San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SDSU’S LUKE WOOD TAKES ON TOUGH CHALLENGES
Race, pandemic at forefront of issues university faces
It was a loaded question that couldn’t be ignored: How is Black Lives Matter different than the KKK?
A San Diego State University donor emailed the question to campus officials in 2017 as the university was about to introduce an online course examining the plight of Black people in America.
A reply was quick in coming from Luke Wood, the prominent SDSU social scientist who created the program. He did not mince words.
“I do not perceive Black Lives Matters to be an extreme organization,” said Wood, who is African American. “In contrast, the KKK’S background in lynching and murdering thousands of Black people I think stands for itself.”
His “Black Minds Matter” course, which partly arose from a police shooting in El Cajon that killed a Black man, went on to draw more than 10,000
viewers nationally and was praised for its nuanced look at an explosive subject.
It also helped put Wood where he finds himself today — in a key leadership post at a sprawling public university that’s facing dynamic and daunting challenges as the fall semester begins on Monday.
Wood is vice president of student affairs and campus diversity at SDSU, which makes him responsible, in one way or another, for everything from housing and financial aid to student health and fraternities and sororities.
Faculty describe the 39year-old Oakland native as a calm and candid unifier with a steeliness that’s reflected in his childhood nickname, Iron Horse.
Those qualities are being put to the test.
Wood is trying to keep 33,000 students safe at a moment when COVID-19 infections are rising, and broadly affecting young people. There’s a hunger for normalcy among students. But some are wondering if SDSU should teach more of the courses online instead of holding most of them on a crowded campus.
On Aug. 14, concerns about the virus led California State University Stanislaus to delay the start of inperson classes to Oct. 1.
Wood also is starting the new school year dealing with an old, intractable problem — strained relations between the campus and College Area, the neighborhood that borders the university. It has been the scene of rowdy fraternity-driven partying for decades. Residents button-hole Wood in restaurants and grocery stores to complain.
Before the new semester began, students antagonized neighbors by putting up a sign on Montezuma Road that read, “You honk, we drink.” Nearby, as parents were guiding their kids into dorms, the Delta Chi fraternity hung a banner outside its house that said, “Daughter Drop Off Center.” This comes a year after onand off-campus partying contributed to a major COVID-19 outbreak.
Then there are the matters of religion and race.
The university is struggling to cope with a series of anti-semitic attacks that include, among other things, the vandalization of Chabad House and the placement of swastikas on campus buildings. A task force has been studying the problem. Tension on the committee led SDSU to seek help from the National Conflict Resolution Center.
And Bonnie Reddick, the Black director of the Black Resource Center, resigned in June, claiming that the school isn’t doing enough to fight racism.
“You hear students say that SDSU only trends on Twitter for two reasons — sports and racism,” said Catlan Nguyen, editor of the Daily Aztec, a campus newspaper. “That’s not funny, but it does happen.”
SDSU’S special challenge
The topic has special resonance with Wood, a systemic-racism scholar who wrote a companion book to the “Black Minds Matter” course and has written many others, including “Supporting Men of Color in the Community College” and “Black Men in Higher Education: A Guide to Ensuring Student Success.”
Wood says he experienced so much prejudice while growing up in Northern California that he considered passing himself off as White because he has light-colored skin. His birth mother was Black, and his biological father is White and Jewish. Wood and his twin brother, Josh, were raised in a foster home by White parents.
He has been dealing with such issues as an administrator since 2018, when he was named head of faculty diversity. But his responsibilities mushroomed last year when he was appointed vice president.
Wood’s mandate includes finding more ways to get SDSU to better live up to its claims of being a place that welcomes people of color and offers everyone an equal and fair opportunity to prosper.
He’s working at the direction of Adela de la Torre, the social justice advocate and economist who in 2018 became the school’s first woman and first Latina to be permanently appointed president of SDSU, a school that’s nearly 125 years old.
The topic took on greater urgency in 2020 when a campus task force issued a report saying that SDSU has not fully embraced its role as an institution that serves lots of Latinos, which results in uneven results for students academically and culturally.
Latinos made up nearly one-third of SDSU’S student body last year and could soon become the largest ethnic group on campus.
The study characterizes Latino faculty and staff as under-represented and overworked, adding that there is “a growing inequity whereby Latina/o/x tenured/ tenure-track faculty members are stretched further or overburdened through cultural taxation, having to serve and mentor more students than their counterparts.”
The report further says that the university — located barely 20 miles from the U.S. border with Mexico — is not sufficiently sensitive to Latino culture.
People interviewed by the task force said there is a disparity of cultural understanding among management, faculty and staff, the report said. “For example, little empathy is given to the importance of familial commitments that extend past immediate family members, particularly in multigenerational households.”
The report also said SDSU treats its branch campus in the Imperial Valley — which is predominantly Latino — as a secondclass operation.
They are problems without a quick fix.
Wood doesn’t have the legal authority, institutional backing or resources to simply order that SDSU quickly hire a much higher percentage of faculty who are people of color.
He’s working in a methodical way, promoting such things as implicit bias training for members of search committees and ensuring that recruiters look more broadly and deeply for faculty and staff who would improve the school’s diversity.
This “wasn’t an institutional priority” until de la Torre arrived, Wood said. “We need to get to a point where our faculty are reflective of our students. It’s aspirational. But that’s the ultimate goal.”
All of these issues are occurring during a period of national political polarization fueled by social media posts, many involving race and some that mock the “woke” sensibilities of colleges and universities — the very tensions currently being sent up in the Sandra Oh series “The Chair” on Netflix.
SDSU felt the heat in April when lecturer Robert Jordan used stereotypes about Black people to make a point in a cinema class. A video of him making the remarks was posted on Twitter, triggering an uproar. Students called for Jordan to be fired.
De la Torre and Wood came to his defense, saying that academic freedom affords him the right to make controversial remarks. Jordan is still on the faculty.
Wood acknowledges that the convergence of all these challenges has made his job all the more stressful.
“It used to be that you could go to a room and just have a conversation,” Wood told the Union-tribune during more than four hours of interviews.
“Now, you have to be prepared for a political culture that’s so vicious it led to an insurrection in our nation’s capitol. Even when you’re there with good news on how you’re going to address a long-standing issue there’s a sense of innate distrust at every level.”
Stand and deliver
In a sense, though, Wood has been preparing for this moment for a long time.
Over the past 15 years he’s been heavily involved in research that examines how Black boys and men are undervalued and criminalized by everyone from police to educators. Wood and fellow SDSU researcher Frank Harris III released a study earlier this year that showed that California’s Black students — especially those in elementary school — are suspended at a disproportionately high rate.
They also produced a widely-cited study in 2016 that revealed high rates of housing and food insecurity among Black and southeast Asian students in California’s community colleges. The study helped get colleges to focus on the problem.
“Luke has a strong belief that the world needs to be more equitable and that he is responsible for making that happen,” said Pam Luster, president of San Diego’s Mesa College.
Keith Curry agrees, pointing to a moment in May when Wood went on Zoom to talk to maintenance and custodial workers at Compton College in Los Angeles about the opportunity they have to support students of color, particularly Black males.
“He told them that they see these students more often than anyone else and that they can really impact their lives by saying hello, helping them find their classes and pointing them to a counselor,” said Curry, the college’s president. “He believes that everybody matters.”
Life in a lumber town
Maybe that’s because Wood’s own life almost ended before it even began.
He says that his biological mother, who suffered from mental health issues and was in prison at the time, tried to kill him and his brother Josh while they were still in the womb.
“She would run from one end of her cell to the other, banging her stomach against the bars,” Luke Wood wrote in his companion book to the “Black Lives Matter” course.
The two boys survived and were placed in foster care, joining a White couple who eventually adopted the twins.
Their permanent parents devoted their lives to foster care. They lived in Hayward for a while. Then they moved the family to Mccloud, a tiny, mostly White lumber town near Mount Shasta.
It was common for the couple to care for 10 to 12 foster children at a time, and the social atmosphere could be hostile.
“The first phone call I think my parents got was an anonymous call from someone who said, ‘Get the (racial epithet) twins out of town,’” recalls Josh Wood, now a Sacramento businessman.
Luke Wood remembers many warm, joyful moments, including playing in a band that covered Creedence Clearwater Revival songs. But he said that many of the foster children he lived with had suffered horribly.
“We were a collection of throwaway kids, the children whose parents abandoned them in dumpsters, brutalized them with fire, shot them up with drugs, and disregarded them,” writes Wood in his book.
He often struggled in school, particularly in the fifth grade, when Wood says he repeatedly clashed with a teacher who objected to his complaints about the bullying he and his brother were getting from other students.
Things greatly improved the following year when a different teacher nurtured his love of writing. He received more support in high school from a teacher who taught him to be an effective public speaker. Wood tapped both skills when he joined Future Business Leaders of America, a student group that sponsored a speaking competition. He started to become politically aware, infusing a speech competition with ideas from the civil rights movement.
Those skills helped Wood gain admission to Sacramento State University. Josh joined him and was elected president of the student association. Luke became vice president, and his political activism quickly surfaced.
He began to pointedly question the university’s leadership, asking why the faculty wasn’t more diverse and why the school didn’t seem to welcome Black students. Campus officials objected, saying his claims weren’t accurate and that he was just stirring up trouble.
“Luke held the university accountable and they didn’t like it,” said Cecil Canton, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at Sacramento State who served as his mentor.
“They came up with all kinds of things to try to get him out of the university. They will tell you they didn’t. But they did. I had to go to several meetings to speak up on Luke’s behalf.”
Raising difficult subjects
Wood pursues the same issues today as an administrator, with an eye toward changing the atmosphere on campus.
He co-developed a biasreporting system that sends emails to key staff on issues ranging from discrimination to racism and a violation of free speech policies.
Colleagues say Wood has enjoyed some success because he raises difficult subjects without being confrontational and speaks in a language everyone can understand, especially when he’s dealing with the public.
Tyrone Howard remembers being impressed when Wood met with a large, multi-ethnic audience in Sacramento to discuss his finding that Black students are suspended from California schools at a disproportionately high rate.
“He doesn’t belabor the point that we have a problem,” said Howard, director of the Black Male Institute at UCLA. “He’s always very solutions oriented. Here’s what ‘we’ can do. Not what ‘you’ can do, but what we can do collaboratively.”
The demands of the job — and of simply being Black — affected Wood’s health last year.
He says the low point came in June when a woman he didn’t know rushed up to him while he was walking in a church parking lot in College Area and yelled racial epithets at him.
She also picked up some type of stick and threatened him in a menacing way.
Wood said he didn’t call police “because those interactions don’t usually end good for people who come come from my community.”
He shared the details of the attack with his brother, Josh, who had earlier taken him aside and said, “I’m worried about your having a heart attack or a stroke. You have too much on your plate. I don’t think it’s safe or healthy.”
This year, Wood began regular workouts at a boxing club near campus and started eating healthier. It’s enabled him to shed 45 pounds.
Howard sees a positive future for Wood, saying, “I think Luke will be a university president in the next 10 years. He’s an effective and outstanding educator, he’s an outstanding researcher, his recent moves into the administrative realm have given him even more opportunity to grow.”
Howard’s remark surprised Wood on a recent morning, as he sat in an office overlooking quad that will be filled with students on Monday.
“I think in 10 years I’m on faculty,” Wood said. “I enjoyed being professor. It was the most enjoyable job I had.”
Tamping down COVID
For now, Wood has his hands full as an administrator coping with the resurgent pandemic.
There’s a lot of pressure to get things right after SDSU’S highly criticized handling of things last fall.
SDSU didn’t lean on students to follow health rules. Students were seen gathering in groups, maskless, on campus and at big parties in neighboring College Area. There also was little social distancing.
By early September, SDSU experienced a COVID-19 outbreak, leading to a campus housing quarantine that partly occurred during an intense heat wave. The school also temporarily shut down the small number of in-person classes it was offering.
On Sept. 9, Wood went on Youtube and appealed to students to comply with the health laws. But he delivered a mixed message, saying that “positive cases (at SDSU) are relatively low compared to other universities of our size.”
SDSU’S infection numbers were soaring. Between Aug. 24, when fall classes began, and Sept. 27, roughly 1,000 of the university’s students tested positive for COVID-19.
The school had the highest number of infections of any university in California.
The school’s outbreak was so serious it helped put the region at risk of falling into a more restrictive lockdown, county health officials said.
Wood arranged for a private security company to begin roaming College Area to try to head off problems. He did the same in his Honda Accord.
“What I saw was a large number of 18-, 19- and 20year-olds being 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds,” said Wood, who lives in that neighborhood. “Once we started doing the patrols (the problems) died down pretty significantly and pretty quickly.”
There was a drop in the number of infections. But the underlying problem — big parties — didn’t disappear.
Shortly before Halloween, county health officials took the unprecedented step of issuing cease-anddesist orders at eight homes where big parties were planned. Six of the dwellings were fraternity or sorority houses.
The rowdiness continues, and many residents are skeptical that anything will change.
Wood urges patience, noting that SDSU will take a firmer approach that includes beefed up security patrols.
Fraternities and sororities are under a five-week alcohol ban. So are student clubs and organizations, which is a change.
“We’re taking this issue incredibly serious,” Wood said.
gary.robbins@sduniontribune.com