Like the year before, 2018 has proven to be an important one for issues relating to diversity, equity and higher education. Most notably, this past year we witnessed up close a number of racial incidents on campus involving law enforcement being called on students and staff of color.
Over the summer, a Smith College student was racially profiled while eating lunch on campus. Oumou Kanoute, a sophomore, was eating lunch and reading a book in a common room on campus that requires keycard access when she noticed a White man and a White woman pacing outside the room’s entrance. Campus police arrived a short while later and told Kanoute — who is 5-foot, 2 inches — that a “Black woman demonstrating suspicious behavior” was spotted by an employee.
“All I did was be Black,” she says.
In response to the incident, Smith College president Dr. Kathleen McCartney apologized to Kanoute and announced that the school was hiring a third-party investigator to review the incident. Smith College was not an anomaly. It was the latest in a string of disturbing cases involving White people calling campus authorities to report Black people going about their everyday lives, including waiting for friends, napping or doing their jobs.
Officials at the University of Texas at San Antonio launched separate investigations into “possible discrimination” and “academic management of the classroom” after a Black student had police called on her by a White professor after she had put her feet up on one of the classroom chairs. The biology professor, Dr. Anita Moss, led university police to the student during her Anatomy & Physiology class and watched as the student was escorted out of the lecture hall. The video went viral on social media.
Not since protests in 2015, have there been massive demonstrations on campus like this year, with students taking to the streets to call attention to racism and racist symbols — like Confederate statues that still adorn campuses throughout the country. Students at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill toppled ‘Silent Sam’ and demanded that the statue be removed from the center of campus. When college officials pledged to relocate the statue to another part of campus, a group of teaching assistants and instructors pledged a “grade strike,” threatening to withhold more than 2,000 final grades if the university continued with its plan to house the statue of the Confederate soldier in a $5.3 million history center.
Meanwhile, the contentious and legal challenges to affirmative action resurfaced yet again, as the Trump administration abandoned Obama administration policies that called on universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses. Over the summer, the Education and Justice Departments rescinded seven Obama-era policy guidelines on affirmative action. The move came as a group of Asian Americans backed by a conservative anti-affirmative-action group sued Harvard University, claiming that they were systematically excluded from the Ivy League university. Legal experts predict that similar legal challenges to the policy will inevitably end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. With a conservative-leaning court, it is possible that affirmative action could become a policy of the past.
