LOS ANGELES – Five months after a group of students at DePauw University angrily confronted their college president following a string of racially charged incidents on campus, Dr. D. Mark McCoy was sitting in front of his office computer actively processing the incident with Dr. Charles H. F. Davis, who was some 2,000 miles away.
McCoy wasn’t alone. He had gathered members of his cabinet, and other key administrators from across campus, to participate in a virtual eight-week intensive Equity Institute sponsored by the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California (USC).
The day’s topic, as noted on the syllabus, was “Understanding Campus Unrest and Responding to Student Protest,” which included a 90-minute facilitated discussion by Davis that surveyed the literature, examined two case studies and allowed the DePauw administrators and faculty the opportunity to reflect on the challenges that they witnessed first-hand last semester.
Davis, the director of research and chief strategy officer at the Race and Equity Center, pointed out that organized student demonstrations on campus can be viewed as a form of “participatory democracy” aimed at impacting change, adding that “we often think of it as the problem itself, rather than as something that helps us understand the problems that are already existing on our campus.”
For McCoy — who has been at the helm of the small, private liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana since July 2016 — the opportunity to delve deeply into issues about racial equity and race-conscious leadership has been a central focus of his presidency.
“We’re always looking for ways to train ourselves and do better,” he says in an interview with Diverse, adding that the Institute has already proved useful in providing his team with a roadmap on how to better cultivate relations on campus. “The work is never done. It’s like the horizon, we’re always running to it, but there is more work to do.”
As McCoy puts it, the protest on campus “was a bit of a perfect storm,” but helped administrators realize that “we have to continue to develop more proactive strategies each year.”
