Following the death of George Floyd last May, administrators at colleges and universities scrambled to issue statements condemning the murder and vowing that they would use the incident as a moment to address systemic racism on their own campuses.
Some institutions decided to establish social justice centers, endow scholarships for minority students and to set aside funds to aggressively court underrepresented faculty. Others like San Diego State University (SDSU) required that the study of race relations be required for future police officers, prison guards and other criminal justice students looking to earn a degree.
“If you look at any aspect of the criminal justice system, you’re going to see racial disparities,” Dr. Roddrick Colvin, a professor at SDSU said at the time. “Now, it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to advocate and argue for and develop policies that are really going to address this head-on.”
These kind of changes—which some say were long overdue—are encouraging to some, but there is a growing recognition that as time passes, some of the longstanding promises made by institutional leaders will likely fade away. That certainly was the case in 2014 when a wave of protests erupted on college campuses following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
But the murder of Floyd led to the confrontation of race and racism within the higher education sector in a way that hadn’t been experienced before. For institutions such as Northwestern University, remaining silent wasn’t an option.
“We now get internal memos from our provost about incidents that happen in the news, like the assaults on critical race theory or the Asian American hate crimes,” said Dr. Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., an associate professor of political science and director of the Northwestern’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy. “We are getting these statements and that is positive. And I want to give credit where credit is due.”
To advance racial equity efforts, Northwestern donated about $1.5 million to support activities in the cities of Chicago and nearby Evanston, Illinois. Other aspects of the university’s 10 commitments to social justice and inclusion included faculty diversity training and the renovation of the Black House.
