Today I do not feel like a Trojan. So instead of attending class, I found a bench on campus and I’m trying to imagine how it would have felt to be the undergraduate version of myself yesterday (Wednesday) during this.
What’s sad is that it was easy to transpose almost every iota of my own college experience, which began with 9/11 and SCOTUS’s first steps to dismantle affirmative action through the Michigan case… I even had the same nerves and discomfort walking onto campus and flashing my ID–do I look like I “appear to be affiliated with USC” enough?
What is compelling me to write and post this though is a question my cousin posed to me as I was trying to process my feelings: “did you really expect anything different?”
For anyone at USC who’s reading this:
Yes, I did. Shame on YOU SC.
For all of the rest of us:
Three reasons:
- First and least obvious perhaps: dystopian use of technology. Campus-wide communication can and should include joy, compassion and support in these moments… not just sadness, danger, and CYA policies. My phone notifications don’t need to feel like the CPD’s shutdown protocol at Taste of Chicago.
- Second: deployment of non-university safety personnel. I encourage friends with more knowledge of protest history to elaborate and educate me, but the deployment of especially the LAPD and the NYPD–departments that have deservedly spent decades navigating a reputation of brutality and profiling–feels like an abdication of a school’s duty of care. If USC safety isn’t trained in engaging protesters, then we should get on that. At the very least, university senior leadership should have met with protesters prior to sending out the police. If entrenched power like that which we encountered 25 years ago (elitist white men) paid us that courtesy, then yes, I expect at least as much from the university administrators today who bring with them much more extensive resumes of student support and professional administration.
- I expect different from us. To the “us” in seats of power: they may have “hired” you, but it was not a board of trustees, members of the corporation, or the university’s biggest donors that made you provost or president… remember you are there because of the generations who not-so-long-ago pushed through barricaded doors and glass ceilings to put you in a position to be the first (or second or third). Terence Blanchard recently said of being the first Black composer to have an opera appear at the Met that “I may be the first, but I know I’m not the first that’s qualified”. We should expect leaders from our communities, especially when they’ve made it to where they are even partly through our support or by demonstrating support for our communities, to continue to support us when they are in position to make or at least publicly own decisions. Twenty-five years ago, when students spoke to power, it was almost always to a white hetero man. Everyone else, we’re only here because somebody dreamt us and prayed on us. So yes: we expect different from us.
So what should we do?
To my fellow educators: truly consider the safety of every one of our students
If we believe that student safety is our first priority, then now more than ever I urge us to center student voices (all of them) when we consider what a safe space looks and feels like. We have to remember that one student’s safety may and often does come at the cost of another’s. Pretending this isn’t true exacerbates that feeling of alienation for the unsafe party. I think of all the female-identifying engineers of color, all the hijabi women, and any others who saw themselves in Asna (the USC valedictorian whose disinvitation to speak at commencement preceded the protests yesterday by about 10 days). Those students must now bear the weight of their dreams and accomplishments being dismissed by the university alongside hers.
To be a bit more vulnerable… I believe that I survived eight years as a high school principal because I embraced this duality: every difficult decision we make as leaders usually helps and harms. There is no decision that is 100% right. So when the decision was mine to make, I tried to be humble and repair the harms that my decisions caused on the parties harmed. I pray that the balance of these decisions for every single young person I ever worked with was positive, and if not, I ask forgiveness from them first and from Allah second.
In the most pressing context… If ever a school must resort to using physical force to keep (some) students safe, how are we restoring the feelings of safety for those we have endangered through that decision? This may seem foreign to anyone who has never been suspended from school, or faced constant microaggressions, or felt unsure of which single-sex restroom to use. But rest assured, for a huge portion of students in our schools, “not feeling safe” is the default. How have we not previously mobilized the city police to eradicate rape and sexual assault on college campuses? Or hazing? Or racist halloween costumes?
And to my fellow parents: be authentic
My other cousin is right. Ain’t nothing changed. In fact… while so much is better, things are strangely worse for our kids in so many ways. So raise them strong. And make sure they know where they come from, that they unapologetically and fiercely assert who they are as individuals, and never give up on the belief that they can be the generation that finally changes the world.