(ThyBlackMan.com) Now former University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe in a moment of rare candor for someone who just fired himself admitted what has been probably one of the worst kept secrets at American colleges. His words: “Racism does exist at our university, and it is unacceptable.”
During the past decade hardly a week has gone by without a report somewhere of hanging nooses, white hoods, racist graffiti, racial slurs and taunts aimed at minority students. The colleges that have been called on the carpet for the racist acts read like a who’s who of American higher education. Clemson University, Auburn, Lehigh, Tarleton State, Texas A&M, University of Texas, Austin, University of Connecticut, Johns Hopkins, Whitman College, the University of Oklahoma, U.C.L.A., U.C. San Diego, and the University of Maryland, to name only a very a handful. Months before the firestorm at Missouri, the Harvard University Voices of diversity project found campuses rife with subtle and no so subtle “microagressions” against minority and women students.
The pattern is always the same after a racist outburst. Teary eyed, enraged students confront campus officials. The officials, in turn, issue the obligatory indignant denunciation of the racial offense. A legislator or two may chime in with equal indignation. If it’s a frat, as was the case in 2014, at Oklahoma University, the fingered lily white fraternity will issue a quick statement disavowing any knowledge or responsibility for the racist act of a few of their members. If students squawk loud and long enough, campus officials will convene campus wide sensitivity sessions where students vent and rage at the administrators and at each other. If the students continue to squawk, campus officials will pledge to institute new diversity training, recruit more minority students, and hire more minority teachers and administrators, and maybe even an ombudsman.
