Sustaining a Fight Against Racism

Two decades ago, Jabar Shumate confronted racism as he ran for student-body vice president here at the University of Oklahoma. When he went to campaign at a predominantly white fraternity, Mr. Shumate found fliers posted with his photograph. “Do you want this person living in your Greek house?” they read. “Vote the other ticket.”

The scare tactic didn’t work; he was elected vice president and later president of the student body.

Now he oversees efforts to make his alma mater a more diverse and welcoming place in the wake of a racist video that ignited the community a year ago and brought the conversation about race to campuses across the nation.

The former state lawmaker says he welcomes the chance to help heal the hurt caused by the video and to build on efforts to make the campus, where 5 percent of the student body and 2 percent of the faculty are black, more inclusive.

The video showed members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon belting out a chant about how they’d rather see a black person “hang from a tree” than joining SAE. It galvanized protests here. Student leaders, who had been working for months to improve the racial climate before the video surfaced, were seen as drafters of a blueprint for political activism on campus. The calls for change made national headlines before protesters on dozens of other campuses began issuing their own demands to administrators, and before a groundswell at the University of Missouri at Columbia helped topple two administrators.

Now, a year later, conversations about race take place more frequently here, students and administrators say. Since last March, the university has expanded diversity training and appointed administrators to oversee efforts to recruit and retain a more diverse population of students and employees.

But challenges remain. The number of black faculty members is stubbornly low. Some students question why people are still talking about race. And activists worry about “diversity fatigue” — that the focus and the will required to make lasting change might start to fade.

Even before the video went viral, David L. Boren, the university’s president, had been trying to persuade Mr. Shumate to take a job that both the president and the student activists agreed was sorely needed: as a full-time director focused on making the campus more inclusive.

More than 200 colleges have, or are creating, positions for chief diversity officers, but the title Mr. Boren selected for Mr. Shumate was “vice president for the university community.” It’s a signal that overcoming bigotry and racism is a job for everyone.

“I’ve known Jabar since he was a student leader here,” Mr. Boren says during an interview, “and I have tremendous confidence in his judgment and insights.”

The first time the president offered him the position, in January 2015, Mr. Shumate declined. He and his wife had just built a house outside Tulsa to be closer to her work, and he had just started a job as an education lobbyist.

“When the SAE incident happened, the president convinced both my wife and me that we could make a real difference,” says Mr. Shumate, who was appointed in March and started on June 1. He sees his role as providing a megaphone for the groups working with the diversity puzzle that don’t have a direct conduit to the administration. At the same time, he’s prodding everyone to do more.

Mr. Shumate reports directly to the president, and that, says Mr. Boren, “sends a message to our diverse community that there’s someone who has the president’s ear whenever he wants it.

“He’s speaking with my authority,” the president says. “If they don’t do what he says, the next voice they hear on the phone will be mine.”

Mr. Shumate, who smiles easily, spends more time listening than talking in his meetings with students representing racial groups, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and others. He has long histories with several administrators from when he was a student here, and from his decade as a lawmaker in the Oklahoma House and the Senate.

He and the president met when they were both freshmen — Mr. Shumate as an 18-year-old college student and Mr. Boren in his first year as Oklahoma’s president.

Mr. Boren admired the way Mr. Shumate, who was student chair of an underoccupied and unattractive residence hall, persuaded the university to keep it open because of a strong sense of community that students had built there.

Mr. Boren, a former Democratic governor of Oklahoma and a former U.S. senator, encouraged Mr. Shumate’s run for student-body president in 1997. Then, as university president, Mr. Boren hired him as his press secretary after he graduated, with a bachelor’s degree in public affairs and administration.

When Mr. Shumate was 28, before he’d earned a master’s degree in human relations from the university, Mr. Boren also encouraged the two successful runs for the Oklahoma Legislature.

What persuaded Mr. Shumate to return to the university, he says, was the campus’s quick, decisive reaction to the viral video.

After OU Unheard, an activist alliance of black students, posted the video on Twitter and Facebook, the backlash from students and administrators was swift. Within days, Mr. Boren had expelled the two students who led the chant, called those who participated “disgraceful,” and severed the university’s ties with the local Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter.

While some legal experts questioned whether he might be violating the students’ First Amendment rights with his quick reaction, the president knew what he had to do within 15 minutes of learning of the incident.

“This was plain, old, in-your-face racism,” Mr. Boren says. “There was only one moral choice, and that was to put it down and stop it.”

Students from all backgrounds quickly rallied to denounce the incident and declare their commitments to diversity and tolerance.

As OU Unheard continued to press the university to respond to its grievances, including the shortage of black professors, low retention rates for black students, and the lack of programs to support them, the administration responded. Activists on other campuses turned to Oklahoma students for guidance as protests erupted elsewhere, says Jordan Bell, a black senior who was a member of OU Unheard. “We set the blueprint for what political activism can look like.”

That’s not to say that everyone is happy with the progress the university has made.

Chelsea A. Davis, a senior who helped found OU Unheard, says the university has made a number of “surface changes,” like requiring diversity training for some, but not all, employees.

The university now requires five hours of diversity training for all freshmen and transfer students. Diversity training is required for new faculty and staff members, and encouraged, but not required, for those who are already employed.

Ms. Davis welcomes the 66 new scholarships the university awarded last year to incoming freshmen with strong records of community service. But more students need more help, she says, particularly those working two or more jobs, falling behind in their studies, and struggling to stay enrolled.

The changes that have taken place in Norman in a year’s time, Mr. Shumate says, are significant.

“While I know that the evidence of our work will take time, I think the university is on the right track in making diversity and inclusion the core of what we do,” he says.

The university is building what he calls an “infrastructure for change.” In addition to his office, it had each college establish a diversity-and-inclusion officer.

One of the biggest challenges for Mr. Shumate is maintaining the momentum for change. He hears that when he meets with students and faculty members.

“You keep hearing, ‘We’re in a postracial society,’ and that it was only SAE,” Ms. Davis says. “A lot of white students still think racism is a myth black students made up.”

Erin Simpson, assistant director of residence life, housing, and food services, worries, too, that many people are losing a sense of urgency, if they ever felt it, to help root out racism. “There’s a huge swath of our campus who don’t understand why we’re still talking about this, or why anyone’s still upset,” says Ms. Simpson, who is white. “They feel like this was last year’s issue. We’re having to remind them that this is going to be a marathon.”

The conversations taking place aren’t always easy. Fraternity members complain that some students reacted to the video by assuming that most Greek members were racist. People in other underrepresented groups sometimes feel that their needs are overshadowed by the focus on black students’ demands. And sometimes the sensitivities about “microaggression,” the everyday slights or insults that communicate disparaging messages to people, make white students afraid to ask questions that might seem insensitive.

Promoting sensitivity and responding to activists’ demands without alienating students or alumni can be a challenge, as presidents on many campuses have found.

“We have to continue to improve the climate in a way that avoids backlash,” Mr. Boren said during one of his regular meetings with Mr. Shumate. “We don’t bite at every suggestion that comes along.”

One it passed up was dropping the university’s nickname, the Sooners. A Native American student group, Indigenize OU, said the historical connection of the name to the settlement of American Indian land made its members feel unwelcome. Mr. Boren said that the word had taken on a new meaning, and that he’d consider changing it only if 245,000 alumni agreed.

The university did, however, agree to requests that it elevate the Native American studies program to a department, which will happen in December.

Among the most pressing challenges that lie ahead, not only for the University of Oklahoma but also for colleges nationwide, is improving faculty diversity.

Hiring more faculty members to whom minority students can relate is one of the key demands — and one of the most difficult to meet — that student activists have focused on across the nation.

“The pool is relatively small, and the demand is huge,” Mr. Boren says. “You can’t just rely on the regular recruiting process.”

Over the past year, Oklahoma has made a number of changes in that process. For starters, each college now has a diversity-and-inclusion officer, who reports to Mr. Shumate. These officers reach out to graduate programs and ask for recommendations of top students from diverse backgrounds. They’re working with groups like the PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that supports aspiring minority business professors.

In the College of Arts and Sciences, search committees get extra money to expand their pool of finalists from three to four if they bring in a candidate from an underrepresented group, says the dean, Kelly R. Damphousse.

Department chairs are urged to avoid overburdening minority faculty members with a disproportionate share of committee assignments and to provide more support for associate professors on the path to full professor.

Administrators point to a handful of minority hires over the past year as evidence that the outreach is making a dent but say they still have a long way to go. The Price College of Business, which has only one black faculty member, is hoping that the opening of a diversity-and-inclusion center will make prospective professors feel welcome.

When the racist video circulated, Mirelsie Velazquez, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies, was in her first semester of teaching at Oklahoma.

“That was my welcome to campus, and it was almost my goodbye,” she said during a meeting arranged by Mr. Shumate in the university’s Center for Social Justice, where she is an affiliate. “But now you feel it’s OK to speak up and someone will listen.”

Mr. Shumate’s office provides a support system that didn’t exist before, she and other professors at the meeting said, and a place where people who are working to improve diversity can share ideas and strategies.

On the student front, the university’s admissions office has stepped up its outreach to minority applicants and prospective students.

The racist video went viral during the thick of the application season, creating a potential recruiting nightmare for the university.

The following month, the admissions office held four receptions in Oklahoma and Texas to help make the point that the chant was the work of a “niche group that went rogue, and didn’t represent the university,” says Matthew W. Hamilton, vice president for enrollment and student financial services. From the fall of 2014 to the fall of 2015, the number of black students applying to the university increased by 11 percent, while the number who enrolled was up 15 percent.

Oklahoma’s population is about 8 percent black, 9 percent American Indian, and 10 percent Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Still, the university is a long way from where it wants to be. Last year black students made up 5 percent of the full-time-student population, down slightly from the 6 percent they represented a decade before, in 2005.

During that time, the Hispanic population has doubled to 8 percent of the student body, while that of Native American students has dropped from about 7 percent to 4 percent.

The focus groups, classroom discussions, and campus protests over the past year have made some students feel more comfortable speaking out about racial injustice, according to a diverse group of about 25 undergraduates who listened to Mr. Shumate speak, as a guest lecturer, during their “Introduction to Human Relations” class. He urged students to help prevent the kinds of incidents that shook the campus a year ago.

The racist chant “didn’t just make minorities angry, it made white people angry,” Lauren Anderson, a white freshman, told her classmates. “When I watched the video, it really opened my eyes. I didn’t think that kind of racism existed here.”

As a student leader, Mr. Shumate says, one of his major accomplishments was helping create a center where other student leaders of diverse campus groups would all meet. He urged students in the human-relations class to diversify their friends and acquaintances.

“If you don’t take the opportunity to get to know people who are different from you, you won’t know how to step out of your comfort zone when you enter a diverse workplace,” he said. “Our challenge is to create an environment where everyone feels welcome, respected, and supported.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.