Chris Caplinger left his phone outside the bedroom that night in October, so it was only when he awoke early the next morning that he saw the text. It came in just before midnight, and it carried alarming news: Students are burning a book.
Caplinger knew immediately what book. Whose book. The night before, an author named Jennine Capó Crucet had given a talk at Georgia Southern University, addressing white privilege and sparking an outburst from students. Freshmen read her book as part of the university’s first-year experience program, and Caplinger, who had long directed the program until August, had been heartened afterward when he saw some students approach Crucet with questions and requests for autographs.
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Chris Caplinger left his phone outside the bedroom that night in October, so it was only when he awoke early the next morning that he saw the text. It came in just before midnight, and it carried alarming news: Students are burning a book.
Caplinger knew immediately what book. Whose book. The night before, an author named Jennine Capó Crucet had given a talk at Georgia Southern University, addressing white privilege and sparking an outburst from students. Freshmen read her book as part of the university’s first-year experience program, and Caplinger, who had long directed the program until August, had been heartened afterward when he saw some students approach Crucet with questions and requests for autographs.
But the tension hadn’t eased, Caplinger saw that morning. It had spiraled out of control.
On a campus grill, students had set Crucet’s book on fire, clutching clusters of pages as the flames spread. A woman wearing Georgia Southern apparel looked giddy nearby, and soon enough, users on Twitter sent images of the book-burning to Crucet herself.It was a chilling display: A terror often associated with Nazi Germany, unfolding on an American college campus.
so after our FYE book’s author came to my school to talk about it... these people decide to burn her book because “it’s bad and that race is bad to talk about”. white people need to realize that they are the problem and that their privilege is toxic. author is a woman of color. pic.twitter.com/HiX4lGT7Ci
Photos and video of the students’ actions were shared across the university, then across the country, and then the world. The actions, at least to the public, made Georgia Southern synonymous with intolerance. Even in a year saturated with explosive political division, these images were a horrifying low point.
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The narrative that circulated was painful, an indictment of campus culture at a predominantly — and historically exclusively — white campus. But in the incident’s aftermath, outside of the public eye, faculty members have put much of the blame elsewhere. A lack of preparation, budget cuts, and insufficient foresight unwittingly spread the kindling for the spark that would come.
This is a complicated era for colleges, which increasingly recognize the importance of diversity programming. But they are also charged with balancing tight budgets and face scrutiny of their political atmospheres. The run-up to the Georgia Southern book-burning is a cautionary tale, at least the way some on campus tell it: Fail to put your money where your mouth is, and the consequences can be stark — even with the best of intentions.
Before the fire, before the talk, before the new students even arrived on campus at the beginning of 2019’s fall semester, Caplinger knew Georgia Southern couldn’t possibly include everything about diversity in its first-year experience course.
But his instinct was to try anyway — at least to start a conversation on campus. He didn’t, couldn’t have, anticipated where it would go.
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‘Stamped From Existence’
KeyShawn Housey, a student-government association officer, speaks at a solidarity walk at Georgia Southern University in October 2018.Dylan Chapman
In the fall of 2018, student and campus leaders at Georgia Southern agreed on one thing: The university needed to do something about campus displays of racism.
Over the summer a student had used the N-word as she described photos on her black future roommate’s Instagram. A screenshot of her text message went viral. The student-government association advocated for more curricula about diversity and inclusion in response to the events. Days later, the student newspaper reported that a professor used the N-word in the classroom, making the problem more urgent.
The university commissioned a report that semester on diversity, and it brought more than 200 angry comments from students. “Comments included calling for ‘the building of walls,’ comparing ‘diversity and inclusion to a mental disorder’ and calling for a stop to any conversations — for ‘racial and gender equality to be stamped from existence,’” the report’s writers described.
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The consultant behind that report came to campus that fall semester, and Caplinger left one of his presentations thinking that the first-year experience could be a forum for these discussions. Most students are required to take the two-credit class, which Caplinger had directed since the mid-2000s, in their first semester on campus. The program’s curriculum had been revised many times over the years, and requiring diversity- and inclusion-learning outcomes, he thought, could be a part of the next iteration.
Georgia Southern isn’t alone in integrating these issues into a program for new students. About 74 percent of institutions have a first-year seminar, according to a 2017 survey from the University of South Carolina, and about half of campuses included objectives connected to intercultural competence, diversity, and engaging with difference.
By the end of the fall semester, the university decided the first-year experience would include new requirements on diversity. Georgia Southern assembled a committee to draft learning outcomes for the class, a group that decided students would examine identities, consider the different experiences of “privileged and minoritized” identities, and discuss common ground between the groups. One outcome, the group decided, was to articulate “the challenges and rewards of interacting with others who differ from themselves.” They also added a new outcome on free expression.
There were limitations from the outset — with a packed course, instructors may only have time for a few sessions on diversity and inclusion.
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Several professors wrote in a feedback form obtained by The Chronicle under state open-records law that they thought the program, though well intentioned, was overextended. One wrote: “I am seriously concerned that this is an unreasonable number of specific outcomes to expect for a two-hour course … it is more effective to target fewer outcomes, reiterated multiple times and via multiple teaching and assessment strategies.”
The content, too, raised concerns. On the form, one faculty member wondered how to measure diversity as a learning outcome, and another thought colleagues would “balk” at training required to teach it. “The wording of the outcomes seems fine,” another person said. “The challenge will be in delivering. These are some of the most complex issues we face, and few of us on the faculty are prepared to fully engage them.”
One professor, who responded anonymously to a survey after piloting the course in the spring, said their students recoiled from the activities set out in the curriculum. A “Who Am I” classroom activity required students to talk about their identity categories in race, sexuality, and religion. Their students found it awkward, almost dehumanizing, the professor reported.
That professor agreed that incorporating diversity efforts into instruction was important. But they worried that, delivered inadequately, the teaching could build “resentment” around these subject areas.
“Requiring all FYE instructors, regardless of education or training, to attempt to implement these outcomes in a class of students who are often resistant to and disengaged from the course to begin with is more likely to result in students walking away with a more negative view of the ideas in the outcomes than they started with,” that person wrote.
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Caplinger saw the range of feedback, and he acknowledged the issues. The program couldn’t devote 30 class hours to diversity issues, and there was always potential that something could go off the rails.
But that was not a strong enough rationale to simply back away. This wouldn’t be the last piece of diversity and inclusion curriculum that students would encounter, Caplinger later said, so it didn’t need to be exhaustive. And the task force had discussed possible ways instructors could be prepared to lead these conversations.
Instructors ‘Freaking Out’
Diversity education takes money. But Georgia Southern was trying to find places to save. The university’s state system, the University System of Georgia, had been reviewing administrative activities across its colleges, trying to find areas to cut costs. Caplinger heard around March 2019 that money for the first-year experience would likely be on the chopping block.
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These cuts were major, more than halving the budget for the program.
In the 2018-19 academic year, Georgia Southern spent about $1 million on a category that primarily funded course-instructor pay, according to a budget obtained by The Chronicle. That line item fell to about $33,000 the next year. The budget for the program over all fell from $1.9 million to about $860,000 in the same time period. Christine Ludowise, an associate provost for student success, said that money was funneled to help mitigate salary disparities between faculty and staff at Georgia Southern and those at other universities.
Much of the reductions came because instructors would no longer be paid to teach these courses. The change seemed to trigger a faculty exodus from the program. Just 24 percent of first-year experience instructors in the fall semester were faculty, including department chairs, a huge drop from 80 percent the prior year. About 44 percent were academic advisers, support personnel who generally work individually with students to keep them on a path toward graduation. A quarter were other staff, and graduate students made up 7 percent. The total number of instructors fell from 131 to 105.
That would mean bigger classes across the board. So Georgia Southern added three lecture-sized classes — clocking in at up to 200 students — with undergraduates facilitating 25-person recitation sections for those courses. That kept the other sections down to around 40 students, still an increase from the prior year, but not as high as they would have been. Caplinger knew larger classes would be a harder environment than a small seminar to discuss sensitive issues.
The university provided data that showed that the ratio of faculty to staff in instruction has varied over the years, skewing more toward faculty following a university interpretation of a federal overtime rule. Still, the percentage of faculty instructors this fall was at its lowest point since at least 2013.
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The university told faculty about the elimination of compensation between spring and summer semesters, Ludowise said, and that may have created some distrust. Faculty, she said, may have decided not to teach the course because they did not feel certain that volunteering to do so would be counted by their department or college for future promotions.
The first-year experience office offered trainings for these instructors. A four-hour general course in pedagogy training was required for staff who had never taught at Georgia Southern before, and all instructors were required to take a two-hour curriculum overview.
Two instructors told The Chronicle that one of the trainings was a detailed overview of the learning-management system. Neither said they recalled required programming on how to teach diversity and other sensitive issues in these trainings. Ludowise said instructors could have asked questions during the curriculum overview and said a teaching center offered optional trainings on topics including diversity.
One instructor, who requested that The Chronicle not publish their name or position for fear of professional repercussions, said colleagues without a background in teaching felt unprepared. The instructor said the university distributed the resources on the content uncomfortably close to the beginning of the semester, reducing time to prepare.
The main reason people were “freaking out” was the diversity content, that person said: “Everybody had the feeling that this is something serious, this is something we don’t need to botch … If we are addressing this issue, we need to do it in the right way.”
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Another instructor interviewed by The Chronicle, Jolyon T. Hughes, said he felt the preparation offered by the university was sufficient. An expert on hate speech offered to pitch in on some of the teaching in Hughes’s first-year seminar, taking pressure off. “That can be a weighty, tricky subject,” said Hughes, an assistant dean in the College of Arts and Humanities and its communications officer. “I was able to find someone I was extremely confident in.”
Ludowise said that after the book burning, she heard from colleagues that the incident was the result of having staff teach. She disagrees, and said that all staff member instructors had a master’s degree and some had a doctoral degree. “I’m not going to blame anything else besides the fact that we just need to learn, all learn, how to have these kinds of conversations with each other and come at a point of mutual respect.”
Even the common syllabus distributed to instructors raised questions. The university had picked Make Your Home Among Strangers by Crucet as a common read — it tackled issues that Ludowise thought all college students could connect with, no matter their race. Though students were required to read Crucet’s book before her talk, a session on “identity and worldviews” and two sessions on privilege were scheduled for after she came to campus, according to the master syllabus. That meant some students wouldn’t hash out ideas in advance of the talk.
“If you knew that there was a chance that there was going to be something explosive, then we would have made a different decision, clearly,” Caplinger said in a recent interview, though he added that it would have been hard to have conversations about diversity too early in the semester, before students knew one another well.
Before the fall semester began, as the budget cut was enacted, the university removed Caplinger from the first-year experience directorship. The program was left without a leader. It remains so to this day.
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‘Set This Up To Fail’
At Crucet’s lecture, a tense exchange turned up the heat. In one exchange, a woman asked the author why she “came here to tell all of these people that white people are privileged,” according to footage reviewed by The Chronicle. Others in the crowd jeered.
Shortly after, a group gathered to burn her book outside. The book’s spine wasn’t catching, and a student shouted, “That’s a hardcover,” as a classmate crumpled up a page nearby. (Crucet did not respond to requests for comment through her publicist.)
As word spread of what happened, faculty members traded emails, obtained by The Chronicle under state open-records law. Even professors who were not connected to the first-year experience program expressed sadness and hurt. They said some kind of student outburst could have been anticipated because of the lack of investment in programming.
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“You don’t make big words about diversity and inclusion and then throw a book at students, call a speaker, and hope it will all go down well,” wrote Laura Valeri, an associate professor, in an email to her colleagues. “I say this with respect for our students. It’s just that you cannot expect 18-year-olds who have not been exposed to these kinds of concepts to read a book and suddenly be enlightened.” (Valeri later told The Chronicle that she was feeling strong emotion after the book-burning when she sent that message, and that she had no involvement with the first-year experience program. She also stressed that she was speaking for herself, not the university.)
Implicit in several professors’ argument is a belief that good teaching, backed by sufficient resources, has the power to teach these nuanced themes effectively. “I don’t think this is on the advisers or even the FYE staff that was left in the wake of the defunding,” wrote Jared Yates Sexton, another associate professor, in an email to colleagues. He declined to comment further. “Administration set this up to fail.”
Ludowise, the associate provost, disagreed, saying she believes “this could have happened whether or not we changed the class.”
“You have to start the process somewhere,” she said. “As we challenge students, there will be disruptions, there will be people who react inappropriately, there will be people who exercise their rights in a way we don’t condone and find personally offensive.”
KeyShawn Housey, a student-government association officer who had served on the first-year experience diversity outcomes committee, remembers how painful it felt to see an image of the book-burning on his phone. He saw it the next morning as he sat in the back seat of a friend’s car, driving to class.
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It was a slap in the face, seeing all the work he had done — from pushing legislation on diversity and inclusion to serving on the committee — violently disparaged.
“What is this Nazi Germany,” he tweeted. “I don’t even have the words right now.”
So we burning books now... what is this Nazi Germany. I don’t even have the words right now. https://t.co/u5XYlEhgR4
With the budget cuts and instructional changes, he said recently, “it is easy to say that in hindsight, it was going to fail.”
But he does not believe that administrators could have foreseen what happened and the pain it caused. “Nobody could have thought,” he said, “we were going all the way back to the 1930s.”