A public admission by Bellevue College administrators that they could have done a better job informing students about a series of hate speech incidents on campus directed toward Muslims and members of the LGTBQ community is winning the college praise from some of its most vociferous critics.
A group of student activists say that they were outraged that the college had failed to notify them about a string of anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ graffiti writing that had adorned walls of buildings across the sprawling campus since January. But they also say that the college’s recent outreach over the past few days has been reassuring, though they remain cautiously optimistic.
For their part, Bellevue College officials say that they mistakenly excluded students from a mass email broadcast informing the campus community about the hate incidents.
“It was never something that was done on purpose,” says Dr. Gayle Barge, vice president of institutional advancement at Bellevue, a public college about 15 minutes outside of Seattle that offers associate and bachelor’s degrees and has an enrollment of about 34,000 students. “We feel like we could’ve done a better job. We’ve apologized. We were under the impression the students were emailed too, [but] they were not.”
While the college’s initial fumbling has been the subject of public scrutiny, its handling of the debacle in the days following the public apology could possibly serve as a case study for how colleges and universities can better deal with the fallout from the steady increase of biased incidents which are becoming all the more commonplace on campuses across the nation.
“We’ve found the conversation with the administration to be pretty constructive,” says Ana Mulió Álvarez, a graduating senior and a member of BC Students United, an anti-hate group that sprung up in recent days that includes student leaders from 43 organizations on campus. “We are not at war with the administration.”
At a meeting held at the school’s cafeteria on Tuesday afternoon, student leaders presented a long list of demands to the administration that include the hiring of additional security officers, recruiting additional faculty of color and implementing a zero tolerance policy when it comes to racism, discrimination and differential treatment.
