Princeton University’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, billed it as an “extraordinary” measure: The Ivy League institution, he announced last weekend, would strip Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs.
But for Asanni Armon, a 2017 Princeton graduate
who occupied Eisgruber’s office in 2015 to demand that and many other racial-justice actions, one of the remarkable things about Eisgruber’s announcement was its inadequacy for the current political moment.
Armon, 25, joined other alums and current students who responded to Eisgruber with a series of statements demanding more expansive reforms, including an antiracist curriculum, defunding the campus’s Department of Public Safety, and paying reparations to descendants of enslaved people owned by the university’s past presidents and members of its board of trustees.
“To do something cosmetic like a name change, to make it seem like they’re doing something important, when they’re not, I think is the most disrespectful,” Armon said. “Because there are real substantial things that they could be doing — that they have the power to do.”
Princeton joins the the University of Kentucky, the University of Alabama, and other institutions that are meeting this moment of racial reckoning by capitulating to longstanding demands for the removal of offensive symbols. But changing a name is, in some respects, the easy part. The tougher task is what comes next.
Scholars and activists are debating — sometimes with themselves — whether this could be a watershed racial moment for higher education. Will student uprisings this fall lead to deeper changes than those achieved by the antiracism protests that shook campuses five years ago? What would it take to really address the role universities play in perpetuating racial inequality?
Black-student protests in the 1960s and ‘70s resulted in significant changes, like the creation of African American studies departments and the intensive recruitment of Black students. But the anti-affirmative action backlash of the ‘80s and ‘90s in some ways checked those gains, said Stefan M. Bradley, a historian at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, who studies Black-student activism.
Another major anti-racism push erupted around 2014 as the Black Lives Matter movement took hold on college campuses. Black student activists, Bradley said, introduced new antiracist concepts to allies and administrators, spurred the removal of some offensive campus symbols, and spawned some efforts to recruit Black students and hire Black administrators.
Confronting the System
What’s different today is that the Covid-19 pandemic is exposing inequities in higher education, said Bradley. Citizens are responding to police killings and systemic racism with a sustained multiracial, intergenerational protest movement that is “confronting the system in a way I think we haven’t seen since the late 1960s,” said Martha Biondi, a scholar of Black social movements who is a professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University. And university leaders are reacting by taking an antiracist posture, committing, at least verbally, to fighting institutional racism.
That’s a departure from their past practice of dismissing racial-justice demands as the “radical imaginations of students who just need to grow up,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In abandoning that old rhetorical defense, Muhammad said, they now have little room for backsliding.
“I think this fall will be one of the most turbulent semesters of the past 50 years on college campuses,” said Muhammad, a historian of racism and criminal justice. “Because that energy that has been in the streets is also part of the on-campus work of college-educated students who have engaged in this national antiracist reckoning.”
A lot is uncertain about how the pandemic might affect students’ presence on campus and, as a result, their activism. But what’s becoming increasingly clear — as the Princeton case highlights — is that one of the main battles this fall will be over the role of race in curricula.
Princeton graduate students like Abyssinia Lissanu are capitalizing on this moment to redress what they see as the failure of its policy school to teach students how to fight racism.
Lissanu traveled nearly two and a half hours from her hometown of Somerset, Ky., to participate in June protests in Louisville. Lissanu, who is Black, said she was especially saddened by the police killing of Breonna Taylor, who was a Louisville resident and, like most of Lissanu’s immediate family, a medical worker. “It felt like this could have been me or my family members so easily,” she said in an email.
Lissanu, 25, is spending the summer educating herself on radical policy solutions that focus on the roots of racism. She said that master’s students at Princeton’s policy school can pass through their entire first year without learning about systemic racism. Less than 5 percent of the school’s faculty members are Black, according to a letter signed by hundreds of its graduate students and alumni.
That petition called for an “antiracist transformation” of the school’s curriculum by the fall of 2021. It demands that the school’s faculty be at least 25 percent Black by 2022. It calls on Princeton to create a Center for Antiracist Policy along the lines of the center that Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, is building at Boston University.
“If Princeton’s goal is really to educate us to be policy makers in 2020, but they’re not talking about racism, I don’t know what they’re doing,” Lissanu said.
Students, she added, feel that they have been “committeed to death” by Princeton’s leaders, who have been more apt to convene discussions than take meaningful action on racial-justice issues. “They should just get used to the fact that we’re going to be a lot more uncompromsing,” Lissanu said. “We’re going to be a lot more willing to walk out.”
A Princeton spokesman, Michael Hotchkiss, framed the Wilson name decision as one step in what will very likely be further measures. The university’s president in June directed his cabinet of senior academic and administrative leaders to “identify specific actions that can be taken in their areas of responsibility to confront racism in our own community, and in the world at large,” Hotchkiss said in a statement emailed to The Chronicle.
“By tasking every member of the cabinet (including the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs), the president has signaled that every aspect of the university’s life — from teaching to research to operations to partnerships — can and must address these issues.”
The statement also pointed to a series of previous steps the university has taken to diversify its student and faculty ranks, including mentorship, college-access, and fellowship programs. The statement did not respond with any specificity to the students’ calls to defund the campus police, pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, or transform the policy-school curriculum.
Changing the Rules
But the challenge is much bigger than policy schools. Universities, said Harvard’s Muhammad, have for the past half century focused on hiring a certain number of Black people into visible positions, just as companies and government agencies have done. They set up Black-studies departments and elevated their first Black deans and department chairs. But such “symbolic representational integration of Black people” hasn’t fundamentally changed how universities operate or view the world, Muhammad said.
Black studies “has been marginalized within most academic communities for a long time,” he said. Universities treat it as a haven for Black students and scholars but not an institutional — and budgetary — priority. Students can elect to take those classes, Biondi said, but generally don’t have to.
The emphasis on representational diversity “is precisely why in 2020 we have seen this explosion of outrage and frustration with the ongoing impact of every kind of form of systemic racism, in our health-care system, in our banking system, in our housing sector, in our education sector, in our criminal-justice sector,” Muhammad said. “Every aspect of those sectors are impacted by what students learn on every single college campus. So if you’ve got 80 percent of college campuses that are white students” who “never learn a single thing about race or racism” before starting careers, then “why would we expect society to look any more different?”
Muhammad added, “That is where the clock has run out. Because the notion that representational diversity was good enough without changing the rules of these institutions is precisely the unfinished business of the social movements going back to the 1970s.”
Changing the rules would mean, for example, requiring that graduate professional schools in every area — medicine, law, business, policy, public health — force students to study how their particular domains intersect with structures of institutional racism.
To do something cosmetic like a name change, to make it seem like they’re doing something important, when they’re not, I think is the most disrespectful.
Beyond curricula, another focus of student protest centers on how universities police campuses and surrounding communities. Some student activists are already taking that struggle beyond petitions.
At the University of Chicago, about 40 activists last month occupied the campus police headquarters. The #CareNotCops student campaign to disarm, defund, and ultimately disband the university’s police department emerged in the wake of the 2018 shooting by the campus police of a University of Chicago senior, Charles Soji Thomas. Student activists had staged occupations in previous years, but this time was different, said one participant, Kosi Achife.
The student newspaper published an editorial supporting their cause. The occupiers received thousands of dollars in donations. The university closed bathrooms and prevented food from coming in, but the students held on for about 20 hours. They used art, dance, and music in their protest against what Achife described as the campus police department’s “terrorizing” presence on Chicago’s South Side.
“There was like a lot of hate, honestly, at the beginning of the campaign,” said Achife, 21, who graduated from the university in June. “But now, as like people are really witnessing” police brutality, “they’re getting more in tune with the work that #CareNotCops has been doing.”
A University of Chicago spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
As with curricula, protesters against campus policing are up against deeply rooted structural forces.
Campus police units, like urban forces, began to grow in the 1960s, amid conflicts between student activists and local police officers, according to a recent presentation by Adom Getachew, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. College presidents, Getachew said, mounted a successful lobbying campaign that led legislatures in over 44 states to permit the creation of campus police forces. Even as campus crime has fallen, Getachew said, the presence and authority of armed college police officers has continued to expand.
There are some early indications of change on police reform and other racial-justice goals students are pursuing. The University of Minnesota severed some ties with local police. Students in the California State University system may be required to take ethnic-studies courses, under a bill advancing in the state legislature. Stanford University on Tuesday announced plans to hire 10 new professors specializing in racial issues. Reparations projects are underway at Georgetown University and a small number of other institutions.
But such goals will bump up against the reality that universities are suffering financially as a result of the pandemic. Historically, said Loyola Marymount’s Bradley, when institutions lose money, diversity, equity, and inclusion projects are among the first things to be cut.
New antiracist investments, he added, will inevitably trigger a backlash from some white alumni, students, faculty, and staff. Pressing forward with them will require bravery by university leaders who are often wedded to doing things the way they have always been done, he said.
“Courage is not something that we see liberally passed out in higher education,” Bradley said. “I’ll keep that glimpse of hope. But I’m bracing myself ... for whatever happens.”
