Penn State president defends call to back off race center
Across the Big Ten Conference, universities have locked in multimillion-dollar pledges one after another.
Purdue University announced spots for 40 new diverse faculty under a $75 million effort. Indiana University tagged $30 million for faculty and researchers from underrepresented communities. The University of Michigan planned for at least 20 new faculty in structural racism and racial inequality.
And at Penn State University, a Center for Racial Justice promised to bring
together researchers in racism and racial bias, stirring hope for collaboration across disciplines like sociology, geography and public health. Faculty expected about $3.5 million from the university over five years.
It was a modest figure, but enough to get started as schools nationwide expand scholarly work on anti-racist practices, according to Penn State professors who helped with planning. Academic hiring commitments over the past couple of years followed a racial reckoning when Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in May 2020. Millions across the country demonstrated against systemic racism.
So when Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi last month canceled plans for the racial justice center, upset faculty said their worry wasn’t about shedding a budget line.
Rather, they said, it was a lost opportunity at a key moment in U.S. history — a high-profile step back for a public university that has long struggled to become more diverse and supportive, especially for Black students, faculty and staff.
Penn State is losing Black faculty at four times the rate of any other group, according to a recent open letter to university leadership from more than 400 faculty members. The university employed 245 Black faculty as of fall 2021, or about 3% of its total, institutional data show.
“This [cancellation] is only going to exacerbate that exodus and make it harder to retain our most talented faculty. That’s No. 1,” said Joshua Inwood, a geography professor who served on a search committee for the center. He signed the open letter, which questions the reversal and alleges a decadeslong failure to to invest in anti-racist efforts.
Ms. Bendapudi defended her decision, arguing that Penn State must review its ongoing work on diversity before determining new investments. The center had been an unfunded commitment when she took office this year and faced a gaping budget deficit, she said.
But without the center, Mr. Inwood said, faculty will have a tougher time competing for research dollars and collaborating “to address a fundamental reality of American life: living in a deeply racially polarized society.” Faculty want the university to fulfill its promises, he said.
The center as a symbol
“The legacy of the George Floyd murder that we all experienced led to no change whatsoever here at Penn State,” said Gary King, a biobehavioral health professor who logged and shared the hiring commitments at other Big Ten schools. He is among a half-dozen faculty contributors to “More Rivers to Cross,” a two-part report on Black faculty and academic racism at Penn State.
At University Park, its main campus in State College, the university employed 103 African American professors in 2018 — down from 105 in 2004, according to the report. Those with tenure or tenure-track positions at University Park dropped from 83 to 68 in the same period, authors found.
More than half of surveyed Black faculty said they sometimes or often faced racism from administrators or supervisors, while eight in 10 at University Park reported experiencing racism there, according to the report.
Faculty expected the Center for Racial Justice to herald a new outlook, Mr. King said. University colleges were exploring how they might work with the center, which lined up with a recommendation in “More Rivers to Cross,” he said.
“This center represented a symbol that Penn State was finally recognizing that it needed to address, on a national scale, issues related to institutional racism and matters of racial justice at the point of view of scholarship,” he said. Now he describes a university commission on race issues as “an exercise in futility.”
The recent commission also had recommended the center, which was announced
in September 2021 under then-President Eric Barron. At a faculty town hall on Friday, Ms. Bendapudi vowed to confront systemic challenges in racial equity and diversity, pledging that her “heart is in this work; my commitment is in this work.”
She nixed the center after examining not just the budget, but also “our most pressing needs in diversity, equity and inclusion, including racial equity,” she said. She was concerned that a center may not necessarily “move the needle” for Penn State.
“To me, the better way was to hold ourselves to something measurable, something everyone would see that we could talk about every year,” Ms. Bendapudi said.
The university will hold itself accountable to specific, board-approved goals, in particular closing race gaps in student retention, improving faculty diversity and opportunity across departments, strengthening professional opportunities for staff and fostering an overall sense of belonging, she said.
Most immediately, the administration is reviewing current work in those and related areas across Penn State. By early 2023, it intends to work with faculty, staff and students on next steps, Ms. Bendapudi said.
Several thousand activities scattered across the university fit the category, said Jennifer Hamer, a special
adviser on institutional equity who is leading the evaluation.
“There’s a lot of great work out there. I do wonder how much greater it could be if they could work together or somehow be informed by one another,” Ms. Hamer said at the town hall. Her work involves “bringing those together and making sense of what we’re doing.”
Pressed on a specific financial commitment, Ms. Bendapudi demurred, saying any figure right now would be fabricated.
“Let us spend some time. Be thoughtful about it,” she said.
A flashpoint on campus
Later, Ms. Bendapudi said the center’s cancellation had “really tough” timing, announced two days after the founder of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, was to speak at University Park. “It has been traumatizing for many.”
Among students, the event commanded more attention than the center did, said Taran Samarth, a senior from State College. A student group was set to host the gathering Oct. 24 at University Park until Penn State pulled the plug. The university cited a threat of more violence after event supporters clashed with protesters outside the venue.
In the days leading up to the event, students worried over safety and the possibility of violence, Mr. Samarth said. Confrontation flared when a featured guest antagonized anti-racist protesters, according to witnesses. The Proud Boys has ties to white nationalism, the FBI has reported.
“The administration wasn’t giving much to assuage people’s concerns” beforehand, said Mr. Samarth, a research and policy leader with Penn State Forward, a progressive group that backs board candidates. The conflict drew national news coverage and criticism from alumni.
In a statement last week, the university board chairman, Matthew W. Schuyler, pointed to “a need to protect the safety of the campus community and Penn State’s commitment to, and obligation to support, free expression.
“However, when it became clear the event could not go on safely, it was the right decision to cancel it,” Mr. Schuyler told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He described racism as “an issue at all universities, as institutions face the same challenges as our nation. President Bendapudi, the university administration and the board are entirely committed to enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at Penn State.”
Still, Mr. Samarth said anti-racist proclamations over the past two years don’t appear to have changed the feeling at University Park. That will require concrete plans for action, he said.
“I don’t know that I feel any more materially welcome as a person of color than I did four years ago, per se, just because we’re saying the words ‘DEI’ (for diversity, equity and inclusion) or ‘anti-racism,’” Mr. Samarth said. The language has become “more meaningless” since Ms. Bendapudi dropped the racial justice center, he said.
Her commitment to narrowing the graduation gap echoes student activists as early as the 1980s, Mr. Samarth added. Just more than a third of Black students complete their Penn State degrees within four years, compared with about 61% of white students, recent university figures show.
A history of unrest
Black students accounted for about 3.7% of the student body in the mid-1980s, according to a 2002 thesis by Robin Hoecker, then a Penn State senior.
The university was approaching the end of a federal desegregation mandate that set a goal for 5% Black enrollment by 1988, Ms. Hoecker wrote. More than three decades later, Black enrollment was 6% this fall, according to Penn State.
“The demands are always very similar over time,” said Ms. Hoecker, now an assistant professor of journalism at DePaul University in Chicago. She chronicled Black student protests at Penn State on a roughly 10-year cycle as early as 1948.
A request since the 1960s: that the student body reflect the demographics of Pennsylvania, which the U.S. Census says is about 12% Black.
“The students keep asking for meaningful investments to solve these structural problems, and the university never really commits to doing that in a meaningful way,” Ms. Hoecker said.
Student activism has brought incremental change, such as the addition of an Africana Research Center after a sit-in in 2001, she said. The racial justice center would have delivered resources “in the same way we dedicate research money to agriculture or engineering. We should be using collective funds to solve problems withinthe commonwealth.”
At the university Faculty Senate, chair Michele Stine said the developments this autumn present Ms. Bendapudi an opportunity — a chance to show Penn State can lead on racial justice after its difficulties.
“I’m hopeful,” Ms. Stine said Thursday. “I like what I have heard and seen from the new administration so far, and I am hopeful that we will address these issues in meaningful ways.”