While May serves as the capstone to the academic journeys for legions of the nation’s college graduates, for the 2017 graduating class of Bethune-Cookman University (BCU), a historically Black university founded in 1904 by Mary McLeod Bethune, located in Daytona Beach, Florida—May 10th was a day filled with pomp and circumstance as well as protest.
Despite a petition signed by more than 60,000 students, alumni, and community members, PresidentEdison O. Jackson and the BCU Board of Regents moved forward, ignoring protest from the community, alumni, students, and faculty, and extended an invitation to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to deliver the graduation commencement address.
Myriad missteps led to ominous clouds that accumulated and hovered above DeVos’ invitation: the public gaff of misspelling W.E.B. DuBois name; the ahistorical, decontextualized, and misguided reference to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as the first schools of choice; the unwavering support she provided to charter schools and voucher programs. Thus, for many DeVos represented the very oppressive systems that led to the broken and uneven P-12 systems that several individuals in the audience had to overcome, just to pursue their postsecondary education.
The outcome of the decision to forgo rescinding DeVos’ invitation became manifest in a most profound and public way at the graduation commencement ceremony. Many of the graduates chose to engage in active protest, ranging from booing, turning their backs to the stage, and even exiting the venue altogether.
What this debacle provides is an opportunity for critical reflection and a ‘teachable moment’ on a number of topics—agency, education, oppression, race, and representation—across a diverse constituency; namely, students; whether alumni or current as well as administration and faculty.
For the University administration, the reflection process must begin with introspection to determine what beyond the espoused narrative of “exposing students to individuals who hold divergent viewpoints” would move them to shift in a direction that was so diametrically opposed to their constituencies.
Part of the administration’s reflective process might prompt a review of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, particularly his discussion of ‘playing host to the oppressor:’
