On Nov. 8, 2018, the day after a racist message was written on a whiteboard outside a dorm in Sweeney Hall, NAACP chapter president Australyah Coleman sprang into action.

Coleman reached out to Moe’ Nai Robinson, who was then president of Black Student Union, and Areauna Rogers, president of Collective Action for Cultural Unity. The three of them almost immediately began the work that would ensure the incident was a catalyst for change and not swept under the rug.

“A lot of times people talk about, ‘Oh, we need to do this to change,’ but nobody actually puts the work in behind it to make it happen,” Coleman said. “We planned all of this in a matter of like, six hours. We woke up that morning, we went to our morning classes, we met in the University Center, we sat down and planned everything until the time of that sit-in.”

The sit-in outside Sweeney Hall, organized only hours before it occurred but attended by about 200 people, was where the three announced four demands the university had one month to answer to.

Nearly a year later, some changes are still over the horizon.

The demands

About two weeks after the incident, Coleman, Robinson, and Rogers began meeting regularly with a small group of staff to organize the institutional changes they’d demanded.

The demands were as follows:

Every CMU student must be required to take a cultural course pertaining to their major or minor.
Security cameras must be placed and actively used on each floor of each residence hall on campus.
A certified third-party must host a mandatory race and ethnicity training for all CMU faculty, staff, students and police.
The officer who responded to the incident must publicly apologize for comparing the message to the hatred police officers receive.

Within a week, Coleman said, the officer apologized privately. The other three demands remain tangled in a mixture of work-in-progress and redirection.

The security camera demand quickly encountered stumbling blocks. Whoever wrote the racist message on Nov. 7 remains unidentified partly because there were no cameras recording the hallway.

Then-associate vice president of student affairs and now-interim vice president of enrollment and student services Tony Voisin brought a representative of the CMU police department to one of the meetings who explained that while many halls, such as Kesseler Hall, have cameras that point at entrances and exits, no cameras record the hallways to protect the privacy of students who live there.

Recording dorm hallways is going to remain an ongoing discussion as the group’s meetings pick back up in the coming weeks. Logistics such as data storage costs, how long to store footage, and whether additional cameras will need to be installed (rather than rotating the current ones) are still open questions. Around February Residence Life is going to send out a survey to dorm residents, Voisin said, and one of the questions is going to regard the issue of hallway cameras and privacy.

Faculty and staff contracts prevented mandatory diversity training by a certified third-party from being implemented. As an alternative, Coleman said, some professors have begun giving students assignments to attend cultural events and write a report, or offering extra credit for doing so.

Near the end of the last academic year Robinson introduced the idea of an online diversity training module similar to the “Think About It” course on drugs, alcohol and sexual misconduct that incoming students are required to take. The university contracted with EverFi, the same company who created “Think About It,” to create a course that espouses CMU’s diversity and inclusion values.

The course was assembled over the summer and is currently accessible on CentralLink. However, the course is effectively optional due to programming differences between “Think About It” and the diversity course, Voisin said. Students will be reminded to complete the course via email, but can’t be stopped from registering for new classes if they don’t, unlike “Think About It.”

The response to the first demand, for a requirement that students take a cultural course “pertaining to their major or minor,” lies in a gray area. The 2019-20 academic bulletin lists 37 courses under subgroup IV-A of the University Program, known as “Studies in Discrimination.” Since the 2014-15 academic year, this subgroup has been effectively vacant, containing only a message that it is not required and listing no classes.

Voisin said that the reconstruction of the subgroup could have been in progress for as long as three years, and that a curriculum change such as that couldn’t have been put together between the whiteboard incident and now.

Ongoing Efforts for Institutional Transformation

A page on CMU’s website last updated in April lists the initiatives that have been spurred on across campus largely in the wake of the whiteboard incident. While the four specific demands Coleman, Robinson, and Rogers put forward last year have gone partially unfulfilled, the Ongoing Efforts for Institutional Transformation are essentially what they have led to.

A.T. Miller, appointed as CMU’s first chief diversity officer last year, has done behind-the-scenes work to enact institutional change. He’s hired a “diversity data analyst” in his office who works to find trends in the responses to employee and student surveys, employment and student retention data, and the statistics of who’s engaging in what programs and disciplines across campus. Interpreting these numbers will give his office insight into whether the diversity initiatives are actually working.

Miller has also worked with human resources, faculty personnel services and deans to require that members of search committees complete a portion of the new online diversity module on unconscious bias before they’re able to help hire new faculty.

Ways to adapt the Tunnel of Oppression, an “interactive theater” hosted occasionally by A Mile In Our Shoes, a registered student organization, into a fixture of summer orientation are also being strongly considered. The Tunnel of Oppression features short scenes that bring students “face to face in various bias incidents to learn what it is like to face oppression.”

Measures are being put in place to introduce incoming students to CMU’s values before the school year even begins. This year, volunteers from Leadership Safari and IMPACT, a program “designed for new students of color,” were trained together, and a letter was sent out by President Bob Davies describing his expectations for how CMU students treat each other.

Coleman said that going forward, more communication from the university to its students would “clear up a lot of issues.”

“As a student,” Coleman said, “I should not have to come to you with all of my concerns and the students’ concerns, put in work to make these changes, and then I also have to report to campus what you guys are doing to fix a problem that you have.”

Coleman said she hopes to release a sort of status report on progress so far once meetings resume, and wants to conduct a campus climate survey to find out what concerns still need to be addressed.

Robinson said she feels “pretty satisfied” with what’s been done so far, but that the job isn’t finished. “It’s a start,” she said. “I don’t think the work is really done.”

“I’m pleased that we were able to make some steps, but I’m not satisfied with those,” Voisin said. “It’s never going to be easy, without bumpy roads. That’s always part of the growing and learning process. We need to encourage more dialogue, not less.”