What’s the Best Way to Lead After a Racial Incident on Campus?

After a racist incident on his campus, Michael K. Young has, by many accounts, done a lot of things right.

The Texas A&M president has apologized personally, using “I” when saying “I am sorry” for an incident last week in which university students made racially charged remarks to a group of visiting high-school students. He has apologized in person, traveling from the campus, in College Station, to Uplift Hampton Preparatory, the charter school in Dallas from which the students came. He has met with student leaders at his own institution. And he has used the incident as a platform to publicize the efforts his administration has made to improve diversity and inclusion across the university since he took office last year.

But he faces more challenges. Whether to expel the students who verbally harassed the high-school visitors is one of them. Even deeper challenges lie in how a college leader, and everyone on a campus, can confront the troubled campus climate an incident like this exposes, and in what a university community can do to prevent future incidents.

The controversy began when about 60 students from Uplift Hampton, many of whom were black and Latino, visited Texas A&M. The high-school students reported that a white university student asked them what they thought of her Confederate-flag earrings, and that other students told them to “go back where they came from,” among other harassing behavior.

The incident inspired Mr. Young to offer public apologies, and to tell the Uplift Hampton students in person that “they are precisely the kinds of students we’d love to see enrolling” at Texas A&M. Meanwhile, university students wrote more than 5,000 letters to the high-schoolers, offering their own apologies.

Since the incident, however, some have called on the president to do more. State Sen. Royce B. West, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Dallas, said that the university must “make sure the students that engaged in this behavior are held responsible for it, and that means expelling them for it.”

Mr. Young may also feel pressure to take swift action to avoid making the campus climate worse, as happened at the University of Missouri at Columbia when leaders were criticized for failing to respond to racism and protests mounted.

At the University of Oklahoma, President David L. Boren’s swift expulsion of two students after they were caught on video leading a racist chant provided a high-profile example of zero tolerance toward such behavior.

Mr. Young says that the incident at Texas A&M is the subject of two investigations, one by the campus police and one by the student-disciplinary council, both of which should be concluded within “a matter of days.” He adds that any punishment, including expulsion, is “on the table.”

The university will take “appropriate action,” he says, but he resists the idea that the quick and unilateral expulsion some might like to see would be fair, or productive. If there is any benefit to the incident, he says, it is that it has seized the attention of members of the campus community who might not have been giving much thought to the racial climate. “That’s something we intend to exploit rather shamelessly,” he says.

The university has already been making efforts to improve the campus climate, such as expanding diversity training across the campus to student leaders, beefing up cultural-diversity curricular requirements, and improving technology for the university’s online Stop Hate system for reporting incidents of hate or bias.

Engaging With the Incident

The best thing Texas A&M can do about the fallout is to confront it, according to Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. College leaders often respond to an ugly racial incident by “attempting to make it go away as quickly as possible,” Mr. Harper says. Instead, they should take a clear-eyed look at the climate that led to the incident, and engage with the implications through campuswide conversation, programming, and making connections with the existing curriculum to explore climate and inclusion.

The “clear-eyed” part is important. Mr. Harper seizes on Mr. Young’s assertion that the Uplift Hampton students are precisely the kind of students the university would love to enroll. “Well, why don’t we see more of them enrolling?” Mr. Harper asks. Black students made up less than 4 percent of the undergraduate enrollment at Texas A&M last fall, and Latinos accounted for about 19 percent. The figures are far below both groups’ representation in the state population, which is about 12 percent for blacks and 39 percent for Latinos.

Mr. Harper says research has shown that higher-education leaders are often not attuned to the realities of race on their own campuses — an observation that the past year’s protests demanding that colleges improve their racial climates bear out.

Many of the letters written by Texas A&M students tout the university as a welcoming place, Mr. Harper notes. “Does everyone feel welcome here? How do we know that?” he asks. The campus experience may feel very different to black and Latino students than it does to their white counterparts, he says. And just because students of color aren’t protesting, he adds, doesn’t means that everybody loves the way it is.

Just as important as building racial diversity is building inclusion — making the rhetoric about everyone feeling welcome a reality. It remains a challenge on most campuses, according to Kathleen Wong(Lau), director of the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Colleges have to do more than just recruit a more-diverse student body and faculty, she says; they must also work to increase their knowledge about different groups of people “in a way that’s more than token.”

Mr. Harper says having a dialogue about issues of race on campuses is important enough that he hopes Mr. Young doesn’t expel the students involved in the incident. “Let’s not shut down the conversation,” he says, but continue it, and deepen it. “People are allowed to have an opinion — it’s a university.”

However Texas A&M proceeds, Mr. Young says that ultimately neither he, nor the office of diversity, nor any other single staff member or university unit can head off another racial incident. “We can’t totally control what they do,” he says of students. “We can only control our reaction to it, and control what we teach them in light of what they’ve done.” Fostering diversity and inclusion is a job for everyone on the campus, he says, and “people are beginning to get that.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.