These Campus Leaders Spent the Fall Taking a Racial-Equity Course. Here’s What They Learned.

Shaun R. Harper recently conducted a five-year study of 14 graduate programs that prepare people for careers in higher education. Harper, who leads the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, asked students and alumni what they’d learned in their programs about race, racial equity, and racial problem solving.

The answer was almost unanimous: nothing.

So Harper created a eight-week course for college leaders that’s designed to help them learn, as he put it, “the things they never learned anywhere else.” The USC Equity Institutes, as the course is known, cover everything from the basics, like defining race and racism, to more complex problems, like navigating moments of crisis after a racist incident.

This fall, administrators and faculty members at six colleges took in the weekly, 90-minute sessions; four institutions will follow suit in the spring. Two of the sessions are required: foundations of racial equity in higher education, and talking about race, racism, and racial inequities. Colleges can pick the other six from a menu of options, depending on whether they want to focus on, say, creating more-welcoming classrooms or diversifying the enrollment.

Up to 20 people from a campus can participate. Different scholars each week lead the sessions by video conference, directing participants to read case studies and answer questions. Colleges also devise projects to work on throughout the course.

The Race and Equity Center strongly recommends that each group includes the president, the provost, or the dean of a particular school. Time constraints can make that difficult. One diversity officer remarked, “I’m asking the busiest people on my campus.” At least one president this fall had to drop out after two weeks.

The course costs an institution $40,000. For the pilot round, funding from the Lumina Foundation substantially offset the price. Harper said he would continue working with foundations to ensure that less-wealthy colleges can participate.

The Chronicle talked with some officials who attended the first iteration of Harper’s course. Here are some of the things they learned.

University of Virginia

Dorrie K. Fontaine, dean of the School of Nursing, initially planned to skip the course because she’s retiring next July. Her associate dean for diversity and inclusion convinced her otherwise: The leader has to be there. That sends a message.

At UVa, questions of race are at the front of people’s minds. After the deadly white-supremacist rallies last year in Charlottesville, Va., Fontaine recalled standing in front of a faculty group and saying, “This is not who we are. This is not Charlottesville.” Some of her African-American faculty members pushed back: “Well, actually, that is the way it is here.”

“I had to stop and realize, I shouldn’t be saying that,” Fontaine said.

Three groups from across the university went through the course this fall. It was an easy decision for the nursing school to participate, Fontaine said: “People live or die in my field by how well we treat them.”

At one session a department chair stood up and said he’d be changing one of his courses that very afternoon. A minority student in the course seemed indifferent. He had been framing the student’s disengagement as “she’s not interacting.” He’d decided to turn that around: “What does she need to be more engaged?”

One of the projects the nursing school took on during the institutes focused on diversifying spaces that predominantly include white people. Now, Fontaine said, officials will take another look at the framed photos that decorate the school’s lobby. “Who are we representing when people walk into the building?” she asked. “Are they all white women?”

SUNY-College of Environmental Science and Forestry

This State University of New York institution, which has about 2,200 students, isn’t concerned only with making its small physical campus more welcoming, said Malika Carter, its chief diversity officer. For instance, national parks don’t see a lot of low-income and minority visitors, but many SUNY-ESF graduates and employees work with the parks in some context. How can they help make those spaces more inclusive?

As the ESF administrators were working on their projects — such as figuring out how to conduct more effective, consistent diversity training — they were calling people across the campus to get more information. Someone in the facilities unit, for instance, would have to get on the phone with an expert in web accessibility for people with disabilities.

“It raised some eyebrows,” Carter said. In some cases, people were initially reluctant to answer questions and seemed skeptical of the caller’s motives. That process, though, created “a buzz about what we’re doing,” she said.

Carter, as a diversity professional, was familiar with much of the course material. Still, she said, “it felt good that somebody was saying it that was not me.”

University of Missouri at St. Louis

This regional public university has one of the most racially diverse student bodies among public colleges in the state. It’s also located in racially divided St. Louis, just two miles down the road from Ferguson, Mo., which has become a focal point of unrest as national outrage has flared over white police officers’ shooting unarmed black men.

Early in the course, Kristin Sobolik, the provost, looked around the room. The chancellor was there, as were vice provosts, deans, the chief of police. When, she thought, were these people ever in the same room? Usually in moments of crisis. “We hadn’t had these discussions as a leadership team,” she said.

It was important not only to come together, she said, but also to learn the language of race and racism. “People get afraid in our kind of hypersensitive society to really engage in a real discussion about a lot of different topics — not just race,” she said. “But that’s exactly what needs to happen on college campuses.”

During the course, officials worked on a blueprint for the university’s first multicultural center, created new alumni associations for different identity groups, and revisited existing courses in subjects like African and African-American studies, Sobolik said.

Auburn University

Auburn is hiring 500 faculty members in the next few years, so officials chose to focus on classrooms and teaching, and recruited mostly deans and faculty members to participate, said Taffye Benson-Clayton, vice president and associate provost for inclusion and diversity. Professors need to understand “that they step into a classroom with aspects of identity that people are processing,” she said.

During one session, said Christopher B. Roberts, dean of the College of Engineering, a professor described how he would insert facts about Scotland into a technical class, to break up the dense material. The group discussed how that might be perceived in different scenarios, Roberts wrote in an email. What if an African-American instructor incorporated facts about black history?

The engineering college developed a project on inclusive class assignments. “The initial impetus of the effort was to make sure that students do not feel marginalized by certain problem statements because of their background,” Roberts said.

As the college’s faculty members revise some of the problem statements, they’ll get feedback from underrepresented students, he said. “One challenge,” he continued, “is that faculty members are sometimes protective of their courses and reluctant to change.”

Many faculty members hear the words “cultural competence” and “classroom” and think, “I don’t know if I can do that,” Clayton said. Or “what does that have to do with what I’m teaching, anyway?” The course helped faculty members craft strategies for overcoming that reluctance.

Say there was an incident in a student’s apartment the previous night. A professor might say: I know this happened. I heard some of you talking about it on the way in. I just want to acknowledge that and see if anyone would like to share their thoughts before we get started. “It can be one minute,” Clayton said.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.