The unrest last summer in Ferguson, Mo., following the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, has captured headlines nationwide for the past year.
But for Harris-Stowe State University, a small historically black institution in nearby St. Louis, the events in Ferguson hit especially close to home. About 40 percent of its 1,500 students hail from the northern portion of St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson.
When Mr. Brown was shot, the university’s president, Dwaun J. Warmack, had been on the job — his first as a campus chief — for just one month. Mr. Warmack, who was previously senior vice president for administration and student services at Bethune Cookman University, had been preparing for a new academic year when he was “faced with probably one of the largest national tragedies to hit our society in the past 25 years.”
Helping shape the university’s response required him to “figure out how to be a jack of all trades — and probably a master of none,” he said.
So how does an institution respond when its surrounding city is in turmoil? We spoke with Mr. Warmack about how Harris-Stowe students responded to Mr. Brown’s killing and how the institution had sought to help the local community start to heal. Here are four steps the president and people on the campus have taken.
Build connections with the community.
After Mr. Brown’s death, Mr. Warmack said, university officials moved to build “meaningful partnerships” with the cities near the campus, including Ferguson and neighboring Florissant, Mo. As president of the only historically black university in St. Louis, Mr. Warmack said he felt a “civic and moral responsibility” to help ensure that local elementary-, middle-, and high-school students have a chance to succeed.
The university established a program last fall to have male Harris-Stowe undergraduates tutor students at two local elementary schools and to bus them to the campus to give them a taste of what college is like. About 50 Harris-Stowe students will walk the elementary schoolers to their first day of class this Thursday, extending a tradition that also started last fall.
Keep the campus conversation going.
Mr. Warmack did not hire any staff or faculty members to facilitate conversations about Ferguson over the last year. Instead, he tried to make sure those conversations were part of everyday life at Harris-Stowe. “It shouldn’t be isolated incidents that force us to have this type of dialogue,” he said. “That’s something they should be doing already.”
Over the past year, the university has held 17 events touching on the events in Ferguson, including town-hall meetings and small-group discussions for students about being leaders in their community, Mr. Warmack said.
When Mr. Brown’s funeral last summer fell on the same day as Harris-Stowe’s first day of classes, administrators had to strike a balance between kicking off the year and supporting a student body that was deeply affected. Mr. Warmack said officials had chosen to stay open but to work throughout the day to “create a variety of opportunities to have small conversations regarding how our students are impacted by it.”
“Our first conversation was just about the Mike Brown tragedy and what do we do,” he said. “We talked a lot about how has this impacted them. A lot of reflection time allowed them the opportunity to have a safe space to have conversations and to be vulnerable.”
Support students’ unique reactions.
Mr. Warmack said he had been impressed throughout the year by the “profound” reactions of students to the unrest in their community.
While a grand jury was hearing evidence about the shooting, a group of students led an event called “What If?” They discussed whether the police officer who had shot Mr. Brown would be indicted, and what the outcome would mean for them and for Ferguson. Mr. Warmack said the discussion, which he attended, was “extremely, extremely fruitful.”
After the officer, Darren Wilson, was not indicted, Ferguson once more dissolved into protests. But Harris-Stowe students took a different approach, holding hands in a massive prayer circle around their campus. “That was what they decided. They could have been typical 18-year-olds and went out and decided to loot,” he said.
But the campus was touched by the protests that broke out across the area. At a campus event celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day last January, a group of protesters interrupted the proceedings, leading to a face-off with the police. In an attempt to keep unrest off their campus, a group of Harris-State students formed a “human line” to try to thwart the protesters, Mr. Warmack said.
“That was not proactively planned,” he said, “just our students’ being active and engaged because this is their community.”
Bring community members in to talk.
Last weekend Harris-Stowe held four panel discussions, inviting students, politicians, and activists to talk about the impact of the incident on their community and to ensure everyone “had a chance to be at the table,” Mr. Warmack said. “We wanted to be all-inclusive when we think about this underserved, marginalized, sometimes voiceless community.”
A similar panel, “A Community in Turmoil: Where Do We Go From Here?,” was held four days after Mr. Brown’s death last year. About 1,000 people attended, including the police chiefs of St. Louis and St. Louis County, Mr. Warmack said. It was “a very heated discussion.”
“My intent as a president has always remained not creating a space, ‘Who is right or wrong?’” he said. “We wanted to be able to create a safe community where we can have conversations about ‘How do we heal this city during this tragic time?’”
