U. of Texas at San Antonio Investigates After Students Say Lecturer Called Police on Black Classmate

In a viral video shared on Monday, a cluster of police officers can be seen huddling in the back of Anita Moss’s classroom. A couple of officers appear to have a conversation with Moss, a senior lecturer, who points at a student sitting in a middle row. When approached by one officer, the student calmly stands and gathers her things. She and the officers walk out of the classroom, ending the minute-long video.

So this happened today in class, a girl had her feet up and the professor called the police after calling our class uncivil pic.twitter.com/spq0ShXiFU

— Apurva Rawal (@ApurvaYRawal) November 12, 2018

Apurva Rawal, a student who filmed the interaction at the University of Texas at San Antonio, described what happened in a series of tweets: The student, who was not talking or interrupting the lecture, had her feet up on the seat in front of her, he said. Moss, who took issue with this, stepped out to call the campus police, Rawal said. Moss had just lectured the class on how they were “uncivil” because some students were on their phones and not paying attention, Rawal said.

Moss did not respond to a voicemail or an email seeking comment.

The student responded on Twitter, saying that Moss had told her she needed to leave or she would be escorted out by police officers. “I never disobeyed the student code of conduct. Not once,” she said. “A police report is being filed” at the moment, she said. “This is just the beginning.” The student also thanked her classmates for standing up for her after she was ushered out. (Under Texas open-records laws, police departments generally have 10 days to release a report.)

This is me in Anita Moss’ 2053 Bio classroom. Upon entering class I was told I needed to leave or would be escorted out by officers, I never disobeyed the student code of conduct. Not once. A police report is being filed atm, this is just the beginning. Thanks for your support! https://t.co/YUZGmwgFa7

— pistachio (@FavoritePaigeee) November 12, 2018

On Twitter the video spread quickly. San Antonio students, university alumni, and professors at other institutions chastised Moss for escalating a seemingly benign classroom disagreement. Why, they asked, did the police need to be called at all, especially when a black student was involved?

As a professor I was horrified that this happened to you. If you ever need a scientist in Michigan, I’m your woman.

— Julie Libarkin (@GeoEdResearch) November 13, 2018

It’s a question the university will attempt to answer through two investigations. The university’s Office of Equal Opportunity Services is investigating possible discrimination, President Taylor Eighmy said in a Monday-afternoon email to the campus. Howard Grimes, interim dean of the College of Sciences, is conducting another inquiry into the “academic management” of the classroom, Eighmy said.

“Beyond this particular incident,” the president said, “I am very much aware that the circumstance represents another example of the work we need to do as an institution around issues of inclusivity and supporting our students of color.”

In another email sent to the campus, on Tuesday night, Eighmy said Moss’s classes would be taught by someone else for the rest of the semester. The affected student has been offered support services, he said.

Regardless of the outcome of the investigations, Eighmy said, the incident demonstrated to him that feelings of marginalization for some students — especially African-American students — are “real and profound.” The university needs to hire more faculty, staff, and administrators of color, he said, as well as raise more awareness of how to report potential classroom discrimination.

The local chapter of La Raza Faculty and Administrators Association, a group that seeks to improve the status of Latinos in academe, said in a statement that this “ugly incident” should not be considered in isolation. Rather, the group said, the university needs to face its larger problems in recruiting and retaining black faculty members and academic and student-affairs leaders.

Hiring a vice president for inclusive excellence — a move the university recently announced — is long overdue, the association said. However, the burden of changing campus culture, supporting students of color, and hiring diverse faculty members cannot be placed on one person’s shoulders, the association said.

Martina McGhee, a doctoral candidate at the university, echoed the association’s concerns on Twitter. “I regularly hear about overt racism our black students are subjected to by faculty,” McGhee said. Just yesterday, she said, a student told her that a professor was making derogatory jokes about black women in class. Just because people are experts in an academic field, said McGhee, who studies interdisciplinary learning and teaching, doesn’t mean they’re experts at teaching.

San Antonio’s student body is about 53 percent Hispanic, 24 percent white, and less than 9 percent African-American, according to last year’s figures. Vanessa A. Sansone, an assistant professor of higher education at the university, said campus “diversity” can take different forms. And when a campus is diverse in chiefly one or two respects, administrators can be reactive when incidents involving other minority groups occur. “I think that’s sometimes where the blinders get put on,” she said.

Innocuous Behavior

Black students have long called attention to biased treatment in higher education. In 2015, campus unrest brought widespread awareness to those issues with the hashtag #BlackOnCampus. That year, protests at the University of Missouri at Columbia sparked demonstrations by black students and activists across the country. From the demonstrations arose students’ demands, cataloged at www.thedemands.org.

Many of the demands called attention to college and university police departments. Demands included cultural training for officers, allowing students to report incidents of police bias, and stricter guidelines on when and how an officer can make contact with a citizen.

And recently, instances of white people reporting black students to the campus police for innocuous behavior have spreads on social media.

In May a white graduate student at Yale University, Sarah Braasch, called the police on a black graduate student who’d fallen asleep in a common room. The police questioned Lolade Siyonbola for 15 minutes before determining she was, in fact, a Yale student. “I deserve to be here,” Siyonbola says in a video of the incident. “I paid tuition like everybody else. I am not going to justify my existence here.” Yale officials said they were “deeply troubled” by the incident, The Chronicle reported. The university held “listening sessions.” And the police department added training programs to learn how to de-escalate tense situations and avoid implicit bias.

In July an employee at Smith College called the campus police on a black female student who is also a teaching assistant. Oumou Kanoute was eating lunch in a campus common room when someone reported her to the police for seeming to be “out of place.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Kanoute said in a Facebook post. “I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anyone. All I did was be black.”

Soon after the incident, the college retained a law firm to investigate. The firm reported that the caller had “provided a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” for contacting the police that day, but also that the campus police had responded to a number of “suspicious person” calls at Smith, only to discover that the person had a reason to be there. The firm issued several recommendations, which Smith said it is considering.

And in October a black graduate student at the Catholic University of America, Juán-Pabló González, videotaped an interaction with an attendant at the law library’s circulation desk, Brittany McNurlin, who called the university’s police department and complained about an “argumentative student.” In the video, González asks McNurlin why she had called the police since he was just “asking questions” about the facility. “I’ve answered your questions,” she says in the video. “You didn’t appreciate my answer.” Eventually, at least five officers showed up.

The university said in a statement that the desk attendant had followed protocol. When no librarian is available, the statement says, student employees are supposed to bring issues they are “unable to resolve” to the attention of the campus police.

Updated (11/14/2018, 9:50 a.m.) with an additional statement from the university’s president.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.