When Racism Roils a Campus, Colleges Respond. Will Students Be Satisfied?

Katy Kildee, AP Images

Colleges have been besieged by one racist incident after another in the past two years, and they have spent that time developing a common strategy for dealing with the immediate fallout. One mainstay: Respond publicly.

But what determines whether that response will resonate with aggrieved students?

The best predictor may be how satisfied students already are with the degree of diversity in their ranks, according to a new study presented at this week’s annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

The paper’s author, Katherine Cho, a doctoral student in the University of California at Los Angeles’s higher-education program, cautioned that just because students think they’re diverse as a whole doesn’t mean they actually are — and that’s a problem for achieving actual diversity on campus.

The study, “The Perception of Progress,” is based on data from a 2015 survey, “Diverse Learning Environment,” by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA, whose interviewers spoke to nearly 20,000 students from 26 institutions. (Cho’s data relies on about 9,700 of those responses.)

The next leading predictor of how satisfied students were with a response by administrators was if the students themselves had experienced some form of bias or harassment. Specifically, those who said they had suffered from threats or damage to their personal property were more likely to be satisfied with the response. But students who experience subtler forms of bias — say, being mistaken as Indian when they’re of Hispanic descent — were more likely to have complaints.

It seems like a finding at odds with itself, given that the severity of being directly harassed or threatened isn’t comparable to the effect of microaggressions. But Cho said one reason for the difference might be that it is simpler for administrators to call out extreme forms of prejudice.

“It’s easy for us to point to a hate crime and say that’s not OK,” Cho said. “But what about all of the things that are sort of ranging in between that students are experiencing on a day-to-day basis or are much more subtle?”

The study also found that students who feel a strong sense of belonging on the campus were more likely to be satisfied with the administration’s response.

Race and ethnicity also served as potential indicators. The survey found that nearly 22 percent of black students were likely to be dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with an administrative response, compared with 11 percent of their white counterparts.

But across racial and ethnic groups, a plurality of respondents took a neutral viewpoint toward their college’s responses to discrimination.

The notion of a diverse campus is a complex one in itself. Students’ belief that they are part of a diverse student body doesn’t mean they actually are. And even when campuses are racially diverse, Cho said, that doesn’t mean students are connecting with people outside their own ethnic groups.

“If students aren’t interacting with each other or they’re segregating in a variety of different ways, that is also not the type of diversity that allows to bridge across and really touch upon areas of inclusion,” she said.

‘We’re Not Measuring Toxins’

Of course, there are intrinsic challenges in trying to measure how satisfied a campus is with an administration’s response to such incidents. Roger L. Worthington, chief diversity officer and interim associate provost at the University of Maryland at College Park, studies campus climates. He said there are “no definitive metrics of an effective administrative response to discrimination.”

“Often times we’re relying on the subjective perception of members of the campus community, including faculty, staff and students, and sometimes other administrators as well,” Worthington said.

Universities might instead focus on more straightforward concerns that nonetheless get to the heart of student satisfaction, like, is it following federal laws? Administrators can investigate to make sure that is the case.

They can also launch internal inquiries. Worthington said administrators should look at how well they’re living up to their policies. And, of course, qualitative campus-climate surveys can help, too.

Worthington said, however, that campus-climate research is often misunderstood because the subject material can be hard to pin down.

“We’re not measuring toxins the way we could in water and the atmosphere,” Worthington said. “We’re trying to measure a certain type of toxin in the social climate of an institution that is much more difficult to place a number on. What we’re really doing is trying to conceptualize the experiences, the lived experiences of people, who belong to our campus community.”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.