Chronicle of Higher Education, NOVEMBER 24, 2020
Academe’s Disturbing Indifference to Racism
College presidents are more concerned with reputation management than
racial justice.
By Eddie R. Cole
On a Saturday night earlier this fall, approximately 300 Northwestern
University students gathered to march for the abolition of the
university police force. A Whole Foods window was smashed, campus and
community buildings were spray-painted, and a Northwestern banner was
removed, burned, and left at the home of Morton Schapiro, the president.
The following Monday, Schapiro emailed the campus: “I condemn, in the
strongest possible terms, the overstepping of the protesters. They have
no right to menace members of our academic and surrounding communities.”
Schapiro condemned the defacing of property, and also chants that he
said went into the early hours of Sunday morning: “f— you Morty” and
“piggy Morty” — the latter of which he suggested bordered on
anti-Semitism. “It is an abomination and you should be ashamed of
yourselves,” he wrote. “If you haven’t yet gotten my point,” he
continued, “I am disgusted by those who chose to disgrace this
university in such a fashion.”
“Abomination,” “disgrace,” shame, disgust — it is rare to hear a sitting
college president sound off with such vehemence. Indeed, it was exactly
such passion and moral abhorrence that was lacking from college
presidents’ anodyne statements on police violence earlier this summer
(“a true master class in the passive voice,” wrote Jason England and
Richard Purcell in The Chronicle Review, of one such statement).
Nowhere in Schapiro’s nearly 700-word email did he disclose that
students had first presented their concerns about campus police on June
3 following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Nor did he
mention that months had passed since Northwestern administrators
promised to release their police budget to the public, or reference
reports that show Black students representing only 6 percent of his
university’s enrollment while Black people account for up to 40 percent
of police stops initiated by campus officers.
Faculty members in the Department of African American Studies were quick
to respond:
It is only when your own pleasant suburban life was disrupted by student
protestors that your expression of outrage and dismay to our university
community rose to a level beyond the banal, the tepid, and the timid.
Pushback also came from Jewish students, faculty members, and alumni,
who dismissed his anti-Semitism claim, calling it “a cudgel to denigrate
Black radical protest.”
What are we to make of this incident?
Some will fixate, as Schapiro would have them, on the details of
Northwestern students’ behavior. But that would miss a larger point.
What the incident reveals is that presidents still too often shy away
from the moral authority their institutions grant them — except when
opportunities to police student dissent arise. Is it surprising that the
destruction of property and uncivil behavior animated Schapiro more than
police violence and racial injustice? In a word, no. His actions — and
inactions — fit a pattern of modern academic leadership more concerned
with safety, civility, and reputation management than with enacting
meaningful social and racial justice.
Look back to another moment when racial equality and civil rights were
roiling campuses: the 1960s. In July 1963, President John F. Kennedy
called on college presidents for assistance: “The leadership that you
and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity
today will influence American life for decades to come.” Some academic
leaders rose to the historic challenge, but many shrank from the task of
directly addressing racism.
Consider George W. Beadle’s situation at the University of Chicago in
January 1962. After decades of complaints from the Black community about
racially restrictive housing covenants, students and alumni were raising
similar concerns. (At this time, only 2 percent of University of Chicago
students were Black.) Through the expansion of its footprint, the
university now owned several apartment buildings where demonstrated
incidents of housing discrimination had occurred. Beadle, new to the
job, praised his predecessor’s expansionist policy:
Urban renewal was “a noble goal for a noble university,” he added. When
students launched a multiweek sit-in in Beadle’s office to end racist
practices in university-owned housing, he was aggrieved. He preferred a
gradual approach to integration over an “abrupt” one that might endanger
the university in some way. Besides, the sit-in was “emotional,” and the
university “cannot ‘negotiate’ with any group of students.” Beadle
attempted to make the student’s methods the story, though such tactics
were made more difficult when the university’s public-relations staff
accidentally mailed its internal talking points to members of the media.
For Beadle, a reckoning with university-supported racism was a time for
misdirection and a slowing down of anti-racist fervor. An aversion to
controversy and banal, conservative managerialism was the focal point —
not racial justice. In this case, as in the recent incident involving
Morton Schapiro at Northwestern, a common approach of the
self-proclaimed liberal university becomes clear: Convince the public
that the issue at hand is about anything other than racism.
The ’60s also offer a notable counterexample. In 1963, shortly after the
bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four
Black girls, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, a segregationist, came
to speak at Princeton, invited by the Whig-Cliosophic Society. Princeton
President Robert F. Goheen denounced Barnett’s views while defending his
right to free speech. The appearance itself went off without violence,
and The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Barnett was booed 15 times
and applauded 32 times.
Goheen was in Washington, D.C., for an American Council on Education
meeting during the talk, and returned to Princeton to a mailbox full of
indignation from conservative alumni. Alarmed by Barnett’s chilly
reception, they announced the end of donations, the desire to send their
sons elsewhere, and disgust for Princeton. Confronted by all this,
Goheen went into action.
He wrote zingers back to disgruntled alumni, sending them Princeton’s
admissions guidance for Black students. He gave a passionate 30-minute
address to an audience of 1,200 on “the no longer excusable, no longer
postponable, no-longer-to-be-met-with-lipservice need” for racial
equality. He also ended any business deals with housing organizations
known to employ discriminatory practices and doubled down on recruiting
Black students.
He met with the Board of Trustees, read them the introduction to his
address on racial equality to “make his personal conviction on this
matter very clear,” and suggested a summer institute for underserved
youth. Goheen expanded the university’s fair-employment standards and
committed university personnel to ensuring equal racial opportunities
across housing, admissions, and employment.
Shortly after this, a committee of Ivy League registrars formed to
better recruit Black students. “Everyone realized … they had to do more
than just talk about attracting capable young Negroes,” explained the
dean of the college at Princeton. “They had to actually do something
about it.”
The same diagnosis is applicable today.
It is not enough to simply talk about racial equity and social justice.
Today — as in the past — college presidents must ensure that campus
policies and practices match their public proclamations if they want to
effectively address racial justice.
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