SJSU will re-evaluate campus policing
As part of a broader framework for addressing systemic racism on campus, San Jose State University President Mary Papazian is establishing a task force to reevaluate the role of policing on campus.
The task force ultimately will offer reform recommendations, such as new models for campus security and policing, policy revisions and the redistribution of resources.
The creation of the task force comes less than a month after students and faculty members began circulating a petition urging the university to partially defund its campus police department and redirect that funding to initiatives supporting Black students and staff.
The president’s overall plan does not yet address specific calls outlined in the petition, including disarming campus police officers and slashing the police department’s budget by half to reinvest that money into initiatives for Black students, but leaders behind the petition are holding out hope.
“I recognize working at a school and understanding how things go that you do have to assess things — budgets, processes, department resources, and I’m OK with that,” said Jahmal Williams, program director for the African-American/Black Student Success Center at SJSU. “I just want to ensure that whatever is at the end of this, eventually we see some real progress.”
The president’s broader plan to address systemic racism follows weeks of protests that swept the nation after the death of George Floyd — a Black man who was killed at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis — and prompted a call to action for public officials everywhere to look inward and address systemic racism in their institutions. On college and school campuses, in particular, student activists and faculty members have been calling on their leaders to cut ties with law enforcement, although administrators largely have ignored their demands.
Nikki Yeboah, an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at SJSU who helped write the petition, said she was “tentatively hopeful” about the president’s plan but the restricted time frame of the task force — spanning just three months from Sep
“I just want to ensure that whatever is at the end of this, eventually we see some real progress.”
— Jahmal Williams, program director for the African-American/ Black Student Success Center at San Jose State.
tember to December — brought her some pause.
“I think that quite often people think their work is done after they have listened to Black and brown people share their pain or trauma or experiences of racial inequity, but that’s really where the work begins,” she said. “These just aren’t issues that can be resolved in those three months.”
It isn’t the first task force the university has created in recent years to tackle incidents in racism on its campus.
In 2013, the story of Donald Williams Jr. — a Black freshman who was the subject of racial tormenting from his peers — rocked the campus and set off protests. Williams’ roommates put up a Confederate flag, gave him a racist nickname, barricaded him in his room and fastened a bicycle lock around his neck — and later claimed it was all a joke, according to a police report filed at that time.
The three perpetrators later were kicked off campus, and the university created a special task force on discrimination, which offered dozens of recommendations and brought to light decades of anti-racism work — from a 122-page diversity master plan to a campus climate committee — that largely went unfulfilled.
Scott Myers-Lipton, a professor in the university’s Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, said he hopes the recent movement forces the university to take a deeper look and stronger approach to weed out anti-Blackness and racism on its campus.
“San Jose State has a long history of being reactive rather than proactive in these moments and it’s time that the university changes that trend,” Scott-Lipton said.
After a decision last month to retire the “Spartan Up” hand gesture because of its close resemblance to the “white power” hand gesture, the university is identifying and replacing all images and depictions of the gesture on San Jose State- affiliated webpage sand reference on campus—from buildings and windows to marketing videos to SJSU bookstore merchandise.
Within the president’s office, Papazian is adding two new roles to focus on anti-racism and diversity education — a director of advocacy for racial justice and a director of Black/African-American Equity and Trainer. Those new roles will be in addition to those already employed in the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The university also has set aside annual funding to help sustain and grow campus employee resource groups — culturally ethnic groups of employees that allow members of underrepresented communities to connect, such as the Black Faculty and Staff Initiatives. It’s also establishing training requirements for faculty, management and staff that will consist of microaggression and anti-bias coaching tailored to various campus roles and responsibilities.
Although more than 80% of San Jose State students are people of color, more than 50% of faculty are white, according to 2019 demographic data from the university.
For Williams, that significant discrepancy between the student and faculty makeup can’t be ignored and indicates evidence of implicit bias that most people are probably unaware they possess but needs to be tackled.
“Addressing anti-Blackness is something that everybody can be more aware of,” he said. “When we think of equity, we want to ensure we’re hiring in ways that are equitable, we’re promoting in ways that are equitable and we’re taking that into account for all of our processes.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Papazian said she was grateful for the dedicated Black faculty, staff and students as well as the office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion who have helped her mold the university’s action plan over the past month and that she would “continue to share more as progress continues to be made on these and other efforts.”