One University’s Response to Students’ Demands on Race: Radical Transparency

When student protesters first issued a list of demands they said were needed to improve the racial climate at Emory University, Ajay Nair didn’t want to think his campus had a problem. But Mr. Nair, Emory’s senior vice president and dean of campus life, recalled what it was like to be a student of color at a predominantly white institution. It wasn’t easy.

As he spoke with the young activists, “I felt like I had failed,” Mr. Nair says. Without systemic change, he imagined, a very similar set of demands would hit his desk in a few years, followed by another variation on the same frustrations a few years after that.

So simply dedicating more money to the diversity programs Emory had in place wouldn’t be enough, he decided. The university needed to make every one of its students’ 13 demands a priority.

Following several months of similar student activism, colleges and universities have taken a range of approaches to dealing with demands like those at Emory. Some institutions, like Oberlin College, have simply refused to negotiate. Others, like Yale and Princeton Universities, have hired diversity deans. But most colleges have done little to lay out how they will address students’ specific concerns. What does it look like when a university painstakingly goes through the students’ list, demand by demand?

It looks like Emory’s Racial Diversity Initiative.

Last fall, after the Black Students of Emory issued their demands, Mr. Nair’s office created working groups to pick apart each one. Each group is made up of about a dozen people, including students, faculty members, and administrators — many of whom were selected by the provost, Claire E. Sterk, because their work pertains to specific demands. Members of the student government were also asked to participate, and many activists and other students volunteered to join the groups.

The groups met several times, starting in January, before more than 100 members convened the following month at a “racial-justice retreat.” Their task: to come up with a set of recommendations for how to address each concern.

‘Finally, Someone Is Listening’

P. Faith Singleton, a sophomore at Emory, was a member of the protest group that drafted the original demands. Now she serves on one of the working groups. The climate on the campus has improved since the process began, she says. “We were like, Finally, someone is listening.”

The university has been very public as it digs into the demands. A website created by administrators shows the demands, the response given by the university in a campuswide email in December, and preliminary recommendations from each working group. Members of the Emory community, including alumni and parents, can also give feedback.

As conversations have unfolded in the working groups, some demands are already being answered. One called for the university to replace a mentorship program to support first-year students in the sciences that had ended in December. That program had closed when a grant had expired, and university officials simply spread the news that a new program, set to start this summer, was already in the works to take its place.

But the steps that can be taken to address other demands haven’t been so clear-cut. In some cases, working groups have pivoted completely away from the students’ original requests. Take the demand to ban Yik Yak, for example.

Is Yik Yak the Problem?

The call to create a “geofence” to keep students on the campus from using Yik Yak, the anonymity-granting social-media platform, was one of the more unusual demands at Emory.

For Maxwell L. Zoberman, who is president of the Student Government Association and a member of the working group, the app had quickly turned from “silly gossip and jokes” to a platform on which students of certain gender and racial identities were targeted. He believes it’s the university’s responsibility to fence out the yaks. But doing so poses challenges.

In March, when students at Illinois College demanded that the app be blocked on the campus wireless network, the president, Barbara Farley, did so. But it didn’t quite work as she — or the protesters — had intended. The block didn’t keep students off the app; it just forced them to use it through their own network data plans.

So when the Emory working group got together, its facilitator, Edward W. Lee, executive director of the Barkley Forum Center for Debate Education, asked two questions: Why is a geofence on the table? And what is the primary issue we are trying to resolve?

Mr. Lee says he structured the conversation without a predetermined outcome, allowing everyone a chance to say what they felt about the app before any rebuttals could be made. Group members, including students in the Black Student Alliance, administrators in the communications department, and information-technology officials, raised doubts about whether banning the app would work. The group ultimately concluded that a ban would be more symbolic than useful.

Its members settled on a recommendation that had nothing to do with Yik Yak: to establish a student-led hate-speech rapid-response team.

Tightening Loopholes

On some other demands, identifying an action item was more puzzling.

Suzanne R. Onorato, assistant vice president for community, led a working group that considered a demand to improve Emory’s system for reporting incidents of bias.

“We laughed, we cried, we yelled,” she says. “This is not the easy way to do this. But I think the best way to do this is to engage in those tough dialogues where people have personal feelings, and values are challenged and expressed.”

Ms. Singleton, the student activist, was also a member of the working group on reporting incidents of bias. She explained to the group why she feels the current system does not support women of color. One morning she woke up to find an antiblack slur painted on the tennis courts, but it was washed off before many people saw it.

She didn’t think the incident was taken as seriously as others on the campus, including a case that gained national media attention, in which a swastika was painted on a Jewish fraternity house. “Bias wasn’t treated the same in the black community as in others,” she says.

Over the course of five meetings, Ms. Onorato learned a lot. She realized her office needed to pay attention to three things: remaining transparent, supporting students, and educating the community on the office’s limitations.

Ms. Singleton learned something, too: that not every demand would lead to a change in policy. “We got to tighten loopholes, and we expected to close them,” she says.

The system for bias-incident reporting could only expand so much before Emory would need to hire another person, and Ms. Onorato said that wasn’t possible. The group eventually recommended reconfiguring the reporting system into a leadership-and-support team that has quicker, more regular communications with people who report bias.

For the most part, Ms. Singleton says, the process has been a success for the protesters. Even many seemingly small changes felt substantial to activists.

But it hasn’t been perfect. “We would say we failed a little bit in what we actually got to take out of the many demands that we had,” she says.

That’s clear when it comes to some of the demands that are harder for the university to tackle — hiring more faculty members of color, ensuring job security for black faculty members, and creating a general-education program for workers who want to study for a high-school-equivalency diploma.

Michael J. Gadsden, a junior at Emory, explored all of those issues in one working group. But Mr. Gadsden was “dissatisfied” that some of the demands didn’t result in direct recommendations. A GED program already exists at a local community college, he was told, and the university already has a series of town-hall meetings that allow faculty members and workers to raise concerns over their working conditions. (Mr. Gadsden argues that many people don’t speak up in those meetings because they fear they risk losing their jobs.)

Instead, the group ended up proposing ways that Emory could celebrate underrepresented faculty members. The recommendations include a weekly column in the student newspaper to spotlight underrepresented professors, and more professional-development opportunities for minority faculty members.

“Because we have three demands,” Mr. Gadsden says of his group, “some took more precedence than others.”

Next Steps

By the end of the month, working groups will submit their final suggestions to a new committee, called the Next Steps Group. Its structure hasn’t been finalized, but as the community brings forth new concerns, Mr. Nair says the group will continue to discuss new ways of bettering the campus climate.

Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, says Emory is leading the way in its response to student demands. “Many institutions don’t deal out loud with issues because they are afraid of the reputational risks,” he says. “The last thing a predominantly white institution wants to be thought of is racist.”

Mr. Harper says an overwhelming majority of universities and colleges are not reviewing students’ demands with any strategy or seriousness. What’s more, he says, students are almost never included in conversations about fixing the problems they’ve identified. But if colleges truly want to alleviate racial tension on their campuses, he says, they need to pull together students, faculty members in a variety of departments, and administrators, as Emory has done.

Mr. Lee is optimistic that Emory is headed in the right direction, but he worries about whether the university will support the initiative with the same force in the coming months. Even after the university confronts the first wave of demands, he says, a sense of urgency must remain.

“If we are not furious about continuing to do this in the fall and spring of next year,” he warns, “I fear these will be the list of demands 10 years — 30 years — from now.”

Correction (4/21/2016, 12:39 p.m.): Because of an editing error, this article originally stated incorrectly that Princeton and Yale had done little to describe how they would respond to protesters’ specific demands. The article should not have singled out those universities. Rather, it should have observed that most colleges have not laid out such specific responses. The article has been revised to reflect this correction.