The DC, Volume 104, Issue 2, Spring 2023

A Note From the Editors

Dear SMU Community,

The goal of journalism is to always report the truth no matter what it may unveil. Here at The Daily Campus, we hold ourselves to the same expectation and are committed to providing you truth in our reporting, no matter the time or the circumstance.

This edition of The DC is unique because we are not only bringing light to the forward-thinking students and dynamic experiences, we are also holding up a mirror and evaluating parts of SMU’s historical past.

Whether good, bad or indifferent, recognizing the past is absolutely necessary so we can make intentional changes to improve campus moving forward. This issue is meant to spark conversation and enlightenment

among readers as to how we can continue to make progress.

Through countless hours of research, some spent on the third floor of Fondren Library looking through university archives, some spent looking through digitized archives online and numerous phone calls connecting with past and present SMU community members, we saw SMU’s imperfect history and our own. During our research, we discovered that past editions of The Daily Campus newspaper and previous reporters and journalism students contributed to SMU’s checkered and complicated past.

However, it is essential to recognize the past to prompt healthy discussions

on what changes and needs should be implemented to continue to improve as a university. We hope that while we are critical of past mistakes, we also recognize they were products of their time and that we are committed to moving forward together. Our goal is to provide readers with an honest look into the background of SMU’s past, an evaluation of how far we’ve come, as well as an honest look at where we are today and where we are headed.

We sincerely hope that The Daily Campus is not only a place where students can go to learn the truth, but also a place where they feel represented and seen. That is why anyone can submit a story, a news tip or a suggestion to our organization, not just journalism students.

We are open to every experience and voice that is on this campus, and we hope that this issue reflects our commitment to showcasing all student experiences.

Thank you to the journalism and human rights students who contributed to the reporting, editing and research for this special report: Anna Taglioli, Shelby Geist, Bri Flores and Jordyn Harrell. Special thanks to Joan Gosnell, university archivist, whose knowledge about SMU was integral to this story.

Thank you for reading and supporting student journalism.

Catie George and Brey Sands Editor-in-Chief &

Editors of The Daily Campus look over archival articles in Fondren Library.

Photo credit: Emma McRae

A Fixer-Upper Summer

Renovations to modernize Perkins and Smith Hall seek to eliminate water, mold, bug issues

By Brey Sands | Managing Editor

It’s time for a much-needed facelift for Perkins and Smith Hall, two of SMU’s six on-campus living options for Upper Division Housing. Built in 1949, these dorms have not been renovated since the mid-90s. These long overdue renovations will begin this summer.

Current resident, sophomore Olivia Lind, describes her living experience in Perkins Hall as less than ideal.

“While the dorms provide me with a place to sleep and shower, I constantly see cockroaches roaming the floors of my dorm,” Lind said. “There is constant flooding during storms, moldy ceilings in the showers, leaking ceilings in the bathrooms, in general, constant messes in the kitchen area, and only

four washers and dryers for a three-story building.”

These poor living conditions, however, are not unique to Lind’s experience.

Junior JP Braunfisch, another resident in Perkins, notes having consistent issues with necessities such as water and room temperature. “Being in such

Dean of Residence Life and Student Housing

Aramis Watson ensures students that these renovations are being brought forth in order to make living on campus a more comfortable experience. “The renovation is really about making sure that our Upper-Division

on modernizing that area of campus.”

Watson hopes modernizing Perkins and Smith will not only provide students with upgraded amenities and reliable infrastructure but also a sense of community.

an old building, I’ve had to go through a lot of inconveniences over the last two years such as days or even weeks without hot water and no heating or air in my room,” Braunfisch said.

Housing is a place where students not only feel comfortable but feel like it’s modernized,” Watson said. “We just haven’t had the funding or the bandwidth to be able to really focus

SMU students are required to live in on-campus housing during their first and second years of attendance at the university. Many first-year students live in one of 11 residential commons, each offering a unique sense of community during the transition from home to college life. For example, Crum Commons put on The Great Crumpkin every Halloween, and Kathy Crow puts on its “Crowchella” event every spring. In Upper Division Housing at Perkins and Smith, the

lounges only accommodate smaller scale events such as smoothie nights and weekend brunches.

But Watson said a sense of community, which is built into the foundation of the commons, will be woven into Upper Division

Housing with these new renovations. “The core is really building community,” Watson said. “And building an environment where our Upper Division students feel like they are making a true continued experience from our commons experience.”

Photo credit: The Daily Campus

“While the dorms provide me with a place to sleep and shower, I constantly see cockroaches roaming the floors of my dorm.”

-Olivia Lind, Sophomore Perkins Hall resident

A bulletin board in Perkins Hall displays what the current residence has to offer.

A Raw Deal

By Simone Melvin and Syra Castillo | Podcast Editor and Staff Writer

At the end of a dinner rush, students carelessly toss plastic dishes onto the revolving conveyor belt in Umphrey Lee Dining Hall. A few plates arrive licked clean, but most glide along covered with half-eaten dinners. But for the first time, the compostable items on those dinners will avoid a less-than-green ending.

Since September 2022, members of the dining-hall staff have been separating viable food scraps, setting them aside for compost. This change went unnoticed by most, but composting on campus has been a change that students in SMU’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter have lobbied to bring to campus for year. SMU alumna Sofia Lara proposed the idea as a part of her Human Rights Fellowship in 2019 and spearheaded the initiative with Turn, a DFW-based environmental start-up. “This was six years in the making,” Lara said. “I honestly almost cried when we

The DC | Spring 2023 Issue

Rainbow Cords for LGBTQ+ Grads

Lavender Graduation at SMU

By Catie George | Editor-in-Chief

got the ‘yes’ after so many meetings and emails.”

Before this partnership, SMU did not compost anywhere on campus. Now, new, back-of-house green bins hold compostable items until Turn staffers arrive three days a week to retrieve the raw fruit, eggshells, coffee grounds and bread scraps. “More than 40% of the waste in Dallas disposal sites includes compostable food and yard scraps,” EWB Project Lead

Caroline Corbin said. “Now SMU can be a part of the solution that is having less food waste. It’s very exciting to see that when people advocate for something, change can happen.”

According to the 2010 SMU Archives, the university received a “B” grade in 2011 for its sustainability efforts by the College Sustainability Report Card, an independent evaluation of sustainable practice by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Neighboring colleges such as the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of North Texas have received comparable recognition for their sustainability efforts from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System.

“These types of initiatives are critical and to have this level of impact is important to me,” EWB President Jack Lewis said. “To make the change on an institutional level is a completely different step up from individual efforts toward environmentalism.”

Leaders in EWB said that they had to prove that composting was necessary, and before members of SMU Dining would agree

to any expenses put toward composting, they needed to see if students liked the idea first.

“I don’t think a lot of people understand what [it] composting really encompasses – it’s a big process,” Lara said, adding that originally members of EWB initially thought to use food scrapson campus as fertilizer. However, SMU’s relationship with Southern Botanicals prevented that idea. So, they looked to Turn as an alternative.

Corbin said a large reason for the red tape surrounding the composting project came down to funding. Partnering with Turn cost the university $4,220 for the initial setup and $9,030 per month as a recurring service fee. “It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” Corbin said. “SMU wants students to be happy and to be ‘Dallas’s school.’ To do that, we need to be more sustainable. We need to be focused on these types of student-led initiatives.”

Members of Student Senate agreed to fund the project’s pilot year, and SMU Dining paid for the one-time setup cost. Michael Molina, the SMU hospitality director, said Dining hoped to continue the venture past this year and planned to look at what percent university administration might be willing to fund in the future.

Looking forward, Lara and other EWB leaders hope to implement frontof-house composting where students can be more involved in the process. “In my ideal world, students are composting, and we’d have compostable containers and greenhouses,” Lara said.

SMU hosted its first Lavender Graduation Ceremony honoring LGBTQ+ students in April.

Kayla Earl, a senior theater student who identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community, was surprised and excited to learn that SMU was hosting the event.

“It’s exciting to be the first class that gets to experience that,” Earl said. “It’s also kind of late in the game, especially at this point.”

Lavender Ceremonies began in 1995 and are currently held at more than 200 higher education campuses across the country, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Though Lavender Ceremonies are at colleges and universities nationally, this was the first at SMU. “The main purpose is to provide a space to specifically celebrate and recognize the accomplishments of queer and LGBTQ+ students on campuses and making sure to uniquely recognize them,” said Interim Director SMU LGBTQ+ Center’s Matthew Esparza.

The color lavender is important to the LGBTQ+ community because it is a combination of the pink triangle that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps and the black triangle designating lesbians as political prisoners in Nazi Germany, according to the Human Rights Campaign website.

“The LGBTQ+ civil rights movement took these symbols of hatred and combined them to make symbols and color of pride and community.”

The LGBTQ+ Center invited and honored current and graduating students to

attend. Faculty, staff and local campus partners also attended. Awards were given out that highlighted the impact LGBTQ+ students are having at SMU and in Dallas.

Earl emphasized the importance of honoring queer leaders at the university. “It’s just an awesome thing to celebrate and recognize,” she said.

Following the awards ceremony, student participants received a rainbow cord and a lavender stole to wear at their graduations.

The ceremony is symbolic of the steps SMU has taken to be inclusive, Esparza said. “SMU has been making intentional strides toward supporting their underrepresented students,” Esparza said.

Photo credit: Catie George

The university partners with an environmental start-up to create composting on campus

Angel Suaste, sous chef for Umphrey Lee, places compost buckets throughout the kitchen.

Photo credit: The Daily Campus

Black Hair on a White Campus

A Black senior’s perspective on her hair experience at SMU

By Jordyn Harrell | Engagement Editor

I finally freed my hair from its three-month sentence in the protective jail of knotless braids, a style where I weave in extensions. I stretched my arms as I waited in line to pick up my package. My muscles were still tender from the restless night I spent unraveling mid-back length braids, detangling my ends and deep conditioning my roots. As I swat away a loose strand from my face, my name is called.

“You cut your hair,” Marc Smith, the manager of the on-campus mail center known for his rusty colored hair and matching mustache, short stature and even shorter temper, said as he slid my Amazon package over the counter. “It looks nice.” My hair hadn’t been cut at all. It hovered right above my shoulders in its natural state: a thick mass of tight coils and curls. A soft thank you slips through my tight-lipped smile.

As I left the counter, I kept my eyes trained on the dingy, dented cardboard box awkwardly resting in my palms instead of making eye contact with the line of students behind me. Each step weighed heavy with annoyance. I didn’t look up until I made it outside. A simple ‘your hair

I should’ve grown used to hearing Smith’s compliment considering the number of times I changed my hair during the two years I worked at the mail center.

But that’s why it bugged me. I worked for him for two years; yet he remains ignorant of the idea that his comments weren’t flattering. I can only say his heart is in the right place so many times before his intentions become invalid by his execution. It takes courage for Black women to proudly be and express themselves in a society where acceptance, beauty standards and laws glorifies whiteness.

Dove’s CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Research Studies say discrimination based on hairstyles can start as early as 5 years old. Race-based hair discrimination could be blatant—like almost disqualifying a high school powerlifter from the Mississippi state championship because she wore beads in her hair—or they could be an assumption hidden within a genuine compliment.

I struggled being my full self at Southern Methodist University, a concentrated space of whiteness. I found myself going out of my way to not be seen as an anomaly, especially when it came to my hair. Someone would’ve thought I was smuggling contraband with how I picked up hair supplies from my uncle early Saturday mornings of my junior year. I would peek out the main entrance door of my dorm, with my plaited hair tucked under a black beanie further shielded by the hood of my sweatshirt, and I carefully scanned the parking lot for his car. The ducking and dodging only reinforced the feeling that a curly headed Black girl didn’t belong on a white campus.

So, I stopped hiding. I detangled myself from years’ worth of matted insecurities, and I feel so much lighter. Of course, there are days when those knots reappear. In those moments, I remember the encouragement my mom texted me my first seme ster at SMU after a bad hair day. “Walk in it...Hair is hair,” she said. “You are beautiful in braids. In a ponytail. With a perm. In the natural. With a sew-in. Or with a cap. You are beautiful. Green eggs and ham.” Her words possess just as much truth now as they did then.

On a Friday night, I part my damp hair into sections. I begin to shape my hair – I’m inspired by another natural hair content

creator. Half-way done, I smile at myself in the mirror. My comfort starts with me, not you or your compliments.

Bringing ASL to SMU campus

By Ellis Rold | News Editor

American Sign Language professor

Tiffany McCray is working to better connect her students with the local Dallas Deaf community through a potential new minor, campus clubs and activities.

McCray began teaching at SMU in 2017. Prior to being a professor, she was

an interpreter and teacher for deaf students at Woodrow Wilson High School and J.L Long Middle School in Dallas.

In 2020, she began to develop a curriculum for a sign language minor in hopes that she could connect more students with the language.

“I just typed up a proposal. I typed up the classes I thought they should offer in the minor and I created class descriptions for all of the classes and prerequisites,” McCray said.

The minor will focus on a variety of topics that will allow students to better connect with the Deaf community, she said. Possible courses include fingerspelling and Deaf culture.

Several ASL courses that would be in the new minor are currently offered at SMU. Interaction with the Deaf community is a required part of classes, McCray said.

Students attend ‘deaf coffee chats’ at coffee shops where they meet deaf individuals to practice their signing.

“They’re just out in the community. They meet these students and teach them some new signs. So my students are getting to know them and get to practice and improve their skills,” McCray said.

Students are also able to join SMU’s ASL club, which allows students to get together and improve their signing.

Junior Chad Lilly was encouraged to join the club and began tutoring sign language at the ALEC after taking McCray’s classes.

Born to a deaf dad and hearing mom, Lilly understands the challenges the Deaf community faces.

“I feel like deaf people are a very excluded minority in America, and a lot of people can’t really communicate with them,” he said.

Lilly said his exposure to the ASL community at SMU helped him to appreciate the language more.

“I’m super proud of having a deaf dad, and of knowing sign language. I didn’t really realize how unique of a skill set I have until coming to college.”

McCray intends to submit the minor for approval next year. The minor must be approved by Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, the provost’s office and SMU’s board of trustees.

Lilly encouraged students to get involved with the local Deaf community and sign language programs on campus.

“The ASL courses here are difficult but worth it,” he said. “Whenever someone knows sign language, it really means a lot. It means more to the deaf person than you think.”

McCray said she hopes the various programs will encourage her students to be an advocate for deaf people whenever possible.

“They just can’t hear. They can do everything else we can,” McCray said.

Jordyn Harrrell does her hair in front of a mirror.

Photo Credit: Emma McRae

Professor McCray teaching ASL to her class.

Photo Credit: Arden Eiland

Remembering MLK’s Visit to SMU

By Elizabeth Guevara and Ceara Johnson | Opinion Editor and Sports Editor

Walking up the steps of McFarlin Auditorium this past February, Charles Cox remembers how police lined the stairs. It was March 17, 1966, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at SMU.

Cox, who was a junior at SMU the time, and another student, Bert Moore, drove King from the airport to McFarlin where he spoke for 55 minutes on “The Future of Integration.”

Now, 57 years later, Cox stood on the same steps where members of the Dallas and SMU community would celebrate the legacy MLK and the official dedication of a Texas Historical Commission marker commemorating King’s speech on campus.

Cox brings copies of a letter he wrote to his mother after meeting King and hands them to students hoping to offer a glimpse into one of the most memorable days of his life.

“There had been rumors of a ‘prophetess’ predicting that King would be shot on the SMU campus,” he wrote in 1966. “These rumors were all over Dallas and the predication had supposedly been made by the woman

who predicted Kennedy’s death.”

The student senate originally invited King to come in 1964. However, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963, records say that FBI and Dallas Police convinced former SMU president William Tate to withdraw the invitation due to safety concerns. Although there was caution, Cox said the campus was in “a jubilant, happy state of mind.”

Cox’s nostalgia turns somber as he recalls hearing of King’s assassination just two years after meeting him. Cox says that while King speaking at SMU showed improvements but the fight for racial justice continues.

Contemplating society then and now, he recognizes that while there have been advancements, there will also be a fight for progress.

In 1966, after SMU Student Senate invited MLK to speak, Cox and Moore spent the day with King as he went to meetings with Dallas Pastors’ Association” and a “Social Concerns Committee of Perkins’ Seminary,” according to Cox before giving his speech at SMU in the afternoon.

“He was very down to earth and relaxed, and he had a sense of humor,” Cox said. “He had a personality that was very engaging and low-key.”

When the time arrived for King to give his speech

to SMU, he spoke without notes. “He had the ability to project on the stage with this tremendous conviction and integrity,” Cox said.

King’s speech was recorded by an audience member and is available online at smu.edu. Cox explained that watching MLK speak was like watching a great athlete

compete.

“It engages you intellectually and it engages you spiritually and it engages every part of you, it draws you into the sense that this is one of the greatest men of the 20th century,” Cox said. “That was his gift and he used it to ignite a movement that is still touching us today.”

Voices from the MLK Marker Celebration

“In September 1952, the Perkins School of Theology welcomed its first Black students. In 1965, to revise the story, [an] SMU football player was the first Black athlete to receive an athletic scholarship in the Southwest conference. [In] 1979, the first Black student body president, David Huntley, was elected through a writein campaign,”

- R. Gerald Turner, President of SMU

“Coming to something like this is kind of a good reminder of why we’re doing it each time and why we want to keep going and fighting for racial equality.

- Stephon Sanders, SMU alumn

“I know some of you say ‘I didn’t create it but we inherited it. As Dr. King says, ‘We can either figure [that] out or perish as fools.’”

- Reverend Richie Butler

MLK spoke at SMU in 1966. Students still remember the powerful speech he made that day.

Charles Cox and Carson Dudick celebrated MLK’s legacy. She was among a group of SMU students who were instrumental in bringing the marker to campus.

Photo credit: Cloi Bryan The MLK Marker in front of McFarlin Auditorium

Photos courtesy of SMU News

After 57 years, his student driver shares the moments, messages and memories from that day

SMU Archives Reveal Painful Past

Students shoulder the burden to work towards a better future

By Emma McRae | Copy

Editor

*This story contains content and photos referencing race as it was depicted in the early 1900s.

When senior Shara Jeyarajah began searching SMU’s archive of student newspapers, she wasn’t sure what she would find. She was surprised SMU had an archive dating all the way back to 1915. What she found was unsettling. Issues featured stories that covered Old South Week, an annual event on campus that celebrated the legacy of the Confederacy with parades and pageants during the 1950s and ‘60s. Reminders in student newspapers informed the campus about upcoming Ku Klux Klan community events during the 1920s when Dallas served as an active location for the hate group. In a 1948 issue of The SMU Campus newspaper, she found a headline that read “Students Favor Race Segregation” with an informal polling of the segregated student body.

“It was pretty amazing to see an issue that we

consider so outrageous, and so obviously unpopular now, was the norm back then,” Jeyarajah says. “And not only the norm, but it was co-signed by all these university students that are supposedly training to have a more worldly view of the world.”

says, chronicling stories from the desegregation of the Perkins School of Theology by five Black students in the 1950s to current efforts being implemented to promote diversity. Jeyarajah isn’t the only student to turn to the archives to gain a broader under-

ties, buildings and connections to slavery that warrant discussion and thought — just like those occurring on campuses across the nation.

What she found in the archives inspired Jeyarajah to create a podcast called “Maladjusted” that retells the history of SMU through a racial justice lens. The podcast creates a sense of legacy and continuity for students of color, Jeyarajah

standing of the university’s history. Journalism and human rights students along with editors and reporters for The Daily Campus also have spent years investigating how race has been covered on campus. What they revealed were activi-

Public symbols commemorating these eras have become a greater topic of discussion on college campuses since the racial justice movements of 2020 that were prompted by the murder of George Floyd. Since then, more than 400 symbols — from university names to Confederate monuments — have been removed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. SMU also reckoned with its racial legacy that year, prompted by demands from historically marginalized groups on campus, who wanted university officials to address names, customs, monuments and buildings that document the university’s history of connections to slavery, bias and racism.

“These buildings are harmful in the sense that

they depict and memorialize a bygone era when overt racism was tolerated as a norm that went relatively unquestioned either on campus or in society,” says Rick Halperin, director of the SMU Human Rights Program. He added that the absence of discussion could have to do with the lack of a collective campus memory.

For now, the archives serve as the campus’ memory bank, and they document events such as one long-forgotten event called the Kill Kare Karnival, which made its campus debut in May 1919. Students and local families gathered under tents on Dallas Hall Lawn for an evening of performances and attractions. The most popular attraction, as reported by the student newspaper of the time, The Campus, was The Old Plantation Show, a minstrel show featuring white actors in blackface makeup performing exaggerated and racially offensive skits and songs. Despite hosting three different showtimes to accommodate for large audiences, organizers still turned people away.

The Kill Kare Karnival

was recognized by the university and doubled as a pep rally for the football game against TCU. The carnival even rivaled homecoming in popularity with it being the sole event that united students across different organizations to plan, as reported by the student paper.

Beyond the striking series of K’s in its title, the Kill Kare Karnival’s popularity and the significance it garnered in campus culture featured brazenly racist features. For example, a list of booths planned for the 1928 carnival included an offensive racial slur to describe Black babies to be thrown at a booth for students “wishing to be National League pitchers.” At the height of its popularity, the carnival announced a new addition to the show: “... the world renowned blackfaced comedian, Jordan Ownby ....”

Ownby was not worldrenowned. He was a journalism student on campus at the time, SMU Archivist Joan Gosnell confirmed. Following his graduation, Ownby’s SMU legacy was secured by a $10,000 contribution made in 1922 to upgrade the

“We have to continue to tell that story to new generations, but then we have to invite new generations to write the next chapter.”

-Maria Dixon Hall, SMU Chief Diversity Officer

A 1921 issue of SMU’s student newspaper shows an illustration promoting a popular carnival where student performers would appear in blackface.

The Campus ran this article about the carnival in 1920 promoting the blackface comedian, Jordan Ownby.

school’s football field from wooden bleachers to a steel stadium. Opened in 1923 as Ownby Oval, the stadium was updated again in 1926 and renamed Ownby Stadium, serving as a symbol of school pride for 52 years before it was replaced by Ford Stadium. Though Ownby’s name is no longer a fixture on the stadium, his legacy remains on campus. Today, the street that runs parallel to the West side of Ford Stadium is named Ownby Drive.

This history of racism embedded in SMU’s campus extends beyond Ownby Drive. Less than half a mile away, Selecman Hall commemorates the university’s third president Charles Selecman who, according to D Magazine, publicly

supported the KKK’s presence in Dallas. Caruth Hall and Caruth Auditorium also connect to the country’s history of slavery. The Caruth family, who gave land to the university in 1911, was one of the largest slave owners in North Texas.

But SMU distances itself from the Caruth legacy, telling The Daily Campus in a statement, “The gift of land that was instrumental in the founding of SMU came from William Walter Caruth, who was born after the Civil War and was not a slaveholder. The buildings, programs and institutes on campus that carry the Caruth name stem from the legacy of his gift to the Methodist Educational Commission of Texas and

his descendants - an important distinction.”

For senior Kennedy Coleman, former president of the Association of Black Students (ABS), the lack of a collective memory makes it easier to promote the positive parts of SMU’s past while ignoring the darker parts. “I think that there are just earlier parts of SMU’s history that they are just ignoring or they don’t see a reason in trying to bring that to light, and that can be detrimental,” Coleman says.

Halperin agrees.

“Most people at SMU probably have little or no knowledge of the historical connections between the families for whom our buildings and streets are named [...] and the eras they

represent,” Halperin says. “So it’s not surprising that there is little outcry about the ongoing display of those names in SMU public places.”

In SMU’s history, students have often assumed the responsibility for uncovering issues of systemic discrimination and making demands for action. In the 1960s, students organized sit-ins to urge integration in University Park and marched with protestors from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday. In 1967, the Black League of Afro-American College Students (BLAACS) negotiated demands with then-SMU president Willis M. Tate to address disparities in representation, resources and support for students from historically marginalized communities. Forty-six years later, in 2015, Black students began sharing their experiences with racism on Twitter under #BlackAtSMU. The hashtag went viral, bringing the same frustrations of 1967 to the forefront, and the ABS drafted a list of demands for the administration.

In response, President R. Gerald Turner began holding monthly meetings with Black students and a cultural intelligence initiative called CIQ@SMU was implemented to guide efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on campus. But five years later, students expressed disappointment in the lack of systemic change, and ABS issued demands again, writing at the time, “The University had the opportunity to facilitate change in 1969 and again in 2015; however, we do not intend to miss our chance in 2020.” Coleman, who served as director of programming for ABS in 2020, acknowledges the school has made progress in making the campus a more inclusive space. “There’s a lot of times where students are finding things out and

Ownby Drive is currently an unmarked street running along the West side of Ford Stadium. The street sign is no longer standing, likely due to construction, but a sign in Binkley Parking Garage marks an exit to Ownby Drive.

then it becomes a bigger thing than it would be if the administration just acknowledged all the good and the bad parts of the university,” she says. “It’s always the students that are doing the work. It would be nice for the administration to be the ones interested in finding these things instead of students forcing them to see that this is also important to us.”

The work of uncovering and addressing SMU’s history often falls on students of color who already are burdened with finding a sense of belonging at a predominately white institution. “We have a lot of other things on our mind besides maintaining antiracism at our institution, which is like a second or third or fourth job for students of color,” Jeyarajah says.

Though SMU was founded more than a century ago, its institutional legacy delivers a contemporary impact on students and staff from marginalized and underrepresented communities. For Skyler Arbuckle, a 2022 graduate from the Dedman School of Law, that history remains intertwined with her own. As an undergraduate student at Howard University, Arbuckle learned through genealogical records that her father’s family had been enslaved by the Caruth family in Dallas.

In a 2021 interview published by the SMU Law Review, Arbuckle told University of Colorado law professor Lolita Buckner Inniss that her family’s history and specific ties to SMU are deeply personal to her. “Like so much about

“I want people to understand that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable, but you have to have dialogue and conversation if you want to change.”

-Aysia Lane, SMU senior

A 1948 article from The SMU Campus about a poll that showed the majority of students favored a tax on voting for people of color.

An archival photo of The Campus promotes the Kill Kare Karnival on SMU’scampus.

The DC | Spring 2023

the history of Black people in the Dallas area, the story of Blacks attending SMU is complex and powerful,” Arbuckle says. Arbuckle’s ancestors were successful after emancipation. Her great-grandfather Lewis Alonzo Fields was the first African American entrepreneur recognized by the city of Dallas. Still, the legacy of enslavement remains a painful driving force for Arbuckle, one that inspired her to attend Dedman Law. “Now here I am a law student at SMU, a school situated on some of the same land my family toiled over, studying to become a Black female attorney,” Arbuckle says. “It is an honor and a privilege to be studying the law at a school that would not exist had it not been for the labor of my ancestors and other African Americans, enslaved and free, some of whom we will never know.”

While few SMU students possess ties as direct as Arbuckle’s, all students who walk this campus became part of and connected to this legacy. Without an institutional understanding and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations, each graduating class exits and an incoming cohort of students arrive without an understanding of the school’s history, one they may or may not uncover, Coleman says. “Since we do see these patterns happening with administration,” Coleman says. “It’s like we have the responsibility to be like, ‘If the administration isn’t going to hold themselves accountable, then we have to.’”

And students have done just that, creating their own collective memory of SMU’s history and the implications it creates for all students. Nia Kamau, a 2022 graduate of SMU, created “In Their Own Voices” in 2020, an oral history project that uses collective memory built through

storytelling to create an emotional connection between students and the university’s history. “It was enlightening to see just how great the challenges they faced were,” Kamau says. “And a lot of it was in recent history. I wanted to be able to share those stories with others and use the power of storytelling to help us wrestle with our history at SMU and basically empower student leaders and staff members, administrators, [and] faculty on campus on how to actively address those kinds of issues.”

Using stories from alumni interviews helps students strategize and create solutions for issues informed by diversity, equity and inclusion through

standing of SMU’s legacy.

“I think it’s crucial that everyone who is seeking to lead on this campus understands its history,” she says. “So that would really be my vision for the future, for the workshop to continue to be student-led and to be required for new students to experience and for staff and faculty to experience.”

Jeyarajah’s “Maladjusted” podcast also shares similar goals. She seeks to construct an institutional knowledge of SMU’s legacy, especially for its students of color. Jeyarajah says students deserve to know the school’s entire legacy. “There’s so much just basic knowledge that we lack,” she says. “This is what our legacy is, and when we start to attend

The #BlackAtSMU film is an award-winning documentary created by students that builds off of the 2015 movement, depicting five Black students’ experiences with racism on campus. When the film premiered on Dallas Hall Lawn in 2021, student director Aysia Lane says it was created to encourage discussions of change on campus.

“I want people to understand that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable, but you have to have dialogue and conversation if you want to change,” Lane told a DC reporter in 2021. “I’m just hoping that [...] people can kind of walk away thinking, ‘I feel something about this, and I really want to do something about it.’”

workshops accessible to everyone. Kamau says recognizing this institutional legacy is key to making progress to ensure a more inclusive campus in the future. “I think that every good institution is able to be honest, and to celebrate their victories, but to also grow through their hard spots,” she says. “And that requires knowing what your history is, knowing the ups and downs so that you can understand how it might be affecting your culture today.”

Kamau hopes that in the future the program will be implemented on a wider scale to ensure more people on campus — from students to administrators — gain a comprehensive under-

SMU it becomes something that we deserve to know more about.” “Maladjusted” unpacks the history of racial justice at SMU, but Jeyarajah says students deserve more. She says administrators and faculty should use history, collected in the podcast and other programs like “In Their Own Voices,” to educate the SMU community.

“It is the role of administrators to look courageously at some of the projects that have been created to institutionalize and implement “Maladjusted” and “In Their Own Voices” and #BlackAtSMU and all these projects into their curriculums because they are entirely relevant to what people are teaching,” she says.

Chief Diversity Officer Maria Dixon Hall says continuing to foster this collective memory helps students understand their place in the SMU legacy and create avenues to enact change. “Systemic change takes a very long time, and the people coming in don’t know what all the people before them did before,” Dixon Hall says. “We have to continue to tell that story to new generations, but then we have to invite new generations to write the next chapter.”

Other schools in Texas faced similar issues in recent years and addressed them in a variety of ways.

In 2017, the University of Texas at Austin removed three Confederate statues from its campus that commemorated the legacy of the Confederacy. Texas A&M created a commission in 2017 to study the history of a statue of a former governor who also served as a Confederate general. The commission ultimately recommended that the university provide more context about the history of the statue rather than removing it. SMU has not created such a task force, according to university officials.

In 2019, the Dallas City Council voted to remove a 65-foot-tall monument honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the heart of downtown, four miles from the SMU campus. The recommendation to remove the statue came from a task force created by the Dallas mayor to address Confederate monuments on city property.

Jeyarajah hopes SMU administration acknowledges the place Ownby and Caruth have in the university’s history and then work to create a new legacy. In an email, university officials referred The Daily Campus to a statement issued in 2020 by the Board of Trustees that speaks to “the actions and beliefs of individual people tied to SMU history.” Officials specifically pointed to one paragraph in that statement: “SMU was founded in 1911 by the Methodist Church and the city of Dallas, both of wich were racially segregated at the time. While SMU may have reflected society then, we no longer hold those beliefs nor tolerate any racial injustice or inequities in our University or in the communities we serve.”

Kennedy shares Jeyarajah’s hope, especially as SMU’s peer institutions address parts of their pasts, such as Baylor University

which unveiled two statues in April to honor the university’s first Black graduates.

“We’ve done nothing to commemorate our first Black graduates or minority students that are basically trailblazers in SMU history,” Coleman says. “I feel like there’s little recognition for those groups, especially by the university itself. Halperin says as a historian and human rights educator, instead of erasing the names and the history behind them it’s more beneficial to keep them. “They belong, in my opinion, in places where future generations can learn and see that these things used to be in public places as norms,” he says.

Whatever approach is taken for addressing the legacy of these names on campus, the university has an opportunity to look back on SMU’s history, as students continue to do with projects such as “Maladjusted” and “In Their Own Voices.”

“However painful it might be to come to grips with the fact that this university had a role to play in supporting segregation and racist ideas, we have to acknowledge that pain, admit wrong doing and move beyond it,” Halperin says. “And you can’t move beyond it if you don’t even admit wrong doing.”

“However painful it might be to come to grips with the fact that this university had a role to play in supporting segregation and racist ideas, we have to acknowledge that pain, admit wrongdoing and move beyond it.”

- Rick Halperin, director of the SMU Human Rights Program

In Nov. 1929, The Semi-Weekly Campus published a preview of the Kill Kare Karnival, including a racial slur in a description of the entertainment at the carnival.

Faculty Belonging is More Than a Seat at the Table

SMU tries to recruit and retain diverse faculty in a difficult political climate

By Jordyn Harrell | Engagement Editor

During Black History

Month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a memo to state agencies and public universities saying diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are illegal to use in hiring decisions. The February memo insisted the use of DEI initiatives violated federal and state employment laws by favoring some demographics over others. This public statement mirrors the political stance of more than a dozen other states, mostly Republican. Since the memo’s release, some Texas public universities, including the University of Texas systems, suspended new

recruit the best people, Texas laws decrease someone’s willingness to apply for a job here.

“To be clear, when I was hired 11 years ago and

I told someone that I got a job in Dallas, Texas, they said, ‘Oh, sorry,’” Kelly says. “Texas has always had a reputation problem. You know, the bills targeting trans people…targeting how history is taught in school may mean that some people don’t feel like they could safely work here, which means they might not even apply,” Kelly says.

Just one month after Abbott’s memo decrying DEI at public institutions,

since 1790 that America has worried—white America, in particular—that their privileges were going to be lost by people coming over, whether it was the immigrant, the African, the Asian, so these DEI rules that governors are trying to put in place are [because] they don’t want people to really have an opportunity to figure out how to work together well,” Dixon Hall says.

Statistics highlight the roots of structural racism in higher education. An analysis by The Dallas Morning News revealed that almost no four-year public or private higher education

training course called, “Searching Intelligently,” devised from the best hiring practices.

Although Dixon Hall and her team have improved the process for hiring faculty of color through bias training and widening their search pools, she knows retaining these new hires requires just as much effort. In 2021, SMU lost four faculty members. Last year, they only lost one.

“[Belonging] is the secret sauce because you can go out and you can go recruit and hire people, but if they don’t feel like they belong or if they’re not placed into a community then you’re basically waiting for them to leave,” says Dixon Hall who found support and community in fellow Black faculty.

DEI policies or the use of DEI language in hiring and admission, which worries students and faculty because it oppresses historically marginalized communities

As a private institution, Southern Methodist University is not subject to Abbott’s memo as much as public universities such as University of Texas. However, these anti-DEI policies could affect general faculty recruitment and retention in the state of Texas, says Jill Kelly, associate professor of history at SMU, who serves as one of the three diversity officers for Dedman College. She says even though SMU is doing its best to widely

four bills were introduced to restrict DEI offices and staff, mandatory DEI training, diversity statements and identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions at state institutions, according to the DEI legislation tracker by The Chronicle of Higher Education. These politics of grievances stem from a sad but historic train of thought within American life originating long before 2023, says Maria Dixon Hall, Ph.D., the chief diversity officer for SMU and senior advisor to the university’s president for cultural intelligence initiative.

“It has been literally

institution in Texas had more than 9% Black tenured professors in 2019. In SMU’s previous academic semester (2021-2022), nearly 14% of its tenured professors were Asian and less than 6% were Hispanic or Latino. The percentage of Black tenured professors fell under 3%. While SMU has over 350 tenured professors, Dixon Hall is one of only 13 Black tenured professors.

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion, led by Dixon Hall, has tried to address the bias in faculty recruiting. During the faculty search committee process, members go through a mandatory

Dixon Hall and the Diversity Council are now prioritizing cluster hires, a cohort of hired faculty members who focus on a specific topic. Faculty may feel less isolated as a cohort, Dixon Hall says. One cluster hire will be for urban research, which highlights issues in cities such as migration, public health and housing.

“We’re hoping [it] is going to say, ‘Here are some

issues that SMU cares about,’ you know, to make thriving, healthy, equitable cities,” Kelly says.

Another way the university is growing and retaining faculty is through graduate students. Departments have started to reach out more to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions to recruit graduate students.

Paige Ware, Ph.D., the associate provost for faculty success, has also been trying to make sure new faculty feel welcome by inviting them to events. One event Ware highlights is the Springboard, a monthly brunch featuring faculty guest speakers.

Kelly likes the direction the university is headed with these new initiatives. She says for people to feel like they belong at SMU, there needs to be transparency, guidelines and accountability. Plus, a sense that you can bring your full self to work.

“People like to say belonging is having a seat at the table, it’s more than that,” Kelly says. “It’s when you talk at the table, people hear you and value what you have to say. It’s one thing to invite everybody, but if you don’t engage with everybody, that’s not necessarily belonging.”

SMU demographic statistics and survey results, created by Jordyn Harrell.

Faculty Statistics at SMU show a disparity in faculty of color, created by Jordyn Harrell.