Graduate students employed by the University of Washington don’t have to put up with workplace microaggressions. It says so right in their union’s contract.
Under the terms of a new collective-bargaining agreement between the public university’s administration and its graduate researchers and teaching assistants, such employees’ work environments should “be free from everyday exchanges — including words and actions” that denigrate or exclude them as members of some group or class. If they encounter subtle racism or sexism on the job, they can file a grievance potentially leading to third-party arbitration.
“We are paving the way for unions at other institutions, whether they are academic or not, to include this sort of language in their contract as a form of buttressing their harassment protection,” says Elizabeth Scarbrough, a doctoral student who helped negotiate the contract as a union trustee. Her union local drafted the microaggression provision, she says, partly in response to members’ concerns that work was being distributed to them unevenly as a result of gender bias.
Although Washington stands apart in adopting such contract language, it is hardly the only higher-education institution to have taken steps to protect students and employees from subtle, and often unintentional, forms of discrimination. The University of California, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point include discussions of microaggressions as part of their faculty-training efforts. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign plans not only to provide faculty and staff members with such training, but to discuss microaggressions as part of a course required of incoming freshmen.
Elsewhere, Ithaca College’s administration is working with its student government to develop an online system that will allow students to anonymously report microaggressions so the college can track the type and frequency of such incidents.
Recently, however, such efforts have come under fire as threats to free speech on campuses, partly because the term “microaggression” is being applied not just to obviously offensive or insensitive behavior but to statements many regard as expressing legitimate viewpoints.
Any characterization of the United States as “a melting pot,” for example, is classified in widely used training materials as a microaggression signaling a refusal to acknowledge the role that race plays in American society. The same goes for saying “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” Colleges are accused of “environmental microaggressions” if all of their buildings are named for white, heterosexual, upper-class men.
Among those sounding alarms, Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, last month accused his institution in a blog post of using the concept of microaggression to try to exclude ideas from the classroom. “I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing,” he wrote. Thomas Sowell, a syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has characterized efforts to stop microaggressions as “micro-totalitarianism.”
“It is becoming almost too easy to say the wrong thing on campus,” says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group known as FIRE. “If we create too many rules about how we talk to each other,” he says, “it becomes difficult to talk at all.”
Repeat Offenses
Chester M. Pierce, a professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard’s medical school, coined the term “microaggression” in 1970 to describe the subtle slights and insults that black people regularly experience at the hands of people who do not see themselves as racist.
Concern about microaggressions did not become widespread in higher education, however, until American Psychologist published a 2007 article providing a detailed taxonomy of different types of racial microaggressions, which it described as psychologically destructive. The article’s lead author, Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, went on to apply the same taxonomy to bias based on gender and sexual orientation in a 2010 book, Microaggressions in Everyday Life.
Such writings provided the template for many of the materials that colleges are using to raise awareness of microaggressions among their faculty and staff members. They have also helped make the study of microaggressions a hot topic among education researchers — the American Educational Research Association’s latest annual conference featured 16 sessions dealing with the subject. In an interview last week, Mr. Sue said he had given presentations about microaggressions at more than 30 colleges in the past two years.
Mr. Sue says research is showing that some of the worst perpetrators of microaggressions are well-intentioned faculty members who do not realize how their statements or actions hurt students and undermine academic achievement. He says colleges need to become more aware of microaggressions if they hope to maintain safe environments for their increasingly diverse work forces and student bodies.
Mr. Sue’s interest in microaggression stems partly from his personal experience as a Chinese-American who often has been treated as a foreigner, despite being born here. He characterizes his work as driven by a desire to help people who suffer psychological damage from repeatedly putting up with slights and snubs that might look harmless in isolation. He is unapologetic about treating as microaggressions many commonly held views — that we live in a meritocracy, for example — because he believes they truly hurt many people who hear them.
“We are all victimized in this society, and inherit the racial biases of our ancestors,” he says, adding that he sees awareness of our biases as the only way to get past them. Although he holds that the perpetrators of serious microaggressions “should be called out,” he says, “my whole focus is on educating people.” In his training sessions, he says, he seeks to provide a setting where people can discuss microaggressions “without being punished or blamed.”
Student Concerns
Perceptions of microaggression were found to be common among the nearly 5,000 minority students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who responded to a recent online survey conducted by faculty members and students. More than half of the respondents said they had been the victim of racial stereotypes in the classroom. Well over a third said they felt uncomfortable on the campus because of their race.
In an email this week, Menah Pratt-Clarke, Urbana-Champaign’s associate provost for diversity, said administrators there had responded to the survey’s findings by requiring every entering freshman this fall to take a 30-minute online lesson on diversity with a segment on microaggression. Administrators are also providing additional training on microaggression to faculty and staff members, and are working with the Academic Senate to make a class on ethnic and racial minorities in the United States a general-education requirement.
At other colleges, students have embarked on campaigns to pressure their institutions to take similar measures. Among such efforts, students have created Facebook pages documenting microaggressions at Binghamton University, Brown University, Wellesley College, and Yale University. At Fordham University, students held signs repeating or recounting microaggressions as part of a student’s digital photo project. Microaggressions were cited as a major concern by students who staged a sit-in at Colgate University’s admissions office last fall.
Ithaca College’s student-government association embarked on a campuswide campaign against microaggressions last spring, a year after hosting a town-hall meeting on the subject. In March it passed a resolution that created a panel to work with administrators to establish an anonymous, online microaggression-reporting system to track the demographics of victims and perpetrators.
Kyle D. James, a rising senior who is the student government’s vice president for academics, says the effort is still in the planning stages and faces challenges, such as developing mechanisms to ensure that authorities get the details of incidents that amount to violations of the law.
Fears of a Chilling Effect
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has sounded alarms about the Ithaca effort, saying the proposed reporting system lacks a clear definition of a microaggression — creating the potential for unjust accusations — and threatens to chill speech. The student government has responded by saying its efforts have been misrepresented and the concerns raised are overblown.
FIRE also is predicting legal challenges to the University of Washington’s new contract with its graduate-student union, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers that represents more than 4,000 academic employees on the university’s three campuses. By agreeing to such a provision, the university has “set itself on a collision course with the First Amendment,” says Will Creeley, FIRE’s vice president for legal and public advocacy.
The university’s administration declined to respond to requests for comment. Officials of the union local argue that the validity of microaggression complaints should be reliably sorted out by a grievance process built into the contract.
William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, says he sees the Washington contract provision on microaggressions as unique but similar to language in other contracts prohibiting harassment, discrimination, and bullying.
Free-speech concerns also have been raised in connection with faculty-training efforts at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point and at the University of California, a key battleground in the nation’s affirmative-action debate, which includes the statement “Affirmative action is racist” on its list of microaggressions.
Both institutions have responded by saying critics have exaggerated the scope of their training efforts — Stevens Point’s is a single workshop for new faculty members; the University of California’s, a voluntary seminar for deans and academic department heads. Both universities have also said they have no desire to limit speech, an assertion being treated with skepticism by critics who say such training on microaggression is sure to leave untenured faculty members fearful of crossing a line.
Greg Summers, the provost of Stevens Point, lamented in a recent interview that “microaggression” is a term that “clearly does not translate well to a popular audience.” He said, “There are much less jargony ways we could talk about these issues that make it clear we are not policing speech.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.