Diversity at Northwestern was the hot topic on campus this year - we featured the individuals, student groups and organizations working to improve it in our spring issue of the North by Northwestern magazine. But keeping track of how the movement started and subsequently branched out – both within and outside the student body – can be tricky. So as we've done with on- and off-campus housing and ASG, we're taking a perennial issue and putting it in some context to be continually updated.
WHAT IS THE ADMINISTRATION DOING RIGHT NOW TO RESPOND TO STUDENT PRESSURE?
When student group leaders met with Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin, Provost Dan Linzer, University President Morton Schapiro and Dona Cordero, the new assistant provost for diversity and inclusion on Saturday, May 19, NU4DiversityNow leader Jazzy Johnson proposed that the administration sign their diversity petition and commit to releasing specific, attainable goals by the end of the school year. While Schapiro declined to sign the petition, Telles-Irvin verbally committed to make public her report on specific steps that will be taken to strengthen diversity at Northwestern. The report is due to Schapiro by the end of June.
Telles-Irvin says she hopes to have a letter ready for incoming freshman this year regarding standards Northwestern upholds and what the university requires of students in respect to tolerance of others.
Speaking during the meeting, Cordero looked to past Northwestern diversity initiatives for inspiration. The plans, amendments and programs included from 2002 to 2012 are numerous and quite diverse, themselves. It is officially unknown right now whether these initiatives are ongoing or abandoned. They include (but are not limited to):
- School of Communication International artists series; Continuation after first series (during the 2002-2003 school year) is unknown.
- The Center for African American History has not held an event since May 2011 (2003-2004).
- LGBT Resource Center is now expanding (2004-2005).
- Center on the Science of Diversity speaker series was discontinued after 2010 (2006-2007).
- “Sexual orientation” added to NU’s nondiscrimination policy (2007-2008), with “gender identity” and “gender expression” following the year after (2008-2009).
- Partnership with Questbridge, a non-profit that links low-income high school students with university opportunities is still available to students (2008-2009).
- Northwestern Greek Allies group held three events in spring 2011 (2009-2010).
- Latino Studies and Sexuality Studies programs established – neither program is listed in Northwestern’s undergraduate program webpage, and while a “Gender and Sexuality Studies” cluster is available to graduate students, no specific “Latino Studies” program is listed. However, a Latina and Latino Studies program both a major and minor, despite its absence from official NU program lists (2010-2011).
- Center for Black Performing Arts has been discontinued, according to administrators at May 19 meeting (2011-2012).
The section for the 2011-2012 school year lists 23 items, more than four times the number of efforts in most proceeding years.
Items of the future (2012-2013 school year):
- Creation of an improved bias incident report website
- Appointment of a Feinberg School of Medicine vice dean for diversity
- Panhellenic diversity and gender forum that is “being facilitated” by an Evanston YWCA member
- Transgender training for Health Services staff
- Establishment of an Institute for Public Health and Medicine, which includes programs in Healthcare Equity, Community Health Inequalities and a Center for Global Health
- CAPS and Women’s Center plan to hold a year-long series on “privilege and micro-agressions”
- A “Healthcare Issues” event about transgender healthcare
The seven planned initiatives for 2012-2013 do not include focus groups and other steps to be taken by the administration, which will be unveiled at the end of June.
In an interview, Cordero detailed her plan of attack for this long list of past and present diversity initiatives, some of which were never fully implemented or are no longer active.
“What I have to do is I have to go through all of those [initiatives] and connect them to whoever the contact person is for each of those and find out whether or not they are still active, because some of them may not be in place any longer, so I need to do a lot more work to find that out," she said. "Then, for those that are still active, I want to make note of those, share all of those initiatives with the working groups that might be the appropriate working groups to take a look at those and once we have all of that we’re going to start thinking about, okay what are the current needs? And are these initiatives that are in place meeting the needs? And if they aren’t then we might need to start thinking about what’s going to fill those gaps. And that’s where, perhaps, new initiatives will come in, or there may be opportunities for collaboration across things.”
Cordero says she wants to adopt initiatives that may have potential for improvement. From there, new plans will fill the holes left by inadequacies of the past, she says.
There are five working groups (academics and education, faculty recruitment and retention, pipeline, campus life and lifetime connections), created with members from a larger University Diversity Council and comprised of students, faculty, staff and alumni, that will look at the active initiatives that fit each of their separate descriptions. The working groups, which act as “arms of the council,” says Cordero, will report back to the council with their findings. The council will also hear recommendations from the Diversity and Inclusion White Paper. Then, time tables for the completion of projects will be recommended.
WHAT ARE THE ACTIONS AND GOALS OF DIVERSITY STUDENT LEADERS?
Johnson says there are several steps the university could take within the next year to strengthen diversity at Northwestern.
A diversity curriculum requirement, one initiative outlined in a six-point diversity petition that developed after a diversity meeting in February, isn’t fully formed yet. It could take any of many different shapes, but it’s an important step for NU4DiversityNow.
“It can be implemented, and it does need to come from the provost office,” Johnson says. "He can do that."
But Provost Dan Linzer countered Johnson’s argument during the May 19 meeting. “The curriculum is the responsibility of the faculty,” he says. Johnson asked Linzer to mandate that the faculty introduce a requirement, but Linzer maintained that he could not push the faculty to make the decision.
Johnson also asked for more resources for minority students. She gave Multicultural Student Affairs as an example of a group in need of funding.
“Because of who MSA does serve right now, with the limited resources comes limited access to things to better the people's Northwestern experiences,” Johnson says. “And so, I think it's playing into this lacking of cultural diversity.”
Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin said she could “look at what is being funded [for MSA], and look for a way to re-look at funding to maximize” what the organization is getting out of their allotted money.
According to an “Info Pack” on student diversity efforts and initiatives, events held to promote diversity on campus have been held within a concentrated effort since January. The list includes 23 events and happenings, such as:
- Jan. 19: “Caucus Against Racial Prejudice on Campus”
- Feb. 12: Diversity and Inclusion Forum with Schapiro, Linzer and Telles-Irvin, six petition demands presented
- Feb. 14: Students met with Linzer about release of Diversity Report, Diversity Council
- March 5: Diversity Training for 60 student leaders run by a YWCA representative on Diversity and Equality
- April 2: Petition officially launched
- April 21: Ski Team Beer Olympics
- April 25: Diversity Report released
- April 27: Student forum “How Many White People Do You Know?” on Deering Meadow
- April 29-May 18: various groups hosted dialogues and roundtable discussions on diversity. Alianza, Political Union, AsianNUproject, Apna, SASA, McSA, NU4DiversityNow and others held events.
“I'm very encouraged by the conversations that are happening, but it the same time, it can be characterized as chaotic,” Johnson says. “I think also just some of the resistance that we're still facing in general for what we're doing can still be pretty chaotic. I mean, looking at the comments under all of these stories, that's a little chaotic.”
“I'm personally a person who [enjoys] chaos because I think we need chaos to get to a better Northwestern. Because I think that when we're just kind of chilling, and we're not talking about any of these things, and we're just not even engaging in this issue that is so critical, and I think when we're comfortable, there's a problem. So I'm a person that engages chaos.”
HOW ARE FACULTY MEMBERS INVOLVED?
Faculty have been aware of and involved in conversations about diversity issues on campus for years, says Nitasha Sharma, an assistant professor in African American Studies and Asian American Studies. But this year, faculty worked alongside unprecedented levels of student involvement.
"I've only been here for six years. This is a movement that's happening and we haven't seen anything like this yet," Sharma says.
Though faculty members have been a part of projects such as the White Paper Diversity Report, most of the faculty involvement in the recent campus diversity movement has come just from pure interest of faculty members who participate through petitions, email exchanges and events such as the Student-Faculty Speak Out. Sharma, who read a faculty statement at the Deering Meadow forum on April 27, says she and other faculty members have met with student diversity leaders to offer guidance as well to ask how to best support them.
"They are really taking the charge, and as a faculty, we are trying to support and follow and cooperate with students," Sharma says. "I hope it's not hierarchical."
45 faculty members, including Sharma, signed their name to that faculty statement, the "Faculty Statement on Northwestern University's Culture of Racism," which also was an online petition that has more than 200 signatures from members of the Northwestern community. The statement argued against vilification of students who called out discrimination on campus and stated the recent racists incidents on campus weren't isolated events, but rather a systemic issue.
After the release of the White Paper Diversity Report, faculty members and students released a "Faculty/Student Petition for a Culture of Diversity at Northwestern" that listed four demands to facilitate the recommendations outlined in the White Paper Diversity Report: doubling the number of minority students, faculty and stuff; increasing the amount of funding, administrative support and resources for services such as Multicultural Student Affairs and educational programming; a two-course diversity competency curriculum requirement; increase diversity in Northwestern's "intellectual culture" through the founding of new research centers – a Center for Critical Race and Cultural Studies, a Center for Critical Disability Studies, and a Center for Critical Sexuality Studies.
Sharma says Barnor Hesse, a co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion White Paper workgroup and an associate professor of African American Studies, has been studying peer institutions to look at how to institute the curriculum change. UC Berkeley, for example, adopted an American Cultures requirement in 1991 to "constitute a new approach that responds directly to the problem encountered in numerous disciplines of how better to present the diversity of American experience to the diversity of American students whom we now educate."
Exactly how to implement that curriculum change isn't nailed down yet, though Sharma says there would likely be multiple ways to fulfill it so that each undergraduate school or department could offer coursework that meets the requirement.
"The level at which we're starting at talking across different groups and incidents and comments on articles really shows that we have not prepared our students to talk about difference and inequality," Sharma says.
WHAT IS THE CURRENT ROLE OF THE DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION WHITE PAPER?
The diversity report (explained here), written two years ago and finally released in May, outlines problems recognized by the university administration regarding diversity statistics and even the definition of diversity – is it just race and ethnicity? Or are gender, sexual orientation and other traits part of the conversation, too?
“The report was pretty damning…it makes the administration slightly more accountable,” says Medill senior Dallas Wright, NU Collectives’ website manager. “It's allowed people to take a more critical eye to like their university experience."
Johnson says there’s no negative side to the release of the report. She and her peers pushed for it, and it happened – she called it a "small victory."
“I can be honest and say that when I was reading it, I was like a kid in a candy store because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, yes! We’re not crazy!’” Johnson says.
However, the report is not seen by administrative actors as a blueprint for how to proceed from here in the diversity movement. Telles-Irvin and Cordero said at the May 19 meeting with student leaders that the report will be taken into account, though.
“The White Paper is being used by the working groups, as well as the diversity council,” says Cordero. “We’ll take that information into the working groups and say, ‘How can we apply this? What recommendations do we want to move forward on? Do we think we should move forward on?’”
Linzer, similarly, says some of the goals of the White Paper are “practical,” while others are “more aspirational.”
Some student diversity leaders have voiced objections to the way the administration is weaving the diversity report into their recent actions.
“As far as administration reaction to it, I do not think they're having an appropriate response,” Johnson says. “I think they're kind of possibly pushing it to the side and like starting their own [focus groups] when a lot of this information is already there. And so what needs to happen is like, we have the diversity report. We need to implement it.”
During the May 14 Diversity “Speak Out” with faculty and students, Hesse discussed a topic breached in the diversity report: two kinds of diversity, “social” and “cultural.” He says he feels the type of diversity Northwestern administrators see as necessary for their image may not be the correct option. “Social” diversity has framed the administration’s response to calls for change, according to Hesse.
A “socially” diverse school will have the numbers to claim it's at least a little diverse, with an adequate representation of minority groups through clubs on campus and maybe staged photos of the president standing amongst a mix of different students. However, a “culturally” diverse environment actually integrates these diverse social groups that to some NU students at the meeting seem very isolated from each other.
Wright outlines an example of “social” diversity, compared to “cultural”:
“We have these traditions, and these events, processes, that are the embodiment of Northwestern, right? Everyone knows these things – Dance Marathon and the IFC and PHA rushing Greek system. So you have these things that are unassailable, that are just like, this is what all Northwestern students do and experience. But culturally, and it says this in the diversity report, culturally, they are not diverse. Socially, anyone can go, and there can be a mix of students, and it's not an all-white event. But culturally, it does not include, you know, facets of other cultures. And yet you are told and compelled to participate in these things because that's what all students do. And so that's what I feel like [the diversity report has helped] people re-examine how they've navigated the university over their time here and question things that you take for granted, like a Dance Marathon, or a rush process.”
WHAT IS PRESIDENT SCHAPIRO'S PERSPECTIVE OF THE DIVERSITY INITIATIVE?
Schapiro says that, as an administrator who is barely on campus during Spring Quarter 2012, he hasn’t been as involved as he'd like to be. When it comes to diversity numbers, he wants to see Northwestern at the top of the list of COFHE schools where Williams College, his old stomping grounds, is.
The Consortium on Financing Higher Education is a group of 31 private universities and liberal arts colleges that formed in the mid-1970s. They track their data with the purpose of analyzing undergraduate education as it relates to topics like financial aid and admissions.
"We're not where we want to be, but at least we're in the top half [of COFHE schools]," Schapiro says. "We should be one of the leaders."
Though he wants to see the student body more diverse, Schapiro questions some aspects of the diversity petition on his desk. He doesn’t see doubling black and Latino student enrollment as a reasonable goal, especially when no specific strategies are suggested.
"Who do you take those spots from?" he says. "Should we increase that at the expense of Asian Americans?" He added that increasing the size of incoming classes is also not a reasonable solution.
As far as curricular adjustments go, Schapiro remains unsure. Since he doesn't teach a class in the spring, he has no say in changes to distribution requirements like ordinary faculty members. He said areas where he has more control over diversity standards include the budget and university admissions.
Schapiro says that he is skeptical of the diversity movement at Northwestern, just as he was of the issue while at Williams. Eventually, he became convinced that a diversity requirement was necessary in the classroom there, and wouldn’t be surprised if he came to the same conclusion at Northwestern. Although Morty may be unsure about the diversity movement as a whole, he agrees there is work to be done on that front.
"We're not declaring victory," he says.
WHAT IS ASG'S INVOLVEMENT IN DIVERSITY ON CAMPUS?
The ASG Diversity Committee began in winter 2012. After then-Weinberg senior Tonantzin Carmona was harassed by a group of female students in January, outgoing Alianza Co-President and current ASG Diversity Committee Chair Hayley Stevens helped organize a meeting where Schapiro, Dean of Students Burgwell Howard, Telles-Irvin and Daniel Linzer were all present. Stevens, Johnson and Benjy Leibovitz continued to meet and work putting forth a series of six initiatives that emerged from the meeting.
"When we were meeting with the administration, it was harder to justify what we were doing," Stevens says. "We were trying to centralize and be the source of these issues, and I thought, 'What if we went to ASG and made it an all-campus issue?"
Since then, the committee itself has moved its focus away from directly working on the six initiatives, which Stevens says are a shared responsibility among the committee and other diversity efforts on campus. Right now the committee is working on a bias response team with Howard modeled after the University of Chicago's similar program. (In addition, Stevens cites Stanford and Tri-College Consortium schools Swarthmore college, Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College as schools whose diversity initiatives or campus culture are models to adapt at Northwestern.) Stevens says the committee is also hoping to work with the Rainbow Alliance on their gender-neutral bathrooms initiative, along with student group leaders to diversity their recruiting processes in order to increase the number of minority students in campus leadership positions.
The committee will also be involved in facilitating further diversity training sessions, a trial of which was hosted in March. Stevens says she's planning to get more students to attend those future sessions, in addition to working with Joshua McKenzie, the assistant director of orientation and parent programs, to see how conversations about diversity could be better incorporated into peer advising groups during new student orientation.
WHAT WERE THE MAIN ISSUES OF THE BEER OLYMPICS INCIDENT?
Part of it was the nature of event itself, a "beer Olympics" game involving members of the Ski Team dressing up in offensive costumes representing Bangladesh, South Africa, Uganda, the Navajo Nation, Canada and Ireland that perpetuated stereotypes and were culturally insensitive. But questions about how the incident went public and how much of the Ski Team's own actions were the result of coercion also received attention.
Lewis says he witnessed the Saturday, April 21 event while visiting a friend's house and proceeded to call a different friend on the Ski Team to find out more. He took photos from his friend's house and didn't have contact until later that night, when, after being informed that he was upset, members of the Ski Team reached out, apologized and set up a meeting for the following day.
At the meeting, they discussed how to move forward from the event, which included the Ski Team agreeing to support diversity initiatives on campus. That meeting was also where they talked about photos of the event. Lewis says there was no coercion – he says he was planning on sending his photos to the administration, and if it didn't respond by the end of business hours on Monday, it would go public, an outcome he said was a group decision among those in attendance. But he wanted the Ski Team's own photos, and they obliged.
"I said that we're going to send them to the administration, but we'd like your photos because it makes a point," Lewis said. "An ultimatum suggests I had something more that they did not have, or that I'm going to destroy you. An ultimatum would suggest that I was going to call Burgie and say, 'Discpline these guys.' But that's not what happened. 'Here is what we have. What you have is going to do a lot more to incite some conversation. Now you do what's right.' What's right is to give us these photos to incite a political discourse at Northwestern and challenge the administration."
Ski Team President Matt Dolph says he stands by comments he made about there being "strong-arming" at the meeting, but insisted the meetings had been collaborative from the get-go – he says providing the photos was something the group did voluntarily.
"I was surprised when Ben and Matt agreed to send the photos," Leibowitz says."I thought that was a brave and mature move. That was beyond them trying to save the Ski Team."
There was, however, a misunderstanding about the photos – not about their exchange, but about their release. Lewis says it was understood that the photos would go to Schapiro and a few other administrators and campus leaders, but says they never talked about Facebook and thought campus media was included. The photos also appeared on a Tumble site, but Lewis took them down at the Ski Team's request when they met again that Monday night.
"Because we were working together and because I respect the guys a lot, I took them down," Lewis says.
CAN YOU PUT THE RECENT EVENTS AND THE SENIOR CLASS IN SOME CONTEXT?
The class of 2012 arrived on campus in 2008 to realize there were only 81 black freshman. Later that year in the spring of 2009, there was a racial profiling incident at Kellogg in which then-junior Josh Williams says he was asked by three different people at Kellogg what he was doing in the building. The following year in the fall of 2009, two students went in blackface as a part of their Halloween costumes. In the past school year, three major incidents happened. The first was on Jan. 12, when then-senior Tonantzin Carmona was harassed by a group of girls who, after Carmona ignored them, shouted comments like "What, no hablas Inglés?" News of the encounter led to a caucus on racial prejudice later that month.
On April 21, Kellyn Lewis witnessed a beer olympics game put on by members of the Ski Team that led to several events on campus devoted addressing diversity issues, such as the Deering Meadow forum the following Friday. In May, two students reported being egged and having a water bottle thrown at them after a man shouted slurs at them, an incident which NUPD began investigating.
Reporting for this explainer by Nolan Feeney, Annalise Frank and Julie Kliegman. The explainer will continue to be updated.