Chatham Student Activism Blog

Posted on the WACAN forum on December 6, 2007:

This semester there have been overt acts of racism by a group of students on campus, some of whom also write our campus newspaper. After a student received racist hate mail in her mailbox, the president of our college held a campus wide forum where she attempted to make it clear that racism would not be tolerated on our campus. Of course, saying that without making any actual changes on campus or investigating reasons as to why our campus climate is so hostile, did nothing. A group of anti-racist students held a forum where we outlined the events of semester and demanded that the administration take action. We demanded an investigation of the campus newspaper, respect for student activism and an office of multicultural affairs.

The administration responded by forming a faculty committee to investigate the matters and make recommendations for actions our university should take. The selection process for the faculty committee was problematic, as the members were hand picked by our president without any student input. Our university stopped offering tenure a decade ago, so there aren’t many tenured professors at Chatham, and those who are not tenured have a significant amount of pressure on them to agree with administrators or remain silent. Furthermore, our most vocal faculty ally, who is an anti-racist scholar, was not permitted to be on this committee. I’m convinced that some of the faculty members on the committee know less about racism, privilege and other forms of oppression than members of the anti-racist student coalition. I sat in an interview yesterday where members of the faculty committee told me that in their opinion, the word “racism” was being thrown around. It seems as though they might be attempting to say that the problem on campus involves a two groups of students who don’t get along, not a culture of racism, homophiobia, discrimination and exclusion.

We recognized that in our interviews, the committee focused exclusively on the wrongs done by members of the newspaper staff, and not on any of our other concerns. Last night we decided to switch our focus to institutionalized racism and getting an office of multicultural affairs. We are going to emphasize our point that the problems with the campus newspaper are symptoms of a much larger problem on our campus that could be improved to some extent by the creation of an office of multicultural affairs.

We are researching the ways in which institutional racism and homophobia manifest themselves in our community. Gathering evidence of this is much harder than pointing to a hate letter or printing out emails. We are working on this presently.

We were also criticized for too “militant.” While we are constantly reevaluating our tactics and the way we are framing the issue, we are not going to stop putting pressure on the university until we see something change, aside from reprimanding the individuals who committed blatant racist acts. Our tactics thus far have involved holding an open forum, meeting with members of the faculty committee in pairs, rather than as individuals (like they wanted us to) and typing up a thirty page document explaining the events of the semester, background information on anti-racism, racially themed parties, student activism etc. Our coalition consists of ~25 students. We do not have any sort of formal leadership and come to decisions by consensus. We’ve experienced some internal problems and everyone is exhausted as finals are approaching, but we’ve remained extremely organized.

I don’t think that we are being too militant, SDS was militant. Faculty allies told us they had a good laugh when they overheard from committee members that we were militant. If we don’t see a true commitment to anti-racism starting next semester we are prepared to use other tactics.

Someone in our coalition said that they heard students at Mt Holyoke walked into the president’s office, sat down and refused to move until they got an office of multicultural affairs.

Thank you for reading this and offering your opinions and resources. We really appreciate suggestions and ideas. We’d also like to get in touch with student activists at other schools.