UMass Boston Racial Climate Survey States the Obvious and Concludes with the Predictable.
Part I: Mattering and Affirmation, Cross Racial Engagement
In 2022, UMass Boston participated in a racial climate Survey whose goal was to “gather student perspectives about our campus climate, which can inform community actions to foster a greater sense of belonging at UMass Boston."
Sounds great, right? We don’t want anyone to feel excluded, do we?
We’re happy to announce that the results are in, and they were disseminated to the public in the form of six community sessions, facilitated by three out of our 250 vice and assistant vice chancellors. We, just like everyone else, were very curious about how we were doing as a leading anti-racist and health-promoting university, and so we took a deep-ish dive into the survey results.
We were apprehensive at first. After all, we keep hearing from our Supreme Leaders about all the inequities, systemic racism, oppression and WHITENESS that infiltrate every corner of academia. Gee, we are worse than the Proud Boys, aren’t we?
Judge for yourselves.
We will break the results down to several parts to save your sanity and ours.
22% of UMass Boston’s students participated. The table below, which shows the demographic breakdown of the participants, raises several methodological questions such as: Do Arab students identify as Arab or Middle Eastern? What about the 98% of LatinX people who hate the term LatinX? Do five Native Americans and four Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders constitute a statistically significant sample? None of the questions were addressed, because as we all know - accuracy and statistical significance are tokens of white supremacy and should be decolonized.
Mattering and Affirmation
Session 1 was about mattering and affirmation. As we all know, the creation and dissemination of knowledge is no longer what universities are about. Mattering is all that matters.
Students indicate the ways and the frequency with which faculty members affirm them. Teaching - out. Constant affirmation - in. Even after affirmative action is gone, there are always ways to affirm anything that goes through students’ minds - from gender to the need for A grades, or ungrading.
The results reveal that 80-90% of the students feel like they “matter” at least a little bit (all shades of green).
Interestingly, the sense of mattering is high in classes taught by faculty of color, but lowest for Asian students. Yet, Asians tend to do better than everyone else. Maybe the logical conclusion is: Mattering doesn’t matter as much as doing your homework.
Next is a prime example of how to create a sensational title that does not match the data, because the data don’t tell us what we wanted to hear. According to the title, expressions of support were lower for students of color. When looking at the actual data, the differences between groups are minimal and expressions of support are very high across the board.
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Overall, our students feel supported, affirmed and cared for.
So… Yay?
…
Nay!!
Haven’t you been reading the Flickering Beacon for the past two years? How dare you suggest that things are, overall, pretty good?! What are we going to do with all the assistant vice Chancellors for DEI? What about our Supreme Leaders, who spent years building all their reputation and professional brand on “Anti-Racism?”, and who keep reminding us how much INEQUITY and WHITENESS there is in higher education? They can’t simply admit that they were wrong, can they?
They can’t silently walk back either. Silence is violence.
The only acceptable action is the same thing they do with the other climate justice thingy: Keep pretending that the problem is urgent, pervasive, much bigger than it actually is and needs immediate attention, and use it to send their tentacles further and deeper into higher education: More DEI, more interventions, more re-education, despite the overall lack of actual evidence of rampant racism, or maybe because of it.
The recommendations for solving the urgent, pervasive problem that doesn’t really exist are the following:
Micromanage faculty teaching and indoctrinate the faculty in the DEI way:
Have faculty regularly convene [for training] with professionals from centers for excellence in teaching and learning.
They should discuss standards of inclusive teaching and ways to engage instructional personnel in developing culturally sustaining and affirming practices.
Provide a diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI) training which explains and discusses implicit bias and microaggressions for staff annually. Each division and department should be encouraged to have their own training session for their staff.
Divert resources:
Offer mini grants as incentives so faculty are encouraged to engage with inclusive instructional design methods.
Identify racial disparities in students’ sense of mattering and their perception of faculty affirmation from the NACCC data, and prioritize support for student groups with the highest need.
Ensure staff have access to professional development funds and are encouraged to seek opportunities related to developing greater inclusion and equity skills.
Violate student privacy and who knows how many anti-discrimination laws:
Collaborate with institutional research (IR) or information technology (IT) department to track student retention and graduation data by demographics.
Disaggregate student data along various axes, including, but not limited to, race, class, gender, first-generation college student status, etc., and share with faculty so that they know whom they are teaching
Cross-Racial Engagement
Next came a session on cross-racial engagement.
NACCC respondents indicate the frequency and nature of their interactions on campus with same-race peers and with peers from different racial groups. Additionally, they report their level of comfort in discussions with other students about issues related to race.
Most students, especially white students, like to hang out with students of different races.
Many students feel comfortable engaging in conversations about race and many more answered (in gray) “WTF do I care? I’m here to study!”
It is not very surprising, given that UMass Boston is one of the most racially diverse universities around, and that racial segregation went out of fashion decades ago.
But yet again, our Leaders don’t let these facts deter them from trying to find creative ways to solve a largely non-existent problem that most students don’t show great interest in:
Develop and include an intergroup dialogue course across first-year curriculum which encourages students to speak and listen freely.
Create intentional, facilitated opportunities for cross-racial engagement on campus including, for example, hosting inter- and intra-group dialogues with skilled facilitators where privilege and marginality are discussed.
Consider implementing racial healing circles to bring students, staff, and faculty together for truth-telling, restoring trust in relationships, and community re-building.
Once more, our Leaders take this opportunity to indoctrinate faculty and staff and push us to participate in activities that are outside our job description:
Equip campus leadership, faculty, and staff with the tools to address race related controversies of the moment, and to initiate discussions about race.
Develop teams comprised of student affairs professionals, academic advisors, tenure-track and tenured faculty, counseling professionals and other administrators with student facing roles, across professional rank.
Charge them with creating student engagement plans that move beyond dialogue and that provide opportunities for students to interact academically and socially across race and other identity group (sic) (which they already do anyway).
Our Leaders can’t help but pat themselves on the back and self-affirm what they have been doing non-stop for the past 3.5 years:
Communicate the message that, despite the difficulty, talking about race is important and creates opportunities to push students to higher levels of critical thinking and toward better preparation to live in a diverse democracy
The only comfort is that as our Leaders have shown over and over again, their talk almost never translates into action.
To be continued.