Events on campuses this year have resonated in boardrooms across the country. Not many could have predicted the issues that would ultimately unseat a number of college presidents. Yet for many of our students, these events have been brewing for years. Our colleges and universities serve as beacons of academic discourse and debate, but for too long, those halls were reserved for those with privilege. Thankfully, that has changed. Our institutions have opened their doors to greater numbers and more diverse students. But we need to do more. The events of the past year have rippled across higher education and impacted all of us.
Claudio Sanchez: My first question is how can higher education leaders anticipate and better prepare to address the complex issues that institutions are now facing in their search for greater diversity?
Michael Middleton: That’s a fairly broad and deep question. I think the first thing that institutions need to do is simply be aware that this is a very real and serious problem that all of us are facing. If it hasn’t hit your campus yet, it will. Boards need to understand the severity of the problem and support their presidents and their institutions in developing solutions and answers. Higher ed has been dealing with diversity for quite a long time and we’ve done a pretty good job of admitting students from a variety of backgrounds over the years. But I don’t think any of us have paid much attention to inclusion and ensuring that those students have a welcoming, supportive environment where they can learn.
Sanchez: I have to ask why? You’re saying you’re admitting them, then you’re… what?
Middleton: Then we’re celebrating. I’ll tell you at Missouri, not more than two years ago, we developed a PR campaign. We called it “One Mizzou.” We had a song. We had videos of people from different backgrounds singing. It was kind of a We Are the World video. We were all very happy and very proud of ourselves. Then our gay, African-American student body president launched a campaign called “Wake Up, Missouri.” He was from the South Side of Chicago and he was quite upset because he came to Mizzou largely because of that PR campaign. When he got to Mizzou, he was called the N word by somebody, three or four times in his time there. We were enraptured with our success at diversifying our student body. But we hadn’t paid attention to the relationships between our students, between our faculty and students, and between our community and students. And so we all need to understand that this is a very, very longstanding and serious problem that takes the attention of all of us to solve.
Sanchez: Ms. Reid, does this ring true for you at Ohio State?
Janet Reid: Well, yes it does. Leadership begins with what it is that you know and what it is that you know you can do. Many of us simply don’t have an understanding of what diversity is, and certainly not what inclusion is, because inclusion is the sense of I belong here.
So, some practical things, just sharing what I’ve done at Ohio State. When I come to board meetings, I meet in advance with students just to talk and to find out what’s going on. This is not an official board function. This is for my own edification as a trustee. At Ohio State, we train roughly 7,000 people a year on diversity and inclusion, on appreciating differences, on how to deal with things when the cultures rub together. We do research in this area with our Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. We link with community partners to make sure our communities are more inclusive. There’s a lot of programming that goes on, yet we still have protests. I think about 106 universities have had protests in the last 12 months or so.
Sanchez: I want to come back, though, to something that you said before we came out here. You said on the point about informing yourself, that too often trustees are a little bit blind. Is that a function of the fact that higher ed is often far removed from the real world? Is it a function of willful ignorance about the makeup of your institutions, about the trends—demographic trends—in this country? I guess I have a hard time thinking how trustees can be blind to some of the dynamics on your campuses.
Reid: Yes. Absolutely. As trustees, we all consider ourselves bright, right? But there are areas where we don’t consider ourselves bright and we mire ourselves down in fear. Fear of sounding ignorant, fear of saying Afro-American. Fear of, “Am I touching on anything out here?” Fear of saying the wrong thing and then being quoted in the press. As a result, when you combine lack of knowledge or ignorance with fear, that’s a very dangerous place for a trustee to be, leading an institution of higher education when we are here to learn. I think one attitude for trustees is to look at ourselves as learners. We’re learning, too. We can understand more deeply the experiences of students whom we haven’t thought about before. Many of these protests have had faculty and administrative supporters.
Sanchez: Yes. Mr. Wilson, people assume that a historically black college doesn’t face nearly as many issues as an institution with a far greater racial and ethnic mix. Am I wrong?
John Silvanus Wilson: We face issues. At Morehouse and AU Center, the issue that has played out is LGBTQIA. As it turns out, our gay communities have the same or similar marginality on many HBCU campuses as African Americans and other minorities on white campuses. So the face of the movement at Morehouse and other places like it is more about that than anything else. I think it is incumbent upon presidents and upon trustees to really, really get educated and lean into these issues. The fact of the matter is, this is not the first time this has come up in higher education. In the mid-80s, when I was just starting my career at MIT, this was raging. I mean, the campus racial climate was all over The Chronicle. It was all over everywhere.
Sanchez: Now at George Washington University, you’ve done away with the SAT as a requirement. I remember doing the story and thinking, it’s a marketing ploy, not unlike some of those videos maybe that you were referring to. It’s an attempt to just market your institution. We don’t know whether what you’ve done is going to create a more diverse campus. We won’t know for years. So what was the point?
Nelson Carbonell: The university had established a diversity committee. Inspired by President Obama, we focused on what we called, “Access and Success.” Initially, all of us sat at meetings with pie charts. I asked, are there individuals in these pie charts? But our pie charts didn’t look that good. We had low attendance by unrepresented minorities, including African Americans. We’re in the District of Columbia, and we still weren’t really drawing African Americans to our campus.
Sanchez: You’ve got 5 percent on campus.
Carbonell: And Latinos, we were nowhere. We had very few, probably 2 to 3 percent Latino population. So we said, okay, there’s something going on. When we looked at the applicant pool, it looked like the population we had on our campus. Then we said, we’re doing something wrong in terms of who we put in the pool to begin with before we select them. Part of the process, then, was really trying to understand, how do we get students who wouldn’t normally apply?
It was a three-year process. It wasn’t that we just decided one afternoon, hey, let’s go test optional. Wouldn’t that be kind of cool? We did it after three years of study of how are we going to make sure that when we bring students to our campus, they’re going to be successful? Because what we talk about is access and success. I agree with what Mike said earlier, that celebrating the inbound data is not particularly satisfying. Look at the class we just brought in and ask who gets out, and what’s their experience when they are on our campus? I want to add to a point that John made. Every institution needs to look at what its challenges are. So we looked at ours and we looked at ourselves in the mirror and said, we’re not doing what we need to do, we’ve got to do something different.
Our challenges may include race and LGBT and other issues, but they are compounded by socio-economic issues. Because in private higher education, we run the Robin Hood model. We have kids who can pay full tuition and we use that to fund scholarships for kids who likely couldn’t afford to go to our institutions. On top of some of the other issues, you have rich and poor on our campus, and how do you make that work? It’s an experiment.
Sanchez: There’s a class issue here, not just a race issue?
Carbonell: Correct. The racial makeup of the different classes isn’t the answer, it’s the result. So we have to be really thoughtful about our challenges as an institution. Going test optional was something that we are tackling. It’s an experiment. Our application pool grew by 25 percent. So we already knew right off the bat that we were getting students to apply who wouldn’t have applied.
Student Protests: Listening and Understanding
Sanchez: Miss Lhamon, you’re at the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. What is your office’s role in terms of monitoring as well as intervening when necessary? Could you describe that for us?
Catherine Lhamon: Our office’s job is to enforce federal civil rights laws in all of our nation’s schools. It’s a fairly large job, with respect to higher education. There are 7,000 colleges and universities around the country and close to 20 million students in those schools. Our goal is to be immediately responsive to every complaint that comes into us, which is an enormous goal in this administration. Our complaint volume has doubled in the life of this administration. We receive close to 10,000 complaints per year, and they range across the full scope. We have 43 active investigations about racial hostility on college and university campuses. We’ve received close to 1,100 complaints on that topic in the life of this administration, which is to tell you that there is immense concern about it around the country. The kinds of concerns that we receive—typically from students, but not always—range from unbelievably retrograde things that get said to students on campus, to clear communication of low expectations of students of color on campus, to failure to redress concerns that students have on campus, and sometimes to speech issues that come to us.
The goal for us is to make sure that our college and university communities are fully equipped to address the concerns that come to them, and ideally to prevent them from coming because they are creating inclusive campuses in the first instance.
Sanchez: But ultimately, who do you—the federal government—hold accountable?
Lhamon: Well, we hold the perpetrators accountable. Where a school has actually violated the law, we will hold that school accountable, and the ultimate stick is withholding federal funds. Happily, we don’t typically get there. Typically, we can work with our institutions to come into compliance where we identify concerns and take proactive steps going forward, so that we won’t see those kinds of concerns recur. I don’t think it helps kids to take funds away, so it is a posture of last resort for us, but we will do it and we are serious about it. So if a school actually is standing at the door and saying we will not satisfy civil rights, we will take your money away. It’s that simple. But I am very pleased that most schools are trying to do the right thing, and when we identify concerns, they try to come into compliance so that we don’t have to get to that place.
Middleton: I think if we had listened in the spring of last year and shown some compassion and concern and engaged with the students in some serious conversations about their concerns, we might have avoided the explosion we’ve experienced. Once the explosion occurs, listening may not be enough. My advice is to get in front of these things if you can, and understand the language. Be aware of what you are talking about. Understand the current discourse around these issues, and then engage in it with the students. I think, though, that listening is the most important thing.
Diversity and Inclusion
Reid: A practical thing to do, if diversity and inclusion are important to your institutions, and they certainly are to ours, is to declare it. So when our president, Michael Drake, spoke of his 20/20 vision, it had three pillars. One of them is inclusion excellence. We train faculty search committees in diversity and inclusion, it’s required for the committees to go through that. But we also join the faculty in pedagogy, in how to get perspectives that are not just the traditional perspectives. Once we understand the power of diversity and inclusion and, with our fiduciary responsibility to train educators, train citizens to be global citizens tomorrow, then we have to have inclusion, not just diversity.
Wilson: The way we talk about it is in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. You could either focus on reducing the noise or amplifying the signal, which is in the process reducing the noise. The strategy is to amplify the signal. Say what you’re about. Put your vision out there and don’t worry about the noise, because as you amplify the signal, the noise will reduce. Where you don’t want to get is being without a vision, being without answers, being without a theory of the kind of world you’re trying to create on campus.
Carbonell: So we’ve gone out and tried to get ahead of it. I think Mike is very wise to tell people not to wait until you have people on your campus that are upset. Just go out and find out what the challenges are. We had a faculty member who gave some supplemental material to students and charged them $40 for it. That’s no big deal right? So a student comes up to him after class and says, “Professor, I don’t have $40.” I was one of those kids on the GW campus. I went to school on a scholarship. I was one of the poor kids, and $40 was all the money in the world. And the professor said to the student, “Well, you’re not going to do very well.”
And the professor, when confronted with this, was really dismayed that they had done this to the student, because they didn’t connect. When you look out into a room full of people, you may be able to see some difference but you can’t see it all. And you really need to be sensitive to the fact that in that room, there are people of all walks of life, of all races, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds. Thinking about that before you walk in the room makes you think about everything more broadly.
For me, it’s pretty simple. The world we’re going to live in—2030 or 2040 or whenever—it’s a diverse world. If we’re going to survive as an institution, if we’re going to serve our mission, that means that our students and our faculty have to find a welcoming place. It’s a very pragmatic thing. When you have a pragmatic goal, that’s not that happy talk anymore, it’s not about the pie chart. It’s about real things and real people on your campus. How do you make that environment different? So I look at it as finding your motivation, but if your motivation is just what makes you feel good, that’s not enough.
Needs and Demands
Lhamon: One thing I think is really important to remember is that our colleges and universities are not static communities. We’re bringing new students in every year. We’re often bringing new faculty, new staff in every year. So even if you feel like you achieved success last year, you’ll have an influx of new people who will change the campus conversation in the next year. We know that that’s going to happen. So the one thing that is static is that it’s not static and we need to be able to be responsive in each community every time.
That means get out in front of it. That means have a campus culture that you articulate, that you are talking about, that you reiterate every year. So that when incidents come up, you have that good will to draw back on, to say this is who we are. This is what our values are. This is what’s acceptable here. And when you hear something that’s an outlier, when you hear something that is anathema to the campus culture that you’ve articulated, the whole community can fall back on it, and you can then have conversations about free speech rights. And you can say the fact that you have the right to say something doesn’t mean you should, and here’s what our values are. Here’s how we’re going to speak back to it. And we’re going to do that from the leadership. We’re going to say from leadership, this is who we are.
We’re not waiting. We’re not waiting for somebody else to come in. We are saying we do welcome you. We do value you. We expect you to succeed. We admitted you for a reason and we want to make this a place where you will thrive. Here’s what we will do about it.
Wilson: I think you need to be aware of the students’ needs when you admit them and you need to have a plan to ensure their success. What you see as a common ground in all these situations is a lot of African-American and other minority students are complaining about exactly what they complained about in the ’80s, and that is marginality. My first task at MIT was to do a black alumni survey. A general alumni survey had already been done and the administration noticed that the responses from the African-American students were distinctively negative. One quote stood out and we used it on the cover of the report. This one African-American student said MIT is a nice place to be from, but not at.
Reid: Students across the nation are connecting and they’re putting all the demands from each institution at thedemands.org. Individual demands are listed there, so some have done an analysis of what the commonalities are between these 100-some-odd universities, and what they find is there are the practical things, like transportation. But when you boil it all down, it’s a sense of belonging—do I feel that this place is our place, not your place that will accommodate me, but our place?
Middleton: It’s really important not to reject demands out of hand, no matter how ridiculous they may seem to you. The demands provide a very good opportunity to give students the sense of inclusion, of participation. Bring them in to your boardroom, talk about the demands, explain to them, “I would really love to achieve what you are seeking but here are the trade-offs. Here’s what we have to do.” These students are not stupid. We’ve taught them well, perhaps too well.
Sanchez: Let me ask you, though, about the perception out there that you’re bending over backwards to accommodate minority students. If you’re at a majority white institution, well, that could be a problem because then you will kind of put fuel on the fire where white students will say it’s the same argument about affirmative action, which we’re going to be seeing down the road. Do you create special accommodations, even though students themselves don’t see them as special, at the risk of being perceived as giving in to those minority students?
Carbonell: I’m going to give you what you need to be successful. Our job here is to bring you onto our campus and have you succeed as a student here. Some students come in and they may be white and rich and all the things that everybody thinks make life easy, and they need help, too. We have challenges on our campuses with mental health and we’re providing mental health services to our students, largely for free. So does every student walk in and need mental health services? No. Do we provide those services to our students? Yes, because we have students that need that to be successful. Do we ask you what color you are or what height you are? We don’t ask you anything. We just say if that’s what you need, we’re here to do our best to provide it for you because we’re here to make you successful as an individual.
Middleton: I can say that our institution is committed to satisfying the legitimate needs of all of our students. We are working on all of their demands. We are explaining why some of those demands can’t be met in the timeframe suggested. All of them were legitimate goals. I don’t think we’re giving in too much. When a group of students comes together and cries out in desperation, I think we have an obligation to respond. I don’t call it giving in. I call it responding to the needs of a group of students.
Sanchez: Does an institution’s push for diversity necessarily clash with the school’s mission or with academic freedom and free speech? As an institution you’ve got a mission. When these issues of diversity come up, it’s like there is a natural tension because the institution is evolving and it may or may not match that mission, and people have to rethink how that mission plays out.
Lhamon: We find ourselves in tension when we are off the path, not doing the things that we need to do to satisfy our students. So when we say, we admitted you, we expect you to succeed, this is what we’re going to do to make sure that you can succeed, that’s the right role for the university. Where there are faculty or students who want to express an opposing view, that’s what schools are for, right? You want to be able to have space for that discussion and that conversation in a way that also supports all of the students and their success. There’s not a necessary tension. When you find yourselves in tension, that’s a place to think about what you can do differently.
Middleton: I think diversity and inclusion is perfectly consistent with the mission of the university in that diversity and inclusion makes us better at doing what we do. What we do is develop and disseminate knowledge, and if you are marginalizing or excluding part of the population, you’re certainly not maximizing your ability to discover and disseminate knowledge.
Now, there is a conflict when we get to questions of freedom of expression, free speech, and limiting speech that is offensive. Those are difficult constitutional issues. I would rather get beyond the legality of that and start talking about civility. I’d like for us to get to the point where we can find that balance and create a civil learning society voluntarily.
Carbonell: Let’s expand a bit. Our students come from the society that we all live in. We can’t expect that when they walk across the border of the campus we can say that it’s a different world and everything that is going on in the outside is not happening on the inside. There is a wide array of challenges that we have on campus that we’re importing from the society at large. They aren’t necessarily just our problems. We are under a lens and we’ve consolidated tens of thousands of 18- to 22-year-olds in one location, and we’re seeing it in a magnified way. The thing that hit me as a trustee, and it’s been said by many people, is we may have the mission to discover and disseminate knowledge, but fundamentally our purpose as an institution is to educate our population and that’s what underpins our democracy. We need to produce good citizens for our society. We may not have as many as we’d like, but our job is to make sure that the ones that leave our campuses are.
Reid: People usually look at mission, vision, diversity, and inclusion as if they are disparate pieces. Diversity and inclusion are the enablers to get to your mission and to your vision. They are fundamental to the success of your mission and vision. So it’s not a disparate piece over here that we have to think about every now and then when students sit down and have a protest.
I think just a mind shift where we think about making college a good place for the underrepresented students and underrepresented minorities, we should do that, no doubt about it. But we also have to produce majority students who can function in the world. They may get an education. They may get PhDs and master’s degrees and be very smart in the fields in which we’ve educated them, but ignorant in their ability to function with, work with, innovate with, live with people who are different than they are. If that’s the case, we’ve made brilliant, ignorant graduates, and that’s not our mission or our vision.
Lhamon: As we talk about ways to think about inclusion for our campuses, we need to think about the whole student. All of our student bodies, many of our traditional residential campuses, are increasingly inviting into their space older students, and we also are seeing nontraditional students across the full range of our campus communities. We need to make sure that we are respectful and inclusive of our students with disabilities, of our students of all ages, of our students of all races, of our students of all faiths. We want to make sure that once we’ve admitted you, we’ve said this is a place where you can succeed.
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