Weekly Briefing

After being accused of wearing blackface, these students sued their college.

Illustration by The Chronicle, Photo by Kirby Lee, AP

Last winter, Chris Kimball, president of California Lutheran University, sent a message to his campus about what he said were two racist incidents on social media involving students.

He didn’t detail the incidents, and instead condemned the actions, writing, “Blackface and the N-word evoke white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and remind us that a violent, racist past is still with us today.” He also said there would be a campus forum about race and equity so Cal Lutheran could “develop the institutional capacity to dismantle racist behavior.”

Last week, a lawsuit filed by 24 members of Cal Lutheran women’s softball team and three coaches says that the incidents involved them, and that many people on campus knew it. The complaint provides an inside look at the incident and the subsequent conflict between team members and administrators.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, accuses university administrators of misinterpreting pictures from an event the team members had posted on social media. The students and coaches say that administrators’ misinformed reaction allowed the group to be publicly shamed and harassed, and that they feared for their safety.

So what happened? In January, the softball team had divided into groups to perform lip-syncing routines for their teammates. One group wore curly Napoleon Dynamite wigs, “hip-hop clothing,” and drew beards on their faces to perform the theme song from the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the complaint said. The group posted pictures and video of its performance on Instagram.

In the legal complaint, the students said that a few days after the posts, an administrator told Debby Day, the head softball coach, that a staff member had complained to the president that the softball team had posted a “blackface” performance on social media. Day said that the players had not been wearing blackface for the lip-sync event, but the team would take down the Instagram posts to avoid confusion.

In the first week of February, Kimball emailed the campus saying that the students who wore “blackface” would be held accountable. Though the team was not called out in the email, its lawsuit says that the campus community knew who the president’s message was about. The local paper even covered the message with the headline, “CLU Softball Team Accused of Blackface.”

Team members wrote an apology and shared it with administrators, but according to the suit, Cal Lutheran officials did not share the letter with the campus. The lawsuit also says the president canceled the team’s six away games in Texas while it placed coaches on administrative leave pending an investigation.

After the team hired lawyers, who met with the university’s lawyers, team members received an email from an assistant dean saying that there would be no “individual student-conduct process” about the incident. But that same day, Kimball emailed the campus again, writing that the university “has a responsibility” to “respond” to behavior that is in conflict with the university’s values. Two days after Kimball’s second message, 100 students walked out in protest of what they saw as a lack of response by the administration to the incidents. Some students told the Ventura County Reporter that racist incidents were common at the institution.

In their lawsuit, the softball-team members and coaches called the protesters a “mob” and said they had been harassed and bullied online. One player said the team needed mental-health services.

Kimball, who left his role as president in 2020, did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment. In an email, a university spokeswoman wrote that the administrators would defend themselves in court and that the complaint contains “misstatements and falsehoods.”

Here’s the kicker: Around the time of the student protest, a 2014 social-media post from Kimball recirculated. It was a picture of another university administrator wearing a dreadlocks wig and a black, yellow, red, and green hat. Kimball’s caption read, “So proud that Bob Marley is our VP of Advancement.”

Read Nell Gluckman’s story here.

Lagniappe.

• Learn. If you need a new icebreaker for the first day of class or for a team meeting, here is a treasure trove. The list is compiled by Rob Walker, who writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing. (Google Docs)
• Read. If you’re not into the novels listed below, here’s a news story about hikers disappearing in southern Australia. (The New York Times)
• Listen. This suggestion comes from the reader Nareg Seferian, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech. The album is titled Gamar by the Aravod ensemble, which plays Ottoman-era Armenian music in the U.S., Seferian wrote. (YouTube)
• Watch. August is here. That means you can’t avoid preparing your fall semester any longer. (TikTok)

Read, continued.

Last week, I asked newsletter readers for books to put on hold at my library. Here are some of the titles you suggested:

• The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Lily and the Octopus, by Steven Rowley
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Alice Network, by Kate Quinn
• Hidden Valley Road, by Robert Kolker
• Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

For more titles, check out our database of the books assigned to college freshmen over the years.

—Fernanda