April 22, 2016
Dear Tulane Community,
I want to update you on the work of the Presidential Commission on Race and Tulane Values, which was recently formed to help Tulane University work toward becoming a truly racially diverse and inclusive community – one that welcomes, values and supports all students. The members of the Commission, which include extraordinary student leaders, faculty and staff, have worked very hard to move us forward in this vital area. Rather than create yet another report, they are funneling ideas directly to me to be acted upon immediately. Here are some of the results:
Our Office of Undergraduate Admission, led by Earl Retif, has measurably increased the number of admitted students of color, particularly African-Americans, in the new class that will enroll this fall. Our incoming Vice President for Enrollment Management, Satyajit Dattagupta, has begun strategizing on the crucial next step, finding ways to increase the number of underrepresented students who enroll after they are accepted to Tulane. As a start, we are creating a position within the Office of Admission focused exclusively on increasing the diversity of our student body. Tulane's Development Office is starting to raise funds to increase the amount of available financial aid, which will help us attract more students, regardless of their economic background. The progress we make and lessons we learn through our diversity efforts at the undergraduate level will benefit our graduate and professional programs as well.
Following the recommendation of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience, we are creating a new Office for Academic Diversity Initiatives that will focus on the academic needs of underrepresented students. We are also fundraising to increase our resources to better compete with peer institutions for diverse faculty and to produce more postdoctoral fellowships for scholars of color. In addition, we are exploring how to best retain the wonderful faculty of color we already have.
Knowing that we need to do much more to support our students of color and international students, we will conduct a campus climate survey next year to learn more about the racial experiences of our students. Too many of our students of color experience not just isolation and exclusion, but outright disrespect and sometimes worse. In February, for example, passengers in a car on Broadway called several of our students a hateful racial epithet and then circled back to throw drinks on them. TUPD is investigating this incident in the hopes of identifying the perpetrators.
We must find a way to promote Tulane values – of inclusiveness, equality and basic respect – to our students. This is a fundamental moral imperative and part of our obligation to educate the whole student, producing graduates who practice and promote justice and are able to succeed in an increasingly global and diverse world. As part of the Task Force on Undergraduate Experience, a new set of pilot TIDES courses next year will include discussions of race and inclusion.
Many on campus were disturbed following another recent occurrence, the building of a wall by the Kappa Alpha fraternity. My understanding is that this is an annual tradition that marks the fraternity's founding, and part of several KA traditions built around references to the Confederacy. After years of work both at the local and national level, the fraternity has taken various steps to remove many of these overt symbols. This year, members of the fraternity built the wall again and wrote "Trump" and "Make America Great" on it. Many students were outraged by the wall, not because it expressed support for a political candidate, but because of its connection to Confederate symbolism and rhetoric currently surrounding immigration issues and construction of a wall between U.S. and Mexico. This signaled a message of exclusion to many of our Latino and international students. The dispute made national news.
Let me be clear on two things: First, Tulane would never punish students for writing the name or showing support of a presidential candidate. Secondly, the students who strongly objected to the wall have a corresponding free speech right to voice their anger and pain (so long as they do not deface or destroy another's property). Unfortunately, many of those who have merely voiced their objections have been met with a barrage of hostile and sometimes racist responses on social media and on campus.
We are a university and my hope is that we can engage in discussions of race, class, immigration and the other crucial issues of our time with civility and respect for one another. I understand in a passionate debate that sometimes civility can be lacking, in both directions. But it deeply offends our values when any of our students are made to feel as if they do not belong here through the use of racial slurs.
We are first and foremost an educational institution, and we must teach all of our students that, while we have the right to free speech, our words can still cause great injury and damage to our community. Those are lessons our students will need as they become part of workplace communities. Our job as administrators is to balance these sometimes competing rights and values in a way that best teaches and encourages our students and best fosters a strong campus community. I can tell you that it is not easy, and we will continue to struggle to do it better.
There is much, much more we are working on to address all of these issues, including focusing on the racial climate for our faculty and staff. You can find the full list of my charges to the Commission at tulane.edu/race/. I will continue to report progress to you regularly, and I hope that you will send me your input through the website, by contacting members of the Commission listed there or by emailing me directly.
Working together, we can ensure that Tulane works for all of us in promoting diversity, inclusiveness, equality and, most of all, our proud sense of community.
