During my tenure as an assistant dean of students, I was involved in a committee charged with responding to reported bias incidents on campus. When a member of the campus community experienced, witnessed or were aware of something that they believed to be bias, they could use an online form to report the incident anonymously. Once a week, this committee I was a part of would read over all the cases and decide how they should be handled.
The committee was made up of several administrators across the university. We had representation from fraternity and sorority life, residential programs, identity-based resource centers (Women’s Center, LGBTQ+ Center, Multicultural center, etc.), campus police, athletics and the judicial administrator’s office. Depending on how much was known from the case, we would invite staff members who may be aware of the incident or have a close connection to the individual(s) or communities involved.
There were weeks where we had only a few cases, usually within residential programs or fraternity and sorority life where students had racially charged conversations or some form of vandalism that was found to be offensive by other residents. We would see a pattern of this behavior, have the appropriate residential staff respond to the people involved, and plan to have building-wide (or sometimes even larger) educational programming to prevent these incidents from occurring again and educate the broader community on why such actions were wrong.
I found the work on this committee extremely rewarding, since many of the students I worked with had little faith in the system but trusted me. Most of the time, however, I acted as a fly on the wall. I wanted to understand what assumptions were being made of the case, how people in the room were defining bias, and how interpersonal relationships could affect the outcome of the case.
While I felt that the committee was effective, and many of those involved had well-intentions, as a young professional working in multicultural affairs, the “diversity staff” of the committee at times felt very tokenizing. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is really important to have representation on committees like this, and I cannot fault the institution for having very few members of the administration who may share the identities of those who were constantly marginalized; however, it can be awkward when everyone looks at you to decide whether it is offensive for a White student to use a stereotypical image of a Mexican man for his event featuring a menu of Mexican food.
I remember thinking that the image used was distasteful. The person who reported it was highly offended and tied it to a series of other incidents on campus that mocked Mexican culture, especially during a time where students were yelling “build a wall” around the Latinx-themed residential building. However, did I believe that person meant to offend someone? When choosing the image, was this person thinking, “let me anger the Latinx students on campus?” Not really.
Finally, someone asked: “Andrew, what do you think?” All eyes were on me. I wanted to say, “It’s racist,” but I knew that wouldn’t be effective. The conversation would then turn on me, and people would begin to dissect the actions of the student and question whether I thought the student was racist — which is not what I wanted to imply.
