After a tumultuous week, what’s the path to mend Mizzou?

Black and white students at the University of Missouri solidly agree on three points.

First, even with the toppling of the university’s president and chancellor, any subsequent changes on campus can’t completely banish bigotry.

Second, white and black students know vastly different experiences at the school.

For the white students who make up three-fourths of Mizzou’s 35,000-plus enrollment, their own skin color rarely registers as part of their experience.

For the 7 percent who are black, it seems to matter constantly. It can mean four years of isolation and marginalization amid a faculty that is less than 3 percent African-American — leaving them feeling never completely part of the whole.

Third, after a student-led revolt that included a one-man hunger strike in a tent city and that was capped by striking football players, few see a precise path to campus harmony.

“I don’t think we’ll ever defeat racism in America,” said R. Shawn Abrahams, a graduate student voicing the sentiments of both black and white students.

So now that the revolution helped take down two powerful men atop the campus court, what becomes of the kingdom?

For starters, newfound tension. The campus all but shut down at midweek after racists trolled the Internet with death threats. White students often felt defensive. Black students became targets of fresh attacks.

MU’s racial unease won’t evaporate merely with two new faces at the top. The environment that caused the uproar, said one professor, dates to the Missouri Compromise.

Interviews with a wide range of students, faculty and administrators in Columbia and across the country reveal a challenge both old and enormous. The world of academia tends to embrace calls for amorphous “dialogues” and empathy. Among the few concrete ideas include filling faculty ranks with more African-Americans. But schools have been pressed on that point long before many of today’s professors were born, with little success.

MU was the first state university west of the Mississippi River, and its founders in 1839 included supporters of slavery in a country and a region that have always known racial strife. The group Concerned Student 1950 that led an autumn of protests draws its name from the first year MU finally admitted black students.

The activism that helped upend the careers of the president and chancellor last week traces to the shooting death of an 18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo., 15 months earlier, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. It also reflects the state of Missouri’s reborn, and increasingly contentious, grappling with the uncomfortable issue of race.

Much work remains to link the protests to noticeable change.

Replacement administrators will arrive to their new suites with a task no less daunting than protecting the campus from racism. They’ll face a newly emboldened student body. And they’ll find themselves lobbied by a faculty that was launching its own uprising before the football team turned the tide. Who might even want such a job?

“You can’t be as tone deaf as the high administration was this time around,” said Stefan Bradley, who earned his doctorate at MU in 2003 and now is director of the African American Studies Program at St. Louis University. “You can’t stop the next redneck from doing something stupid. … But responses to those kinds of things are what black students are concerned about.”

Two worlds

In Columbia, black students find themselves energized by events that proved they are, collectively, quite powerful. But that realization comes mixed with anxiety. That same show of force launched a backlash and set the intimidating challenge of moving the needle on race.

Black students say life on the Columbia campus feels anything but post-racial. They see a faculty with few people who look like them, who understand their particular experience, who are familiar with their struggles.

They don’t detect in their white peers enough understanding of, or intuitive empathy for, what it means to be African-American at a school where that’s such a rare thing. Set aside the ugliest slurs and daily life can prove emotionally exhausting. People too often wrongly assume a black student must be on an athletic scholarship, likely got in only by some affirmative action policy or somehow surprisingly is a math major.

“I invited a friend to a party,” said Sierra Morris, a black student from the Chicago suburbs. “She asked, ‘Is it a black party?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s going to be black people at it.’ She said, ‘I might feel uncomfortable.’

“I said, ‘That’s how I feel every day.’ ”

For their part, white students widely acknowledge they can’t know what college feels like for a person of color. Few among them would reject a need for greater sensitivity to those who sit next to them in class.

Still, some white students struggle to understand why the acts of a few racist outliers — hurling epithets at the student body president, scrawling a swastika in feces on a wall — warrant the ousting of the president or the chancellor. Some worry that even mild objection to the tactics or particular goals of the protest movement could brand a white person as racist.

“It’s driving a wedge through people,” said St. Louis junior Daniel Yaeger, who is white and thinks the entire school is being cast unfairly in a negative light. “I don’t think it’s pandemic. I don’t see a big problem here.”

Protesters complained last week even after the president and chancellor’s resignations that the school seemed slow to react to the latest racist sludge on social media. Yet when an email from campus police called for people who see “hateful and/or hurtful” speech to alert authorities, other students wondered if things were going too far.

“Ridiculous,” said Austin Curtis, 18, a white student from Omaha, Neb. “I think Columbia has a bigger problem than hurtful things being said.”

The email drew heat from both the conservative Missouri Alliance for Freedom, which called it “chilling,” and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri.

In the short term, everyone braces for even higher tensions. In a world of Twitter, Yik Yak and Facebook, action to fight racism quickly begets more racist invective. There’s hope that will fade with time.

“At these transition points, you get the swastikas,” said Berkley Hudson, the chairman of the MU Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations. “It’s going to be hard.”

Uniting any campus is tough. Students may not want the same as the faculty, which often feels unloved by the administration. Those presidents and chancellors and provosts must answer not just to those groups, but to parents, to budget-setting legislators — now a particularly conservative lot concerned that the university tilts too far left — to curators appointed by the governor.

When Clark Kerr was president of the University of California in the 1950s, he quipped that a college boss must deliver “parking for the faculty, sex for the students and athletics for the alumni.” Students mostly fend for themselves. But it’s hard to find a spot for your car on campus, and half of all varsity squads sport losing records.

At Missouri, the specific demands made by protesters went far beyond a new president. The school, like virtually every public university in the country, has looked for decades to boost its number of African-American professors and students. The protesters demanded dramatic improvements quickly.

David Westbrook, a black freshman from Chicago, said that threats or epithets are not the way racism shows itself on campus. It’s subtly felt but easily seen in the way black students congregate primarily with black students, how black students are only on occasion tapped to join white sororities or fraternities, and how and where the races segregate.

“We go to different places,” Westbrook said. “We go to different parks. We don’t get invited to frat parties.”

He’s not sure what the university can do.

“Don’t force it, but at least promote integrated social events or social outings,” he said. “But there’s got to be a movement toward integration.”

An uprising

Campus insiders suggest both UM System president Tim Wolfe and, especially, MU chancellor R. Bowen Loftin had been doomed for months.

Resentment boiled among the faculty and the graduate students they work with when the administration, on short notice at summer’s end, announced significant cuts in pay and benefits to the graduate students. Loftin was seen as caving to political pressure from Jefferson City over abortion when a doctor lost her privileges at the University of Missouri Hospital.

Meanwhile, student protests over the racial climate grew in frequency and intensity. On Nov. 2, Concerned Student 1950 pitched a tent city on the campus’s Carnahan Quadrangle, and graduate student Jonathan Butler declared he wouldn’t eat again until Wolfe was ousted or “my internal organs fail and my life is lost.”

The student group demanded that Wolfe apologize, that he be fired and that the school fulfill a set of demands made by the Legion of Black Collegians in 1969.

The protesters also insisted that within two years the school boost the percentage of black faculty to 10 percent — more than tripling the numbers.

Even the threat of canceled football games likely isn’t enough clout to deliver so much so quickly.

Still, frustrated that no one in power was listening to student complaints, the campus hierarchy tumbled and the voices of the protesters reached every corner of the school and beyond.

“The things in the past week have raised awareness,” said Laine Young-Walker, a psychiatry professor and a member of the faculty race relations committee.

The task of hiring a new chancellor and president could create new friction points. Must these new administrators be black? Can someone from inside the university see the issues objectively? How long will it take a newcomer to move the levers of power?

“There can’t be a prolonged leadership gap,” said Daryl Smith, a member of the faculty race relations committee and a professor at MU’s Trulaske College of Business.

The new administrators need not be African-American, he said. But Smith said they must be people who have the wherewithal to change the racial climate on campus. He’d like someone from inside the school who knows MU well enough to hit the ground running. He suggests Mike Middleton, a one-time civil rights lawyer who retired as deputy chancellor in August and was named interim UM System president Thursday.

Analysts concede the new bosses can’t necessarily prevent the next slur on Twitter or racist act of vandalism, but they argue that people at the top matter.

“If those people come in and listen to what students and faculty have to say and listen, really feel, what they’re going through, they can go back to their cabinet and demand that things get done,” said Shaun R. Harper, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director of that school’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education.

But like so many in academia, Harper and others often stop short of describing what the fix is beyond discussion of race and making clear to minority students that a school truly appreciates the problem.

In fact, many say that those discussions actually matter. For starters, such conversations let black or Latino or gay students know that those running a university empathize with what they’re going through.

“Campus environments evolve through attention and focus,” said Larry Roper, the former vice provost for student affairs at Oregon State University.

Part of that has already begun.

“The students are finally being listened to,” said Stephanie Shonekan, an ethnomusicology professor and chairwoman of the MU black studies department. “Now we need to challenge all students and faculty to think about race and American identity.”

That also marks the rocky road of the coming weeks and months. Nicole Monnier, a professor of Russian at MU active on a variety of campus issues, speaks admiringly of the student protests that she says sped the departure of Wolfe and Loftin. She, like several other professors, said talk of protests and race dominated classrooms in the last, tumultuous week.

“I have students who are involved in the protests,” Monnier said. “I have students who are frightened by the protests. I have students who are angry about the protests.

“It’s really hard right now.”

Remaking campus

Mizzou is far from alone. Yale’s campus fell into heated debate recently over whether that school should be advising students on the racial and ethnic sensitivity of their Halloween costumes.

At Ithaca College in New York, hundreds of students called for ditching their president last week after they thought he hadn’t responded strongly enough to racial insensitivity. The dean at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California stepped aside last week amid criticism that an email she sent about treatment of students of color there backfired because of language she used.

Emotions ran high in Lawrence last week when University of Kansas chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little moderated a forum on diversity and race.

“What students are feeling at Missouri, they are feeling all across the country,” said University of Florida history professor Ibram X. Kendi, who studies black campus movements.

Fifty years ago, he said, racial division was big and obvious. Segregation was commonplace. Racial discrimination had only recently been outlawed. Today, Kendi said, students “are being told their campuses are getting better. But when they continue to get subjected to (racism) and there is not an institutional response that is fast and quick and strong, they feel compelled to act.”

The Black Power protests on campuses a generation ago were often waged by students who were the first in their families to attend college.

“Now you’ve got second-generation black students who tell their parents what they’re seeing, and those parents say that’s the same thing they experienced,” said Shawn Alexander, an associate professor in African and African-American studies at KU. “There’s a particular frustration to that.”

Professors, black and white, regularly criticize schools for lackluster minority recruitment. Indeed, ultimate responsibility for signing off on new hires or, just as critically, granting tenure falls to provosts and chancellors. Yet those choices mostly stem from individual academic departments.

Faculty members typically look to the folks they went to grad school with or consult old mentors for names. So if the professors in a department are mostly white, it’s little surprise that their networks produce people who look like them. MU has 55 black faculty members today; only 20 of those have tenure. Ten years ago, it had 49 African-Americans on the faculty, and 29 had the tenure that brings security to the job.

“In a practical way, it’s in the departments,” said Jonathan Poullard, a former dean of students at the University of California-Berkeley who now consults with schools on diversity issues. “Faculty in the departments have to feel it’s important.”

Seen before

The racial tension gripping the Columbia campus today comes with its own sense of déjà vu. A dozen years ago, the Legion of Black Collegians led about 100 students in a sit-in at Jesse Hall, the campus administration building. They shut it down and called for — sound familiar? — more black faculty members and a number of other measures intended to make the university a more welcoming home for minority students.

“We wanted our voices to be heard,” said Jermaine Reed, a member of the Kansas City Council who was among the student protesters in 2003. “We were protesting back then because of racial tensions that flurried on the campus at the time. … The administration was unresponsive. It was frustrating.”

Reed and his classmates, of course, followed in the footsteps of exasperated students decades before, including the new interim president, Middleton. He’s one of two new university leaders — three were named last week — who are black. Middleton had helped draw up a list of demands as a student in the late 1960s, asking for much the same thing.

That poses the question of whether the Mizzou glass of racial progress looks half full or half empty. Either things still haven’t changed or a man who called for change when he was a student decades ago now holds the power to make it happen.

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 4:33 PM with the headline "After a tumultuous week, what’s the path to mend Mizzou?."