WSU Grapples With Diversity -- Gov. Locke Heads To Pullman Campus Thursday For Discussion On Race

PULLMAN - In the national dialogue on race, this rural, remote and mostly white college campus is working its way to the microphone.

Just this month, it has had heated discussions over a Holocaust revisionist, protests over the denial of tenure for a black political-science professor and the crescendo of a student campaign to require three course credits on American diversity.

This fall, 40 placard-bearing protesters punctured the corporate calm of a Board of Regents meeting by demanding more cultural diversity on campus. Then came a swastika on a professor's door and signs in a dorm saying, in so many profane words, that black students should go home.

The postings brought out a slew of administrators talking earnestly about the value of diversity, and students who say the administration is all talk.

Gov. Gary Locke might expect a good taste of this discussion when he visits Thursday for a forum inspired by President Clinton's initiative on race, "One America in the 21st Century," and broadened to include gender, sexual orientation and other backgrounds.

"What we need to do now is make some specific suggestions and actions that can create a more diverse WSU," said Karen DePauw, interim dean of the graduate school and organizer of the event.

But with some students feeling the event is too scripted, Locke's appearance has become one of several fractious talking points in a yearlong dialogue on diversity and how it is addressed here.

"They're going to talk about hate speech, which is an easy subject to talk about," said Jeff Guillory, a human-resources professional and one of the few African Americans who have lived in the area most of his life. "But the contaminated water below the crap that's floating on top is what they won't discuss."

"They're setting it up in such a way where they go and say, `We're against hate speech,' " said Franz Maish, a Comparative American Cultures student from Seattle. "No one can ask questions. No one else can say anything. And it's the same thing. They're addressing the really safe issues."

They're having a dialogue, all right. Several dialogues. And as WSU's experiences over the past year show, such conversations hit on a lot of topics, offer no quick answers and touch a lot of nerves.

"I've said for years, if you value diversity, you end up with a noisy process," said WSU President Sam Smith. "Having people consider diversity is not a calming approach."

Diversity is a Smith theme

Nearly 10 years ago, Smith abruptly interrupted an interview with a reporter and ushered him out the door of his office.

He pointed to the safety rail circling the top balcony of the French Administration Building's four-story atrium. On the wall just beneath the railing were dozens of heel scuffs left a few years earlier by student protesters who had draped their legs over the edge of the balcony while protesting WSU investments in South Africa.

Smith refused to let workers paint over the marks.

"It reminds me of what students here are capable of doing," he said.

Smith then returned to his office and resumed the interview. The subject was diversity at WSU. The upshot of his gesture was that if he didn't keep pace with the issue, students would do it for him.

The scuff marks are still there and diversity remains a dominant theme of Smith's 13-year tenure at WSU. It is made difficult by the region's conservatism, the university's niche just inside the nation's top 100 or so research institutions and the campus' isolation.

"I think they bring people here on a false premise," said Lucila Loera, president of the Chicano/Latino/a Graduate Student Association. "In the information center, they have this huge picture of WSU and there are multicultural students in the picture. Yet, the reality is when the students of color come here, it's a culture shock in terms of coming to a predominantly white campus that's isolated, not having centers or mentors or individuals that students of color can go to."

Smith (who sits on the Seattle Times board of directors) has in the past eight years increased the percentage of minority students from 8 percent to nearly 13 percent. His new provost, Gretchen Bataille, is a specialist in Native-American literature, and Smith has named two other women and a black man to vice presidencies. His minority faculty has grown 40 percent, from 180 in 1990 to 252 last fall.

"If you look at the progress we've made as far as the percentages of students from different ethnic backgrounds, percentages of our faculty and staff from different ethnic backgrounds," Smith said recently, "we have made considerable progress."

Still, anger over the turnover among minority faculty and staff can be summed up in the black coffin carried across campus with "WSU DIVERSITY" lettered along its side.

The procession, which took place as thousands of students' mothers were in town for Mom's Weekend April 18-19, was one of many demonstrations this year protesting the "Black Exodus," the loss of 17 African-American faculty and staff over the past year. Symbolizing the exodus is Abdoulaye Saine, a West African political-science professor who is being denied tenure.

Saine's supporters contend that university policies don't credit minority faculty for the added committee work and mentorship that cut into their research. They say the problem is embedded in the tenure system, part of "the contaminated water" that Guillory referred to.

"It's parasitic," said Colin Beckles, an assistant professor and co-chair of the African American Faculty/Staff Association. "You're siphoning off the diverse talents and qualities of your faculty of color and then you're excreting them. Because you're done. You've used them up."

Bataille contends faculty of color are leaving for many of the same reasons they leave any campus: Some get better jobs, some are asked to leave, others leave for a spouse's new job.

"There's a lot of mobility in the academic world," she said, "and the same factors that make it difficult for us to recruit make it difficult for people to stay."

Bataille is attacking the problem with a plan in which individual colleges have proposed about two dozen "targeted hires" aimed at bolstering both the university's diversity goals and its bid to be a top-rated research university.

Minority faculty members spend a lot of time mentoring minority students and have less time to do the mission of the university: research. But Bataille says she is reluctant to give special consideration in tenure for teaching or mentoring because it would set off anyone receiving it as "a second-class citizen."

A Holocaust revisionist

There are some things only a few people want to talk about, even on a college campus.

WSU ran smack into one of them when Justin Ried, an undergraduate student, posted a Holocaust revisionist Web site housed in the university's computer system. Then he invited to campus David Irving, a Hitler biographer who, like Ried, asserts that the history of the Holocaust is overblown.

"We think a million truths exist that are not acknowledged by academia," Ried said earlier this month while hanging posters for Irving's appearance.

The school was in a bind: Step on its principles of free speech by refusing Irving a venue - he's not allowed in Canada and Australia - or host a man widely viewed as anti-Semitic.

"We've given him the imprimatur of legitimacy by letting him come here," said Steve Kale, a history professor who wanted Irving banned.

WSU called on its "livability committee," a group of campus and city leaders assembled after the appearance on campus last fall of swastikas and racist, sexist and homophobic messages. The committee sponsored a Holocaust-awareness presentation detailing the very things Irving denied took place.

A story in the following day's Spokesman-Review of Spokane summed up the evening:

"As 150 people watched a Holocaust survivor weep through her wartime stories Monday night, revisionist David Irving stood at a podium across campus discouraging another crowd from believing such eyewitness accounts."

Smith, who witnessed the free-speech movement while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was never a choice about letting Irving speak.

"We obviously try to discourage any hate speakers," he said, "but if we do have them, we try to balance it. We want a student here to understand the value of free speech. If we say, `We don't agree with you, you can't talk here,' I don't think we're being an academy."

`An abrasive process'

When WSU students began pushing for a mandatory class in diversity, Richard Law, a white male who oversees the system of required courses, felt trapped. Here he was a believer in the value of diversity - he advised black MBA students when he started teaching 25 years ago - but in trying to protect the value of a well-planned curriculum, "I was often perceived as the opponent."

This particular dialogue lasted nearly three semesters. It spanned four university committees. Law was - to paraphrase - scared witless.

"Wouldn't you rather be flayed than to be thought of as a racist?" he asked. "It was an abrasive process and one in which I often felt awkward or worse."

The student campaign, nevertheless, was one of the most remarkable accomplishments in more than a decade of periodic activism on the diversity front.

It also showcased the walking-on-eggshells feeling that people with the best intentions can have when a diversity discussion is transformed into a debate.

After negotiating the university's serpentine approval process, WSU students earlier this month watched their proposal for a three-credit diversity requirement land in the Faculty Senate, traditional gatekeeper of what is taught. The students rallied all their resources, marching across campus to pick up supporters, then watching the Senate with a force of nearly 100.

"We had to make sure that the faculty saw that we were ready," said Marilyn Bayona, a communications graduate student from Pasco.

One faculty member, while supporting the measure, chided the students for "intellectual dishonesty" and "extreme political tactics." Another faculty member proposed voting on the measure by secret ballot, a move that Bayona interpreted as an attempt "to show they weren't racist or against diversity. They didn't want people to know who was going to vote against it."

The secret ballot proposal didn't fly; the measure did, overwhelmingly.

The victory was part of a sea change in how the WSU community approaches the diversity issue, said Esther Louie, assistant director for the school's multicultural student centers.

"We've moved beyond doing a superficial celebration of diversity and appreciation of diversity," she said.

This time, the school's remoteness worked in favor of diversity, she added.

"Because it is so isolated here, you can be concentrated in your energies, you can know all the players," she said.

No one is saying the measure would have failed if it was voted on in private. But the vote might have passed by a narrower margin, said one faculty member who spoke privately.

"We felt boxed in," he said.

That same intimidation, that fear of appearing racist, is likely to have a chilling effect in the forum with the governor later this week, said Neil Walker, outgoing student-body president and a major supporter of the curriculum change.

"I don't think you have a big conversation about race in a highly publicized forum," he said. "If I've got a camera on me, you think I'm going to tell people that I don't necessarily understand why every time there's a problem on this campus, you've got African Americans hootin' and hollerin'? If that's how I feel, I'm not going to say that. I know that's not `politically correct.' "