Put 300 campus diversity officers in a room, and they’ll have no shortage of topics to discuss.
But this week, when the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its annual conference here, one issue came up frequently: the racial climate on college campuses.
That topic has claimed the national spotlight, most recently after a video surfaced of several University of Oklahoma fraternity members’ singing a racist anthem. (Two of the students were expelled.) In North Carolina, the recent killings of three young Muslims and a backlash against the call to prayer at Duke University shocked students. And the Black Lives Matter movement, fueled by a recent wave of African-American men’s deaths at the hands of white police officers, also has found a place on campuses.
The incident at Oklahoma didn’t come as a surprise, diversity officers said. But it did provide an impetus for college officials to look more closely at race relations on their own campuses.
"Part of the charge of diversity officers is really to provide leadership to engage" people to respond to those incidents, said Benjamin D. Reese Jr., the association’s president and vice president for institutional equity at Duke University. "It’s really an opportunity for lots of people in the academy to think more clearly and be more decisive about what we need to do."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Sensing-a-Moment-Diversity/228605