Access U: Black on Campus

BLACK ON CAMPUS

Senior Lecturer Gayle Golden reflects on the student experience.

To view the students’ work, visit accessu. sjmc.umn.edu/ blackoncampus/

To support the Brovald-Sim Community Journalism class, visit z.umn.edu/ brovaldsim

FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, THE BROVALD-SIM COMMUNITY

Journalism class has covered a different campus community. Of all years, 2021 seemed like the right time for the class to focus the semester on Black communities on the Twin Cities campus.

The nearly 20 students who gathered on Zoom in January were eager to do what other Brovald-Sim Community Journalism classes had done on campus for disability, addiction, rurality or nontraditional status: create a news site that identifies a “hidden” campus community and report deeply on it through sustained engagement, a large survey and stories that gave voice to its members. Black students at the University of Minnesota make up just 7 percent of the undergraduate population. They were underrepresented and undercovered.

But anxiety loomed large.

For one thing, the pandemic had dispersed campus communities. How would students connect meaningfully with Black students through Zoom, phone or 15 minutes of masked, distanced encounters? Other concerns ran deeper. Most of the non-BIPOC students in the class— most of the class—felt they had no right to report on Black student groups. They wondered if they could even ask the right questions. Or whether their mere presence would cause harm.

The class’ diversity fellow, Marissa Evans of the Los Angeles Times, minced no words in response to that anxiety. “Only white journalists could have the privilege of saying they cannot cover a community,” she wrote in an email to the class, referring plainly to her experience as a Black journalist. “Journalists of color in general are sometimes subject to covering topics they feel uncomfortable or uneducated in, but the assignment and keeping employment often has to outweigh that discomfort...The mission and vision of this class is to push advanced students in the School to do journalism with impact that raises awareness, accountability and open-mindedness. Covering the Black student experience on campus and in the Twin Cities is an opportunity to fulfill that mission.”

AccessU: Black on Campus is a testament to the students’ decision to face their fears and do that hard work.

The students read articles from experts, discussed approaches, and listened to Black journalists about how to report with empathy. When they started the reporting work, they took care of each other at every turn. They created and stuck to a common mission that felt authentic: “To do reporting that centers the experiences, voices and stories of Black communities on the Twin Cities campus.”

Editor-in-chief Jasmine Snow leaned into the hard work of contacting key Black student groups to tell them about the project. As a Black student, she plowed important ground for non-Black students in the class and helped create a manual to guide students through sensitive issues. The class was incredibly grateful for her efforts, which made everything possible.

The AccessU model (supported by the Brovald-Sim Community Journalism Fund) builds on a principle that community journalism begins where people live and what they care about. Students start with simple news and views stories. They move on to profiles. Only later come issue stories, in this case drawn from a survey sent to undergraduates that showed the University’s attempts to address racial inequalities didn’t resonate with students. Another story analyzed, and interviewed people about, the numbers behind Black faculty and students (see p. 15).

Early in the semester, students said they wanted to avoid writing just about Black trauma, which had resonated through the year’s protests of George Floyd’s murder and police brutality reflecting wider systemic racism. They wanted to reflect Black joy too, through depictions of students’ passions and pursuits: Black fashion designers, musicians, inspiring educators, aspiring actors and passionate leaders. The multimedia team created a Humans page featuring photographs with people expressing who they are in their own words.

But Black trauma was never far. The Chauvin trial dominated the end of the term. Daunte Wright was fatally shot in Brooklyn Center, Minn. Only then did the full lessons of community coverage emerge. Relying on our list of survey respondents who agreed to be interviewed, we were able to report what Black students were thinking during the trial and after the verdict.

The work was powerful and important. What began out of fear ended with a lesson in listening and reporting. No one had to parachute in when the story hit. They were already there with empathy. That’s community journalism.

THE NUMBERS ON BLACK FACULTY AND STUDENTS TELL THE STORY

Too few chances for tenure; isolation, exhaustion and a slow pace for change.

BY JESS JURCEK

What is the numerical reality of being a Black student or faculty member at the University of Minnesota?

Imagine a small party of 14 people. The whole party represents the undergrad student population; just one person would be Black. For faculty, imagine a larger party, this time of 33 people. All 33 represent the total faculty at the University; only one partygoer would be Black.

That reality has not changed much in years.

According to data from the University’s Office of Institutional Research, Black undergraduates in 2020 made up about 7 percent of total undergraduates. Black faculty, on the other hand, represented 3 percent of total faculty in the same year.

Behind these percentages, students, staff and faculty say, are problems with the campus climate and with recruitment efforts. Black faculty, staff and students do not always feel welcome or supported on campus, making it difficult to both attract and retain them at the University.

THE PERSISTENTLY LOW LEVEL OF BLACK FACULTY

In the past decade, the percentage of Black faculty fluctuated significantly, particularly between 2011 and 2015 when Black faculty decreased by nearly 20 percent. Since then, the numbers have climbed above where they were at the beginning of the previous decade. However, the

“Through the lectures, class discussion and readings, I knew to approach community journalism by detaching myself from my expectations and biases. I knew it was important to be a blank page and let your sources be the one to hold the pencil.”

—Tina Nguyen

total number of Black faculty on campus is still very small, as well as elsewhere in the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 6 percent of faculty in higher education in 2018 were Black.

Anthony Scott, president of the University’s Black Faculty and Staff Association, points to systemic factors such as the tenure process as a reason for the fluctuating numbers and persistently low level of Black faculty. It is simply harder for Black faculty to make tenure than it is for other faculty, he said.

One reason, he said, is that in general Black faculty get fewer research opportunities and have a harder time finding tenured faculty to serve as their mentors. “If you don’t have someone pushing for you to make tenure,” Scott said, “then it probably isn’t going to happen.”

The difficulty of making tenure and lack of support for Black faculty is common across primarily white institutions in the United States. A 2017 study by researchers from Loyola University Chicago and North Carolina State University called “Recruitment without Retention: A Critical Case of Black Faculty Unrest” found that Black faculty consistently report feeling undervalued by white colleges, tokenization, and being recruited for work on diversity and inclusion efforts. According to the authors of the study, diversity and inclusion work does not hold the same level of credibility as traditional research fields, like physics or biology, making it harder for the Black faculty doing this research to gain recognition for their work, an important step in achieving tenure.

Nicola Alexander, interim associate dean for undergraduate education, diversity and international initiatives in the College of Education and Human Development, said that Black faculty and faculty of color can be asked to serve on committees more than white faculty because there are fewer faculty of color.

“You end up doing a lot of service work,” she said. “And service work is valued, but it is not as highly valued as research.” The extra time that faculty of color spend on service work takes away from the time and energy they can contribute to the kind of peer-reviewed and published research that helps secure recognition, funding and tenure in academia. Furthermore, Alexander said, success in academia is often assessed on a white, male-driven standard that may undervalue the impacts of service or qualitative diversity research and work.

“We typically reward service work and teaching work with rhetoric and research with funding,” Alexander said.

Issues with retention and recruitment apply to staff as well, Scott said. In his 15 years at the University, he said that he applied for at least a dozen positions and made it to the third round of interviews in many of those cases, just to be turned down. No Black men were hired in any of those instances, he said.

“You think, OK, it’s so hard for me to move into the developmental opportunities that I want here, so why am I going to stick around?” Scott said.

Recently, however, Scott was promoted to a

“To learn about this community’s trauma is important, but it shouldn’t be the only thing we report on…. In my future reporting endeavors, I will be sure to look not only for trauma stories within underserved communities, but stories of joy and typical life, too.”

—Shannon Doyle

leadership role. He thinks the timing of his promotion has something to do with the murder of George Floyd and the recognition around racism and the lack of racial diversity that institutions like the University have since faced. There are still very few Black staff in leadership across the University. According to Anise Mazone, the director of the Multicultural Student Engagement Office and previous president of the Black Faculty and Staff Association, Black staff make up 17 percent of “labor” jobs like custodial and dining services, but less than 3 percent of administrative roles. Having such small populations of Black staff and faculty, Alexander said, “As can make people feel isolated. Reaching a “critical a class, we had to mass” of Black staff be very attuned to the fact that and faculty can people were already fatigued and make it easier to under significant stress because of COVID both attract and retain people, and distance learning. Adding the trial of but the UniverDerek Chauvin and the police killing of Daunte sity is not there Wright to this already stressful mix meant that yet. we had to walk a fine line between reporting While Scott says there is the important issues that needed to be still a lot of work reported and being sensitive to the the University emotional state of the communities could be doing to diversify its hiring and we were covering.” make tenure less diffi—Eric Servatius cult for Black candidates, he also said that since Joan Gabel was appointed president of the University in July 2019, there has been a small shift towards greater support of diversity in hiring initiatives. Still, Scott said, “it’s difficult as a Black person on campus when you don’t feel valued as a member of the University community.”

THE ISOLATION OF BEING A BLACK STUDENT

Black representation in faculty and staff matters to students, Scott says, and is part of the reason that Black student enrollment is also low. Limited Black representation in faculty and staff can compound feelings of isolation for Black students.

“Think about how exhausting it is to be in a classroom where a lot of times you’re basically othered, unintentionally by a lot of students, but sometimes maybe not so unintentionally,” Mazone said.

In 2018, the Board of Regents addressed these concerns in its resolution on diversity in undergraduate education. The resolution calls for greater efforts to recruit students from Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools, better evaluation of student recruiting methods, reduced four- and six-year graduation rate gaps for students of color compared to white students, and better recording and monitoring of the enrollment and graduation rates of locally represented ethnicities, including East African. Since the resolution was passed, Mazone said, the gap in four-year graduation rates between white and Black students shrunk by more than 50 percentage points.

Part of this improvement, Mazone said, has come from paying better attention to and working to increase students of color’s “touchpoints,” or moments

throughout a student’s undergraduate career when they connect directly with advisers, faculty or other staff.

One example is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Program (MLK Program), in which Mazone says that all students of color in the College of Liberal Arts are now automatically enrolled. Although this is how the program was originally designed, it was temporarily switched to an opt-in format, which Mazone said hurt the students of color who did not have the social capital to know that the program existed in the first place.

Robert McMaster, vice provost of the Office of Undergraduate Education, said that improving the campus climate for students of color is a combination of efforts across the University, including programs like the MLK Program, as well as hiring more faculty of color and targeting recruitment efforts at specific Minnesota high schools. “Bit by bit, we’re putting pieces of the puzzle together,” he said.

Despite recent improvements in graduation rates and efforts by the University to improve campus climate, Black students continue to make up a small minority of the total student population.

According to Mazone, these low numbers are not only explained by the campus racial climate but by the Twin Cities racial climate, too. Recent police killings of Black people in and around the Twin Cities make some prospective students think that the University is not a safe place for them to be, she said.

Furthermore, Mazone said, among some populations, the University does not have a welcoming reputation but rather is seen as an elite, wealthy and a white space. If prospective students come from a high school where they had few opportunities for college preparations, like ACT prep, or did not have a mentor who encouraged them to apply, it is unlikely that they will end up at a four-year university like the University of Minnesota.

Shemarr Kilgore, a fourth-year journalism and transfer student, did not think the University was an

“I

think community immediate option for him when he graduated high journalism means meeting, school. “In Black people’s communities, I feel like there has to be more resources to help hearing and learning the voices of kids go to these schools, especially a school those you’ve never had the chance or like this,” he said. opportunity to know…. I don’t think I will ever forget this class because it taught me MORE ACTION, LESS TALK Some students, like Kilgore, say the not only how to be a better journalist, but I University talks about its commitment to feel like I’m more empathetic and critical diversity more than it demonstrates that with how I see the world and I move commitment through actions to increase within it.” diversity on campus. This tracks with results from the 2021 AccessU: Black on Campus —Samantha DeLeon survey, which found that about two-thirds of Black respondents and over half of total respondents think the University’s response to racial diversity is more words than action. Kilgore said he thinks it is odd that the campus is not more diverse, especially given the diversity in the city of Minneapolis, which is about 20 percent Black, compared to the undergraduate population at 7 percent Black. Mazone often hears from students who are surprised to arrive at the University and find less diversity than they expected. However, she says that she does not understand where students’ notions that the University will be racially diverse come from. “They have all been here for a campus visit,” she said. “When they walked across the campus, they did not see a whole lot of students of color.” There are certainly pockets of diversity across campus, Mazone said. There are some classes and programs where students of color are in the majority, such as the Multi“The cultural Center biggest shift in my for Academic view of community journalism Excellence was the transition from assuming (MCAE), the President’s I was being exploitative in trying to Emerging do this work to thinking that I can be of Scholars service...There is no reason white reporters Program, can’t learn to be better, do better, and and the MLK make themselves useful doing the kind Program. of coverage that can actually make Mazone said a difference for marginalized it’s important communities.” that students of —Jessica Jurcek color seek out those spaces to find support. “If you have one foot in and one foot out, you never fully feel like you belong here, then

more than likely you’re not going to do well,” she said.

Another space on campus where Black students are represented in higher numbers is athletics. In 2020, nearly 16 percent of the University’s student-athletes were Black. Across the entire Big Ten conference in the same year, 14 percent of student-athletes were Black, according to the NCAA Demographics Database.

Black students tend to be overrepresented in athletics departments across the Big Ten. The University of Maryland—the Big Ten school with the highest Black student population at 11.5 percent in 2019—University of Minnesota, Rutgers “I think University, Ohio State University that this will and Purdue stick with me: this idea University that community journalism all have isn’t just covering one sole a higher percentage community. It’s about the of Black many that make up student-aththe one.” letes than —Sophia Zimmerman they do Black students. Requests for student-athlete data from other Big Ten universities were not fulfilled in time for this story.

Although athletics data suggest an over-representation of Black students on athletics teams at the University of Minnesota, Mazone says that Black students at the University have better access to support resources than their peers at other Big Ten universities. Mazone belongs to a network of multicultural student affairs professionals across Big Ten schools and said that in general, the other schools have less money and offer fewer programs focused on diversity than the University of Minnesota.

Kilgore said that the University does offer him valuable resources and that he “loves being here.” At the same time, he said he is disappointed in the way that the University’s support for Black students often is in response to a traumatic event, like the murder of George Floyd last summer.

“Why weren’t you doing more for these students before this happened? It shouldn’t have to take something tragic like that for you to make a change,” Kilgore said.

Students Say

Below and in the circles on previous pages, Access U students contemplate their semester covering the Black campus community.

“When this class decided it would dedicate a semester’s worth of coverage to Black communities on campus, we did not do so lightly. It took hours of discussion and forethought before we made the choice, fully understanding the amount of work we had ahead of us to make our coverage as equitable and accurate as possible—as well as the context in which we would be launching the site, including the demographics of the class and the timeline of events in Minneapolis. The discussions and repercussions we were seeing following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent unrest were nothing new, really, but instead were things with which white systemic consciousness was being forced to reckon. We aimed to take advantage of that reckoning by using the space we had available to tell stories for and with Black people on campus. “Personally, I have come from and have lived in predominantly white spaces my whole life, and over time, I’ve realized how easy it is to do more talking than walking when it comes to the nittygritty of good, “representative” reporting. You don’t have to do much “diversity and community” reporting to be considered as having done “a lot of good work” by the industry standard—even less so when your audience is majority-white or just generally removed from the community you’re intending to cover. Because our intent was to focus exclusively on the stories and voices of Black people on campus, we didn’t have to worry about or compromise for white audiences who would potentially feel excluded in our coverage. As a result, we were able to do much more honest and in-depth coverage.”