Ronald Crutcher’s Racial Reckoning

Ronald A. Crutcher is acutely aware that his presence as the first Black president of the University of Richmond is a sign of progress. When he graduated from high school in 1965, his race barred him from even enrolling at the campus he now leads, an institution sprawled across 350 acres of a former plantation in what was once the capital of the Confederacy.

Crutcher, 74, will step down this summer as president of the private liberal-arts institution of 4,000 students but will remain on the faculty. A classical cellist and professor of music, he has listened to the crescendo of discordant voices on his campus as battles have raged over building names tied to slavery and segregation.

His own voice is soft and conciliatory. But he is less inclined than many of his white counterparts at other colleges to agree to the demands of student activists: He decries “cancel culture,” dislikes the term “marginalized,” which to him implies powerless, and thinks many people are too quick to take offense at perceived slights or “so-called microaggressions.” His position on the building names left many in the campus community dissatisfied.

Crutcher says he’s more convinced than ever of the importance of bringing people together across ideological divides to discuss some of the most deeply polarizing issues of the day. But events have repeatedly tested his optimism that the result will be mutual understanding.

Early last year, as he addressed a crowd of national higher-education leaders in Washington, D.C., he said that the student body was continuing to rapidly diversify. Richmond was on its way, he felt, to being a model of true inclusivity where conversations across race and class would be welcomed.

The next day, a Black student found the N-word scrawled on her name tag outside her dorm-room door. A student from Pakistan discovered “PAKI” written on hers, and another from Afghanistan had a reference to terrorism scrawled on his.

It was, the president writes in a memoir published in February, “the bitterest evidence of how far we had yet to go.”

This spring, while colleges around the country were expunging the names of slaveholders and segregationists from buildings and monuments, the University of Richmond planned a different approach.

Crutcher supported the Board of Trustees’ decision in February to retain the last names of the Rev. Robert Ryland and Douglas Southall Freeman on an academic hall and dorm, “braiding” them with the additional names of former slaves as a way to educate students about the institution’s complex racial history. Ryland, the university’s first president, was the pastor of a church that included slaves, but he also enslaved people. Freeman, a prominent trustee, supported racial segregation and eugenics.

The backlash, from students, faculty, staff, and alumni, was swift. The administration ultimately declared a moratorium on any changes to the names while a commission was set up that would include broad cross-campus input.

In a video message in mid-April, Crutcher conceded that he hadn’t fully understood concerns about retaining the names. “It is clear that the Board of Trustees and I did not handle the process or decision as well as we should have,” he said. “For that, I am sorry.”

The concession didn’t satisfy everyone, but it temporarily quieted the protests. Activists who fiercely opposed the president’s position said they respected how he had commissioned research into the backgrounds of the two men and ultimately called for more community input.

Crutcher is accustomed to ruffling feathers in his efforts to get students to openly confront, rather than, as he sees it, hide from viewpoints and historical events that trigger strong feelings. He understands that, as someone who lived through the civil-rights movement, he’s speaking across a generational divide.

“Nonetheless, we are an educational institution, and I am an educator,” he says. “We have to recognize that for some students, it is very painful — perhaps even ‘traumatic’” — he signals with air quotes — “but I think we will have failed our students if we allow them to remain there. We need to help them get beyond the pain, the trauma, whatever it is. Otherwise, we will not have served them well when they go out.”

When the stresses of his job mount, Crutcher turns to music. After the pandemic took hold last spring, he played two of his favorite pieces in a musical interlude on YouTube. He acknowledged how isolating, frustrating, and at times frightening the moment was. Music, he said, was his “salve.”

Music also introduced him to the world of higher education that his devoutly religious parents, neither of whom had graduated from high school, knew little about. His father was a stern disciplinarian prone to angry outbursts, his mother a stickler for proper English and impeccable manners. Crutcher felt stifled by their strict rules and ashamed of his father’s crass way of speaking.

Singing in the school choir at age 14, Crutcher was offered the opportunity to play a musical instrument, and he chose the cello. He was an overweight, introverted teen, and the instrument was one he figured he could hide behind on stage.

He fell in love with the cello, ignoring the laughter of other kids as he carted it back and forth over the hills of Cincinnati between home and school. Eight months after starting the instrument, he performed in a state music competition at Miami University, in Ohio, where a white college professor in the audience was impressed with his talent. The professor, Elizabeth Potteiger, took Crutcher under her wing, gave him three years of free cello lessons, and remained a mentor and friend until her death in 1998.

Crutcher went on to double major in music and German at Miami University, where he was one of about 80 Black students in a student body of 10,000. The experience, he says, was alienating, but he never spoke about it with his family, his mentor, or other Black students. His father had urged him to avoid spending time only with Black people because he said Ronald deserved to be in the same circles and have the same opportunities as white people. In retrospect, he writes in his memoir, he spent little time getting to know his Black peers, some of whom probably considered him arrogant. “I am certain that some called me ‘Oreo,’” he writes in his memoir. He was a bit of a loner, he says, and didn’t let it bother him.

After reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X during his junior year in college, he began to realize that not talking about race had prevented him from asking crucial questions. Was his father right when he angrily confronted a bus driver for not picking his family up? Or was his mother’s more restrained approach — dressing her young sons in suits and bow ties so no one would have a reason to demean them — more appropriate?

Why, he demanded in a letter he wrote to his mentor after his college graduation, hadn’t she talked to him about race? As he began to think more about becoming a college professor, as well as a professional musician, he vowed that he’d be a mentor who didn’t shy away from tough topics. He has kept that promise; he and his wife, Betty Neal Crutcher, mentor groups of first-year students at Richmond, meeting monthly to talk about current events and other topics, including race.

After earning a doctorate in music at Yale University and a Fulbright to study cello in Germany, Crutcher returned to the U.S. and began his climb up the academic ranks. He served as provost at Miami University and as president for 10 years at Wheaton College.

As a Black leader at overwhelmingly white institutions, he found that race was never far from the surface. In the mid-90s, as director of the School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, he met with the CEO of an oil company to ask him to support a scholarship for violin students. The first words out of the executive’s mouth when he saw Crutcher? “I had no idea you were Black.” The professor was shocked and angry. He thought about walking away, and when he tells the story to students now, some say he should have, that the words were unforgivable.

Instead, he decided to listen. The man talked about how he and his wife had attended the Aspen Music Festival for several years and had rarely seen string players of color. He wondered if the classical-music community could do more to nurture that talent. By the end of the conversation, which touched on their shared love of classical music, the scholarship was in the works.

Crutcher tells the story to illustrate the benefits of withholding judgment and hearing someone out when they say something that, on its face, sounds offensive. He ended up using the executive’s comment as the title of his memoir.

Crutcher was attracted to the job at Richmond because of its growing diversity and commitment to a need-blind admissions policy. Students of color had nearly tripled as a percentage of the population under his predecessor, Edward L. Ayers, while the number of low-income students had nearly doubled.

But while their numbers had increased to 26 percent of the undergraduate population by 2015, students of color didn’t always feel welcome. Black students talked about feeling they were being asked to represent their race in class discussions. It brought painful memories to Crutcher of his own college experience.

Still, he finds it frustrating that debates about racial justice are often framed as binary. “Either you support the Black students or you support white supremacy,” he says. “Of course, it’s more complex than that.” This binary thinking shows “the real need for dialogue and the realization that we are in an incredibly polarized country now.” Not only are people living in bubbles, he says, but they tend to vilify anyone outside that bubble.

Crutcher has suggested that students are too quick to retreat into safe spaces where they’re sheltered from views that offend them. He’d rather see them take advantage of being in the most diverse place many of them have lived in to hone the tools to respond, whether it’s through counterarguments or just honest conversations with people who don’t share their ideologies. Colleges can encourage that, he says, by welcoming speakers with diverse, even controversial views and facilitating ways for students to interact with classmates from different races, economic backgrounds, and sexual orientations.

“The world our students will enter after graduation is riven with difficult discussions and peopled by those with whom they will disagree,” he writes. “As campus leaders, we have a duty to lead by example and prepare our students, not isolate them like hothouse flowers.”

He can sound like conservative critics of higher education. But even people on campus fighting to change the building names say that Crutcher has a clear commitment to racial justice and an appreciation of how much work lies ahead.

Thad Williamson, an associate professor of leadership studies and head of the Faculty Senate, says the president may not have fully understood “the sense of existential threat” many students of color feel “in an era of Trump.” When Crutcher says that students are being oversensitive, “I sometimes disagree, but I’m rarely offended,” Williamson says. “People know him to be a kind and caring person.”

Mary Kelly Tate, a professor of law who works to identify and exonerate wrongfully convicted people, and who, like Williamson, is white, calls Crutcher “a man with great gravitas who I frequently disagree with on these very important issues.”

The president’s call for viewpoint diversity “is a virtuous aim,” she says, “but not at the expense of making students of color feel alienated” by continuing to honor historical figures tied to slavery and eugenics. “To point out structural racist realities is not evidence of being fragile,” she adds. “It’s quite the reverse.”

Shira Greer, a junior, was an author of a statement from the Black Student Coalition decrying the refusal to rename the buildings. The commission, she says, is probably a stalling tactic and a way to dodge the issue for now. Still, she says, “I think there has been progress made under his tenure, taking a school that has always been backward and catching up. He’s been respectful of students.”

Crutcher concedes that it hasn’t always been easy taking a position that puts him at odds with many faculty and students of color. Shortly after a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned deadly, he was moderating a panel discussion in which a Black sociologist, Bedelia N. Richards, described students being terrorized by a noose found hanging in the theater department the previous year. Crutcher responded that it was unfortunate an inanimate object had sparked such fear. He had always been taught, he said, “that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” When he saw the aghast expressions in the audience, “I realized I’d really stepped in it.” After the session, he said he apologized to Richards.

Interviewed this week, Richards, a race and ethnicities scholar who has a consulting group that helps people talk about race, said Crutcher spoke to her briefly after the panel, but she doesn’t remember an apology. She said that while she thinks he is more careful about what he says now, she’s not convinced he’s any more sensitive to the realities of racism on his campus.

“The way he frames freedom of speech, it’s almost like he sees two kids on a playground throwing insults at each other and they’re on equal footing,” she said. “What I was arguing is that there’s nothing equivalent to a noose that you can throw back at a white person that has the same impact.” The president’s “sticks and stones” comment, she said, “communicated to white people that you can say what you want. Black students just have to toughen up and take it.”

Richards said she feels “a sense of betrayal” when a Black president questions whether microaggressions are real and whether safe spaces are needed. As a Black man, “he can say things and it’s harder to criticize him for it.”

One thing they agree on is that talking across difference is important. They just disagree on how to go about it.

Crutcher is a proponent of the university’s “Sharp Viewpoints” series that pairs speakers from opposite sides of the aisle tackling hot-button issues. One of his favorite pairings was Cornel West, a left-leaning activist and former Harvard professor, and Robert P. George, a conservative professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, talking about how they remained close friends despite their sharply opposing political views.

He’s also encouraged employees to participate in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Program on Intergroup Relations, which describes itself as a social-justice education initiative. He takes those lessons to heart in his own interactions on campus.

“Leaders need to be patient,” he says. “If you’re in a conversation and students say, ‘I’m not happy with what I’m hearing from you. If you’re not going to do XYZ, there’s no point in going forward,’” take a deep breath, and say, ‘Maybe we can return to it later,’ because it doesn’t do any better to push it. That’s just going to exacerbate the situation.”

A lot has changed during his lifetime, Crutcher says, and the pace of change seems to be accelerating. Still, he finds it disheartening that some students today are experiencing the same racism he faced in the 1960s. But in his day, conversations about divisive issues were loud and welcomed, he says. Today, controversial speakers are disinvited, potentially painful debates avoided.

“What I find most hopeful is that students of color and their allies are saying, ‘We no longer want to be educated in a culture where we feel like a guest in someone else’s home,’” he says. “Some people would say, ‘If you’re not happy, just leave.’ No. We’re here. We’re going to challenge you to change the culture.” But to do that, he believes, everyone needs to listen.