College Presidents Can Do a Lot. But They Can’t End Racism.

Bryan Terry, The Oklahoman via AP Images

Imagine: After a flag-football game in which a residence-hall team made up mostly of black students beats one made up mostly of white students, a student on the losing team calls the black students the N-word to their faces. Or: A white student who dates a black student has a brick thrown at her by members of a white fraternity. Or: That same fraternity goes to the local housing projects to hire black kids to work at their Old South formal.

Those were some of my experiences in the mid-1980s as a student at the University of Georgia. The flagship of the state had started allowing black students to enroll only in 1961, as the result of a court order. So for its first 176 years, no black students were at Georgia, creating a strongly homogeneous culture. By the time I arrived at Georgia, in 1985, its bicentennial, black students had been there for only 24 years.

Culture is hard to change. Culture on a campus is even harder to change. There is a constant flow of people in and out of the institution, bringing with them at least 18 years of values they learned from their families and communities. Unfortunately, some of the values don’t fit well in diverse college communities, so the racial incidents I experienced were inevitable. They are inevitable now.

I thought about my experiences recently, while reading the news about the blackface incidents at the University of Oklahoma. Having spent half of my career at predominantly white universities, and still having a chance to speak on those campuses, I watched videos of the university’s town-hall meeting with interest. I heard the concerns of students and faculty members, and their desperate plea — no, their demand — that one man fix the almost-130-year culture of the university:

The president.

Like so many cases over the past four years, beginning with the protests at the University of Missouri at Columbia, I have seen numerous instances of students demanding that their institutions, and particularly their presidents, do something to end racism, diversify the faculty, provide safe spaces, etc. Uncomfortably I’ve watched video of students’ yelling at and berating their presidents for not doing enough to immediately remedy America’s original sin.

College presidents can do a lot. But they can’t end racism. In fact, they can’t solve most of the ills this nation has wrestled with for centuries.

So people’s demand that Oklahoma’s president, James L. Gallogly, resign after the recent incidents, after only six months on the job, is simply ridiculous. If I, a black man, took office as president of the University of Oklahoma last July, there is the same chance that those incidents would have happened. In fact, being the first black president would have undoubtedly caused a racial slur to be hurled about me long before the blackface videos were posted online.

Colleges are made up of imperfect people because our cities, states, and nation are made up of imperfect people. These imperfect people come together in a space where, for many of them, they are now on their own and have to take responsibility for their decisions and actions. Many will make bad choices.

But there is nothing a college president can do to prevent that — just like parents can’t prevent children, bosses can’t prevent employees, and mayors can’t prevent citizens. People will do dumb things.

One lesson students must learn is that nowhere in America can you completely hide from racism. There is intolerance all around us, even when we don’t know it. The recent discovery that Florida’s new secretary of state posed for pictures years ago dressed in blackface as a Hurricane Katrina survivor proves that point. While he lost his job, an untold number of others have done the same, or worse.

So your choices are to learn how to handle those situations and continue to fight for change, or to spend your time in places where the chances of having such experiences are greatly reduced.

Students need to find colleges that are the best fit for them. They have to accept the college for what it is, embrace the culture of the institution, and make it work for them. That doesn’t mean a student should accept mistreatment, but some places will have a higher rate of stupid, racist events than others.

That means that parents and prospective students have to begin to study the cultures of the campuses they are considering. The University of Oklahoma had wall-to-wall news coverage in March 2015, when fraternity members were caught on video singing that no black men would ever be able to join. The coverage indicated the fraternity sentiments were not new; essentially it was part of the culture of this chapter.

Current students’ shock about the recent blackface incidents surprised me. It was a signal that too many students make college choices without taking into consideration their level of tolerance for intolerance.

There is no way a president in his seventh month can change a culture that has shown racist behavior as recently as 2015. We all knew, or should have known, that the behavior was there. The president’s job is to actively commit to changing the culture. I hope President Gallogly will not follow his predecessor, whose solution to the problem was to hire a chief diversity officer with no real authority. The president has to understand and embrace this one rule: He is the chief diversity officer.

But the key word is “chief.” As I watched the outrage of the students, a fair number of faculty and staff members were in the room. I wondered how many opportunities they had missed to address racism in the culture. Did they ignore comments? Did they simply dismiss stories of racism, thinking it was not their problem?

In order to create a culture that supports all students, everyone needs to take responsibility for confronting unacceptable behaviors and attitudes. Bystander apathy is not a concept we should use only when discussing fraternity men who don’t confront hazing. It also applies to the hundreds of faculty and staff members who hesitate to challenge racist ideas that are often acted out.

If the solution is to blame the president for every racist incident on or off campus, we are basically admitting that everyone else on the campus has sat back and allowed racism to be a feature of its climate. In that case the campus should openly market its tolerance for racism so prospective students can find a better fit.

Presidents can’t solve campus racism on their own. If we are serious about battling it, then we all must be diversity officers.

Clarification (1/31/19, 6:25 p.m.): The Chronicle follows New York Times style, which encourages the avoidance of epithets of bigotry. We have adjusted the epithet in the first paragraph in keeping with that style.

Walter M. Kimbrough is president of Dillard University.