An Open Letter on George Floyd, Race, and Higher Education
The murder of George Floyd is a stain on this country, as is the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many other people of color to list who have died at the hands of police or those who were acting on behalf of the police. The violent police response to peaceful protests across the country makes the aggressive, militarized culture of the police even more glaring. I stand with Black Lives Matter in condemning the culture of structural racism and police violence that holds down people of color. We, as a society and especially as educators, need to listen to the voices crying out in the streets and work for the necessary changes to allow everyone in this country live up to its loftiest ideals of equity and equality.
Education is and has been one of the biggest carriers of structural racism. While K-12 education has a whole host of issues, higher education has a checkered past in terms of equality, to say the least. Among countless other issues, most colleges and universities excluded black students long after the Brown v. Board of Education decision banned segregation in education, and the integration of many universities was far from peaceful. Most egregiously, white students at the University of Mississippi rioted and nearly burned the campus down to stop the integration of their university. Since integration, overt and covert instances of discrimination have remained commonplace. There have been incidences of discrimination that have caused large demonstrations on college campuses consistently, for example the well-publicized University of Missouri protests in 2015-2016 after a string of racist incidents. Many campus institutions, especially the Greek system, systematically exclude or segregate students of color. The curriculum often excludes black culture and black viewpoints. Students of color are subjected to endless micro and macro aggressions from white students and professors, such as tokenism and assuming that their race was the defining factor in their admission to the university. These issues along with all of the larger structural racism that surrounds higher education leave students of color with a distinct disadvantage, which is reflected in the entry and graduation rates.
Research has shown that campus racial environments can be improved through: the inclusion of students, faculty, and administrators of color; a curriculum that reflects the historical and contemporary experiences of people of color; programs to support the recruitment, retention and graduation of students of color; and a college/university mission that reinforces the institution's commitment to pluralism. These are reforms that every college/university can and should make. They also need to use their significant platforms to lift up black voices and black scholars, use their significant research capabilities to study ways to improve equity and equality throughout our society, and their lobbying abilities to fight for those improvements.
Higher education, along with home ownership, is one of the two main indicators of generational wealth, and too many people of color are systematically locked out. As a white man, I know that I have been the primary beneficiary of the current system, and I will never understand how it feels to live with the system working against me. I don’t have all of the answers, nor should I. But I’m here, and I stand with my black and brown friends, colleagues, and students to overcome these obstacles in the current system and fight to make the system work for everyone the way it worked for me.
Sincerely,
Nick Brundage
Founder and Head Counselor
