of African-American professors at Kentucky, which currently stands at 3.4 percent of the university’s more than 2,000 faculty members. The letter’s signers would like the university to meet that goal by 2018.

‘Much More Work’ Ahead

Mr. Capilouto says university leaders have long recognized “how much more work we have to do” regarding diversity and inclusion at Kentucky. He says he was “very encouraged” by the faculty letter, and by the rest of the current conversation about race on the Kentucky campus. “The mural, I think, allowed us to intentionally focus on issues of diversity, and deepen and broaden the level of discussion we’ve had around these issues,” he says.

While he acknowledges that he did not reach out to a broad constituency in considering what to do about the mural, he is scheduled to meet with the signatories of the faculty letter in January to discuss their concerns. “Having this many people at the table now, we’re going to have better ideas for what will work” to improve the campus climate, he says.

Mr. Lewis, the education professor, says he looks forward to meeting with the president and would like to see the discussion prompt some widespread and lasting change. “I’m hoping that this ends up not just being a moment.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.