Abstract
The Varsity Blues scandal exposed America’s obsession with elite private universities. The U.S. wealth gap and rise of Donald Trump left public state universities underfunded and amplified racial conflict on college campuses. The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) is a microcosm of the United States. In its archived “Book of the Oath,” graduates from 1920–1965 signed a pledge to uphold “the race.” The Oath is forgotten, but its unexamined legacy has an impact. In 2017, University of Nevada student Peter Cvjetanovic was the face of the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville. The same year, Nevada alum National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick started a movement by kneeling during the National Anthem to protest racist violence. This book investigates racial tensions on public university campuses and the implications for American society.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2019, a scandal arose over a criminal scheme to influence undergraduate admissions decisions at several top American universities. The investigation into the conspiracy was code named Operation Varsity Blues. The investigation and related charges were made public on March 12, 2019, by United States federal prosecutors. Thirty-three parents of college applicants are accused of paying more than $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, college admissions counselor who promised to get high school applicants into the most prestigious colleges in the nation. Singer took money from wealthy parents, used part of the money to inflate entrance exam test scores, and bribed college officials, including athletic coaches who would fraudulently represent the students as desired athletes even though they were not competitively qualified in any sport. The highest profile colleges involved in admitting unqualified applicants were Yale, Harvard, USC, Stanford, UCLA, and Northwestern.
Singer has been portrayed as the criminal mastermind. The parents who are alleged to have used bribery and fraud to secure admission for their children to 11 universities are prominent businesspeople and well-known actors.
See Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit and the Making of the College Admissions Scandal. New York: Portfolio Penguin. 2020.
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Eddie R. Cole (College of William and Mary) and Shaun R. Harper (University of Pennsylvania), in their analysis, “College Presidents’ responses to Campus Racial Incidents,” study racist incidents and administrative responses at Arizona State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Oklahoma, the University of North Alabama, San Jose State, Bowdoin College, and 11 other universities and colleges, both private and public. They conclude that the presidents of the majority of universities and colleges they studied respond with timidity and overgeneralizations, do not name the organizations responsible for the incidents, and do not take action to prevent future incidents.
Presidents’ carefully crafted language in response to these incidents is “consistently safe, ambiguous, and avoids directly mentioning the racial incident….There is a need for academic leaders to say the word racism, and the frequency of these incidents suggests students, and others on campuses, need to know what racism is. Every academic year, incidents prove that race and racism is not a rare, one-time occurrence on campuses, and college presidents’ … statements set the tone for how racist behavior will be tolerated and addressed” (Eddie R. Cole and Shaun R. Harper, “Race and Rhetoric: An Analysis of College presidents’ Statements on Campus Racial Incidents” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2017, vol 10, No. 4, 318-333).
Shametrice Davis and Jessica C. Harris in their September 15 article, “But We Didn’t Mean it Like That: A Critical Race Analysis of Campus Responses to Racial Incidents” (Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, Volume 2 Issue 1, Article 6 https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol2/iss1/6 ) also address the inadequacy of reactive rather than proactive response of administrative responses to racist incidents on campuses: “We unveiled three main aspects of the written responses to the racial incidents: (a) lack of action-oriented language, (b) overreliance upon remorse and regret, and (c) failure to claim responsibility” (72). They challenge administrators to say the words “systemic and institutional racism,” to lead the way to change.
- 5.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Introduction by Donaldo Macedo. 2000, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 (twice). New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- 6.
A “Campus Climate Survey,” conducted in 2018 and released in 2019, revealed that there is still a significant gap in the level of comfort on campus reported by Students of Color, LGBTQ students, and white students. https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2019/climate-survey-results
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In an article titled, “Education for All … Even a ‘Nazi’?” author Greg Toppo describes the response of the UNR administration to the photo of Cvjetanovic at the rally: “As thousands of social media posts, email and phone calls began pouring in, urging the university to expel the young white supremacist, Johnson had one clear, immediate thought: ‘Cvjetanovic must graduate. Initially I didn’t have any notion what it would take to allow him to finish’ [UNR President Marc] Johnson said, but he and others spent weeks considering ways ‘to be more protective than he needed’ into the spring.” Mary Dugan, the university’s general counsel noted: “What we had was a photograph of a person looking angry, and you can’t discipline someone for looking angry. It looked like he was yelling, but we didn’t know what he was saying.”
Toppo credits the episode at UNR with offering “a powerful counterfactual to the perceived intolerance of most college campuses, especially in their treatment of students with political views outside their (mostly liberal) mainstreams.” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/09/27/university-tests-free-speech-mettle-ensuring-graduation-charlottesville-marcher
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The following is a letter from President Marc Johnson to the university community on September 16, 2019, following two incidents the previous week: a swastika spray-painted on a newly refurbished freshman dormitory, and white supremacist leaflets stapled to bulletin boards on several campus buildings.
“Dear Colleague:
There have been a number of abhorrent messages of hate, bigotry, anti-Semitism and anti-democratic ideologies discovered at and around the University of Nevada, Reno in recent weeks. While the University of Nevada, Reno is unfortunately not immune from the environment in which we have seen the same hate and bias incidents happen around the country, we understand how frustrating and disheartening events like this are for our Wolf Pack community.
Let us be clear: This University unequivocally condemns/denounces all efforts that seek to marginalize any member of our community.
We are proud of Taylor Johnson, our student who wrote today’s Nevada Sagebrush article, “White Supremacy Persists at UNR, Two Years After Charlottesville,” and commend her for the courage it took to publish her story. Her act of bravery is just one example of how to civically engage in a way that will continue to bring about change. The American Identity Movement does not exist as a registered student group at the University. By exposing groups like this, the campus now knows its agenda and can see the group for what it really is. We have the tools to combat this narrative and to educate our students on the contrary. It is through civic engagement that we call upon our University community to help change this narrative.
Let us follow Taylor’s lead and call out these acts when we see them. Let us confront acts of ignorance and blatant hate with civility, respectful, active discourse and peaceful protest.
Now is the time to stand together. Faculty, staff and students must stand guard against the hateful rhetoric and propaganda that would lead us to believe that our community is fractured. Our power is in standing together. It is our duty to use the most influential tool at our disposal – education – to challenge hate and address incidents of bias.
It is also immensely important to report incidents of hate and bias so that they can not only be addressed and communicated University wide, but also so the University can ensure those targeted are receiving the services they need.
Sincerely,
Marc A. Johnson”
On October 17, 2019, President Johnson released another letter to the campus community in response to yet another swastika incident on campus. In his second letter in a month, he noted, “While this is not the first time I have shared this statement with our University community, I feel it imperative to reiterate that we remain committed to an environment that encourages dialogue that is respectful” (President Marc A. Johnson email, October 17, 2019).
- 9.
Quoted in Toppo, op. cit.
- 10.
The Book of the Oath, Special Collections, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries.
- 11.
Special Collections, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries. It may not be too far-fetched to give President Armstrong the benefit of the doubt about his motives for eliminating the Oath. Perhaps he was yielding to political necessity in getting rid of the Oath-signing ceremony by convincing the Board of Regents that it was simply too cumbersome. Given the response of Regents Magee and Jacobsen urging continuation of the Oath in 1965, it seems unlikely that a civil rights proclamation by President Armstrong would have been received with open arms.
- 12.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin Press. 2019. p. 37. See also Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, and Caste.
- 13.
D’Azevedo, p. 3
- 14.
D’Azavedo, p. 14
- 15.
Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2015: Spiegel and Grau. New York), initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, honoring the names of over 4000 African Americans lynched in the 11 states of the South from 1877 to 1950. For examples, see also Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014; “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones; Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America. Documentary Film, 2006, Directed and Produced by Marco Williams; Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, Patrick Phillips. (2017: Norton and Company. New York.); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (2011: Vintage Books. New York); Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020: Random House. New York).
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This concept is compatible with recent events at universities throughout the nation to acknowledge, address, and repair damage done by racist incidents, mascots, and monuments. Universities that have faced a racist past head-on include the University of Virginia, whose removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee triggered the deadly “Unite the Right” rally of August 2017; the University of Texas at Austin, which removed a bronze larger-than-life statue of Jefferson Davis that had stood on campus since 1933; Amherst College, named after Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the colonial era governor who infamously distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, which has removed “Lord Jeff” as their official mascot; Yale Law School, whose students petitioned to rename Calhoun College (named after antebellum segregationist John C. Calhoun), one of Yale’s 11 residential colleges; the University of North Carolina, which removed the name of William L. Saunders, North Carolina secretary of state and KKK leader, from a building that had been named after him in 1922; and Stanford University, which removed the mascot “Indians” (adopted by a unanimous vote of the students in 1930) in the early 1970s. The University of Mississippi is grappling with the origins in slavery of its nickname “Ole Miss.” (“When Your Name is a Legacy of Slavery,” Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2019, p. A12.) Like these esteemed universities, acknowledging and dealing with “the Oath” could set Nevada on a path toward enlightenment that might alleviate continuing racist incidents on campus.
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- 18.
As reported in the Nevada Sagebrush on September 3, 2019, Wolf Pack Tower was subject to an act of vandalism within a week of its opening: a swastika was found painted in the stairwell near the seventeenth floor of the tower:
“According to Toby Toland, resident director for University of Nevada, Reno’s Residential Life, a swastika was found in Wolf Pack Tower, on Saturday, Aug. 24 within a week of the tower’s opening.
In response to the vandalism, Wolf Pack Tower called for a mandatory meeting on Sunday, Aug. 25 to address the incident. Residents and staff were in attendance.
Once evidence and photographs were collected, the vandalism was repaired by facilities staff.
This is not the first incident of swastika vandalism that has occurred around the university. Acts of anti-semitism on campus have happened since 2011.
On Oct. 13, 2017, the same day of a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead and six others injured, an unknown student carved a swastika into a wall with a pencil in Peavine Hall. A swastika was also found drawn on Juniper Hall earlier this year on March 8.
Additionally, an unknown student tagged the Church Fine Art’s graffiti stairwell—a place where students decorate walls with murals—with swastikas and a message that said “is this political enough?” in October 2017. In response, the College of Liberal Arts invited artists in the community to paint over the swastikas.
Once evidence and photographs were collected, the vandalism was repaired by facilities staff.”
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Ring, J., Shaw, T., Gibb, R. (2022). Introduction: The Context. In: Saving Public Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05646-8_1
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