When Racism Reappears, How Can a Campus Show It Has Made Any Gains?

Rudi Keller, Columbia Daily Tribune

For many black students at the University of Missouri at Columbia, last week felt like déjà vu. Another racially charged remark. Another demonstration. Another statement from university leaders expressing their outrage and stressing their commitment to “fostering an inclusive campus environment.”

Two black female students had told the campus police that some of their white peers had hurled racial slurs at them outside a campus fraternity house late Tuesday.

Frustrations poured out on Twitter. “Racism is still alive at Mizzou,” wrote one. “Living while black is a disability on Mizzou’s campus,” added another.

The incident was a sharp reminder of the simmering tensions over race relations at Mizzou. Last fall the campus was rocked by protests that toppled two university leaders and inspired similar demonstrations across the country.

Since then, the University of Missouri system has hired a chief diversity officer, started a diversity audit, and created a group of faculty members, administrators, and a student to review diversity efforts across the four campuses, recommend changes, and figure out how to measure any such changes. The flagship campus has set aside more money to increase faculty diversity and begun requiring diversity training for all faculty, staff, and new students.

But students, who are on the campus for only a few years, want to see quick cultural change. Last week’s incident suggests to some students that, despite all of the things university leaders say they’re doing, the campus’s racial climate hasn’t improved since last fall. They wonder whether Missouri officials are all talk and no action.

Experts stress that one year isn’t nearly enough to undo decades of racial problems and that an incident like this one doesn’t necessarily indicate that race relations aren’t improving. After all, college officials can’t prevent every racist remark from being uttered on their campuses.

But they say that Missouri and other institutions can create an environment where such behavior is unacceptable. What the fraternity-house incident suggests, they add, is that there is not yet a critical mass of white students, faculty, and staff at Missouri who are serving as allies in combating racism.

How can Missouri measure whether its efforts to spur institutional change are succeeding? Seeing how the campus community responds to incidents like the one last week is one way of gauging whether race relations have improved.

The day after the slurs were reported, Missouri’s leaders put out a statement explaining the steps they had taken in response — which contrasted with what many students saw as a sluggish response last year to racial unrest. A spokesman for Missouri did not respond to a request for additional comment this week.

For students, it’s often a question of personal experience, said Kimberly A. Griffin, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park who studies the experiences of underrepresented students on campuses. While structural changes might be starting to improve campus inclusion in a broad sense, Ms. Griffin said, students tend to care most about what they’re seeing and feeling on an individual level.

A Call for Intervention

Reuben Faloughi, a doctoral student in psychology at Missouri, said that as far as he knows, white students at the fraternity house didn’t step in last week and tell their peers to stop insulting the black students. While he stressed that most members of predominantly white fraternities don’t engage in such offensive behavior, he said the lack of bystander intervention needs to change.

For the past year, university leaders have been laser-focused on dealing with the issues raised by Concerned Student 1950, the group that led last fall’s protests, said Mr. Faloughi, who was one of its founding members. But he hasn’t seen officials engage many white students in their efforts.

That means, he said, that many of them have never had to grapple with the significance of the protests — or understand the implicit biases they might have against minority students.

Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said he sees similar gaps at many campuses where students protested last fall.

“So many of these efforts are just about trying to meet the list of demands that were issued by students,” he said, “without understanding that there’s this larger explanation for why students of color have these experiences that they were protesting to begin with.”

At Missouri, 78 percent of students are white, Mr. Harper noted. “No corrective diversity effort will succeed there or at any other place that’s demographically similar if there’s no attention paid to the 78 percent.”

The burden of educating those students shouldn’t be placed primarily on black students, said Calvin L. Warren, an assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University. “It’s unfair for some students to have to bear this very heavy and dense weight of trying to solve anti-blackness on a campus,” Mr. Warren said. “That’s not their job.”

The university has started requiring all incoming students to go through diversity training. But Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University and a scholar who studies historically black colleges and black men in college, said he’s skeptical that required training is the best way to reach white students. Such a mandate could provoke a backlash, he said.

Mr. Kimbrough said faculty and staff members should take the lead in embracing roles as anti-racist allies. That means regularly attending events held by multicultural student organizations, he said. That means listening to minority students — and believing them — when they talk about difficulties and challenges they experience on a campus.

Those faculty and staff members could then serve as an example to white students and build bridges across cultural lines, he said. For instance, the faculty adviser to a predominantly white student group might suggest to members that they collaborate with a multicultural group on an event or service project.

“I don’t see a lot of faculty, staff, and administrators getting out of their comfort zones,” he said.

Shift in Culture Needed

When racist incidents occur on a campus, it’s not just about the administrative response, said Beverly C. Daniel Tatum, a former president of Spelman College, the private historically black institution for women in Atlanta. “You can’t create a culture from the president’s office,” she said. Where, she asked, are the voices of white student leaders?

Ms. Tatum cited a statement by the student-body president at Texas A&M University earlier this year as a sign of progress on the College Station campus. Tensions had surfaced after a group of black and Latino high-school students visiting the university were insulted by white university students and told to “go back where they came from.”

Joseph Benigno, the student leader at the time, who is white, uploaded a three-and-a-half-minute YouTube video asking students to reflect on “how an individual on our campus became so emboldened in their racism that they were able to openly yell slurs at a group of black students on campus.” He addressed students who had openly wondered whether the slurs had been fabricated: “My message to you is simple: Stop.”

The statement released the day after the recent Missouri incident by the university’s Panhellenic Association, the umbrella organization for predominantly white sororities, was perhaps the most strongly worded of any made by Missouri students last week.

“The hateful speech of our friends is crippling, the deafening silence of our community is deadly,” the association wrote. That’s a group the university should look to as a partner in improving the racial climate, said Mr. Kimbrough, of Dillard.

Other signs of progress on race relations — such as the results of campus-climate surveys — won’t be measurable right away. Missouri opened one such survey to students, faculty, and staff this week, and many of the questions ask about racism and offensive or hostile conduct. The survey does not ask participants to verify that they are a Missouri student or employee.

Institutions like Missouri should also try to integrate efforts to promote inclusion into all aspects of campus life, said Ms. Griffin, of Maryland. It’s often not the first experience with diversity education that really changes a student, she said; it might take two or three lessons for them to start sinking in.

Colleges could make that happen by revamping their residence-hall experience, encouraging students to interact with peers who don’t share their background during programs or meals, she said. And the university could offer more service-learning opportunities that bring together diverse groups of students.

“Just as much learning can take place over dinner having a conversation or with a roommate as it can in the classroom,” Ms. Griffin said. “How are we creating environments that allow that to happen?”

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.