Invisible Men

 

Donald Matthews got the news while standing at a urinal.

Matthews is director of the black studies program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The way he tells the story, he was in a men’s room on campus in late May when a colleague standing beside him told him about a new black professor who would be starting in the fall. The new hire, Matthews learned, was interested in teaching a class in black studies.

Matthews, a history professor, heads that program. It offers a minor, with an interdisciplinary curriculum including sociology, literature, religion and history courses focusing on black culture. The program is taught by professors in departments such as sociology, economics and history. But school administrators never called to ask Matthews’ opinion before hiring a new political science professor who was interested in teaching classes in black studies, Matthews says. Nor did they officially notify him after making the hire. Instead, he says, he heard it while taking a leak.

What’s more frustrating for Matthews is that the chat at the urinal came after school administrators had endured a month of heat about the racial climate at UMKC and after the university’s new chancellor, Guy Bailey, who was hired to oversee all campus affairs, had publicly promised change.

In late April, university officials were embarrassed when an auditor released his findings about racial issues on campus. University administrators had hired Shaun Harper, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, to study how UMKC could improve its minority recruitment and retention.

Harper asked minority students about their satisfaction with campus life. He concluded that they felt isolated and believed they lacked mentors or advisers on the predominantly white campus.

Talking about the diversity of the faculty, Harper told The Kansas City Star, “UMKC is the worst compared with any other school I have visited in the country.”

The most racist place at the UMKC, he said, is the classroom.

Graduation numbers for black men were a key to Harper’s conclusions. He found that only 17.2 percent of black men graduated from UMKC within six years.

Harper did not, however, provide much documentation to back up his work. Instead, he illustrated his findings with a PowerPoint presentation, which is now posted on the university’s Web site (www.umkc.edu). Harper’s slides cite shocking figures and make damning accusations but offer little written analysis of why problems exist.

Harper declined to provide the Pitch with additional details about his study. “I must honor the commitment I have made to administrators (and colleagues of mine) at the university,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I voluntarily agreed that I wouldn’t offer additional comments to the press, as the intended outcome of the audit was to bring about institutional transformation from within — not to create a media frenzy.”

But his audit generated plenty of publicity anyway.

The week before the audit was released, Bailey had appointed a new provost, Bruce Bubacz, to be UMKC’s second-in-command. Bubacz told reporters he was surprised at the allegation that blacks didn’t feel comfortable in the classroom. He’d been working at the school in various administrative roles for 33 years, Bubacz said, so he knew his colleagues. According to the Star, he said, “If there are things interpreted as racist, I don’t believe they are deliberate.”

That did little to calm Matthews and other professors from the black studies program who say the university has a long history of failure when it comes to maintaining a diverse faculty — a faculty, that is, that would encourage minority students to succeed.

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Since the release of Harper’s audit, Matthews and other black studies professors have met with the Black Chamber of Commerce, church leaders and elected officials in an effort to line up allies to combat what they call empty rhetoric that has allowed the institutional racism to fester on campus.

But the professors might want to pay closer attention to another key statistic in the audit: 56.4 percent of black women graduate within six years.

That number is not only higher than the 17 percent reported for black males but also is higher than the percentages for white men and white women.

That number is just one factor complicating the effort to right decades of wrongs.

In the urban core surrounding UMKC, 35 percent of the population is black. About 80 percent of graduates from nearby high schools are black. So Matthews and his colleagues are troubled that UMKC’s undergraduate student body is little more than 12 percent black.

By comparison, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, with approximately the same overall undergraduate enrollment, has nearly 500 more black undergrads. Among the faculty, UMSL counts 172 tenured white professors and 20 tenured blacks; UMKC has 251 tenured whites but just nine tenured black professors. Matthews is the only tenured black professor in the College of Arts and Sciences; the same college at UMSL has 11.

Mathew Forstater, a white professor of economics who teaches in the black studies program, says even though black studies has consistently been a place for black students to vent their frustrations, no professors in the program have been contacted for advice on confronting the racial problems outlined in Harper’s audit.

The black studies faculty has firsthand insight into the problems, but administrators aren’t calling. “They’re not drawing on the resources they have right here,” Forstater says.

Why?

“We’re the troublemakers,” Matthews says.

“This is typical denial,” says Linwood Tauheed, who was recently made an associate professor of economics and also teaches courses in black studies.

Public criticism of the university began several months before Harper’s audit, with the February 1 release of White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. It was written by the woman who had started UMKC’s black studies program in 1994. Noliwe Rooks is now associate director of the African-American studies program at Princeton University, but her newest book includes a chapter describing the institutional racism she felt at UMKC.

Many universities around the country started black studies programs as far back as the 1960s, making UMKC decades late in getting its program off the ground. Even then, the university’s motives were suspect.

Rooks came to campus to start a black studies program only after a lawsuit involving another black professor.

These days, Sandra Walker works for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. She says she has tried to put her days at UMKC behind her, though she knows she was the first in a chain of black professors who started leaving in the mid-1990s.

Walker filed a lawsuit against the school in 1994 alleging racial discrimination, sexual discrimination and retaliation by her colleagues and the administration. The school settled out of court, and Walker declined to speak with the Pitch about the settlement.

But she spoke candidly in front of an audience of students, faculty members, city leaders and state representatives gathered in the African-American Culture House for UMKC’s Black Studies Conference on April 21. (The annual day of speaking out about the struggles and history that blacks have faced on campus and in neighboring communities fell on the same day that Harper’s audit was released.)

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In a videotape of the conference, Walker tells an audience of about 30 people that when she first stepped onto campus in 1968, she was one of few blacks enrolled that year. She studied sociology in what she described as a “benign” student experience. She’d just moved from Arkansas, where racism was up-close and personal.

Her second year at the school, several blacks who had been kicked out of Central Missouri State University enrolled at UMKC. “They revolutionized those of us who were here,” Walker recalls.

The students started an African-American Student Union and pooled their money for school supplies and other things they needed to succeed on campus. They organized protests and created a support system throughout the organization.

After finishing her master’s degree in sociology and working at City Hall, Walker was hired as the director of affirmative action and academic personnel at UMKC. During her time there, she recruited a record number of blacks for faculty positions, a handful of whom are still there. “I take great pride in that, but it didn’t win me any friends on campus,” she told her audience at the April 21 event.

Walker was soon promoted to dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; at the time, she was the only black holding an administrative role. Then, in 1994, she says she was stripped of the post and placed in an office that was formerly a closet.

Walker says she filed her discrimination lawsuit after making more than a dozen complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

While the suit dragged on in court, the university hired three new black professors. Among the hires was Rooks, appointed to launch a new black studies program.

“When I came for the interview, there was an excitement and enthusiasm from the faculty in the English program, saying this is a real strength, there will be a change, it’s something we need,” Rooks tells the Pitch. “It was almost a mantra. Everyone was expressing real support for this idea of black studies and real support for the idea of faculty diversity.”

But she soon got the impression that the black studies program was a mirage. When she arrived, few people on campus stepped forward to support the program as promised. Rooks sensed jealousy among her colleagues. After her first year there, the dean awarded her $500 to write and print newsletters to spread awareness about the program.

“There would be grumbling and comments from people [colleagues] about how much support black studies was getting, how lucky I was doing black studies,” Rooks recalls. “They didn’t get $500, they didn’t get to do a newsletter, things like that. They didn’t acknowledge that it was what I was hired to do.”

Meanwhile, Rooks says, she was struggling to establish a program without a budget, without clerical help or staff, while teaching full-time as a professor in the English department.

Talking with her black colleagues early on, Rooks learned that no black had ever been tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences at UMKC, and few were on track to earn tenure. “Given the racial makeup of the city in Kansas City, it should have been more shocking to me than it was that there had never been a tenured person and very few people on the tenure track. And people who had been on the tenured track all tended to leave.”

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But Rooks was just out of graduate school from the University of Iowa and happy to have the opportunity at UMKC. Despite her frustrations, Rooks concentrated on building up the black studies program. She remembers struggling with the curriculum committee in the beginning, trying to convince its members to approve two classes she had proposed. Rooks says one woman questioned whether the classes were valid.

“It was the famous comment that really showed me that I was in a different universe,” Rooks says. “She seemed to be saying … Do we really think there’s enough work by black people to support these courses?”

She recalls that the English department hired a black professor who would also teach black studies courses. Members of the hiring committee asked each candidate to take over instruction in Rooks’ all-black class for 20 minutes.

The hiring committee looked on with “wide-eyed wonder,” Rooks says. “Afterwards, all of the hiring-committee folks took me aside and said, ‘This is just so amazing, the work you’ve done with these students. They’re so articulate. They can really converse. They really seem to have something on the ball.'” It was as if her fellow professors were surprised that black students were smart. “Some students overheard, and we ended up having talks about it over the next couple of weeks. But it was just something they were used to from faculty at UMKC.”

In her two years at UMKC, Rooks was twice denied when she applied for a $5,000 grant to research the history of black women’s magazines. “The comments I got back were ‘this is not very strong, it’s not well-thought-out, it’s not doable,'” Rooks remembers. “It was not something they could support, needed more work and someone should take me under their wing and really teach me how to write a grant.”

Frustrated, Rooks says she sent the same proposal to Princeton and was awarded a two-year fellowship paying her $50,000 annually to complete her research. That research turned into her second book, Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them, published in June 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Princeton offered her a job as associate director of its African-American studies program, which she accepted.

In the recently published White Money/Black Power, she writes of UMKC’s department heads: “For this group of white academics, as late as 1995, black studies was something far removed from a legitimate academic enterprise. It was merely to be put in place and supported as a rationale for teaching black students and housing black faculty, but not for changing the institution or challenging it to change in any significant ways.”

Since the audit’s release, Rooks has received calls from UMKC black studies professors Matthews and Tauheed, both strangers to her. Matthews asked about her experiences at the school, and Rooks heard that the same frustrations existed: The school rarely awarded grants to black professors, and tenure seemed a distant possibility.

Rooks says the audit didn’t do anything but incite awareness about something that should already have been known. “You didn’t really need someone to tell you that,” Rooks says. “What you need is someone to tell you how to fix it.”

This summer, Chancellor Bailey has asked politicians to help him fix it.

In early June, Bailey invited five members of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus, which is made up of state senators and representatives from across Missouri, to a meeting with Bubacz and other UMKC administrators.

Though the audit had been commissioned before his arrival, Bailey said, he welcomed the challenges that it posed for his administration. “We knew, going into this, it would expose a lot of the warts on campus,” he told the representatives. Discussing the retention of black men on campus, Bailey conceded, “We knew full well the result of this would not be particularly good.”

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But he noted the success of black women, who graduate at a rate higher than both white men and women enrolled at the school.

Still, he said, he wanted the public to be kept aware of the school’s racial shortcomings and the administration’s efforts to turn them around.

On the subject of hiring and promoting black faculty, Bailey admitted, “We’ve had problems there.” He promised to cast a wider net and advertise nationally to recruit more black professors.

And he suggested meeting with the caucus once or twice a year to monitor progress.

Rep. Sharon Sanders Brooks watched the proceedings with suspicion. She later told the Pitch that she’s been following racial unrest on campus for the past 12 years. She recalls when students referred to the school as UM-KKKC. She says she has heard promises before but has seldom seen any action. At the meeting, she told Bubacz and Bailey that it was time to move beyond dialogue.

Outside of such meetings, others are equally skeptical.

Sociology professor Philip Olson — who is white and not involved in the black studies program — tells the Pitch that he has seen little change in his 36 years teaching at UMKC. For decades, he says, he has tried to set up recruiting programs in inner-city high schools. He says he has almost always been met with resistance from administrators when he suggests a new program or idea. “I would call it racism on the campus,” he says.

In the past few years, Olson has created a successful program at Central High School. He sends his sociology students to work with the high school students. As they fix up dilapidated homes and clean up streets, Olson’s students also serve as mentors to the high school kids, telling them to strive for an education and careers. Olson says about 99 percent of the students his program serves graduate from high school.

Olson hopes that the current administration keeps its promise to become a better neighbor, but he has doubts.

“I’ve been here too long,” Olson says. “I’ve seen this too long. There’s an entrenched staff and faculty and administrative core that has a mindset that is purely smack-conservative … who don’t believe in anything except saying the right words. But they don’t live their life that way.”

Provost Bubacz remembers working to secure a full-time director for the black studies program in 2000, when he was interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Until then, previous directors in black studies had taught classes in black studies concurrent with full-time assignments in other departments.

“I wrote a letter to then-Chancellor [Martha] Gilliland, telling her I thought it was an absolutely critical priority for us to hire a permanent director whose job it was to be director of the black studies program,” Bubacz says. “That’s a reflection of how important I think the program was. And we actually were able to get the program up and running with a permanent director who joined us in 2001, to provide full-time staff support for the program, to provide budget support for the program. So I think it’s important.”

That full-time director is Matthews.

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The day before his hiring was made official, Matthews says, administrators showed him his contract. He says the contract included $15,000 in start-up money for research in African-American culture. He says when Bubacz gave him the official contract to sign the next morning, Matthews trusted that it was identical to the previous day’s paperwork. That evening, when Matthews took a look at what he’d signed, the $15,000 had been lowered to $5,000. He confronted Bubacz, who Matthews says was unapologetic, telling him the decrease was because of budget cuts.

Bubacz would not comment on Matthews’ contract, citing university policy on personnel issues.

Still, Matthews had seven professors working with him to teach and develop the program, and he was determined to make UMKC a respectable place where blacks would feel welcome.

Over the next five years, four of those professors resigned.

The first to move on was history professor Delia Gillis. Like Rooks, Gillis had been hired in 1994. Gillis says she tried to remain at UMKC but, by 2000, believed that she would never be granted tenure. She applied at Central Missouri State University and was hired to head that school’s African-American studies program with tenure in the history department. Three days a week, she makes the 120-mile round-trip commute to Warrensburg.

Gillis has found that hundreds of blacks from Kansas City work and study at the school.

While working on her thesis for a master’s degree in history, Gillis studied the desegregation of the CMSU campus. Many of the men and women she interviewed in 1990 were from Kansas City but had chosen CMSU over UMKC. She wondered why the students were driving all the way to CMSU. “The response over and over again is that the school [UMKC] is so hostile and CMSU is so friendly, it’s worth a drive an hour away on a two-lane highway,” Gillis says. (She has since revised her thesis, and it’s under contract to be published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press in New York. Titled 50 years of Brown v. Board of Education in the Midwest: African-Americans at Central Missouri State University, 1954-2004, it’s Gillis’ second book.)

CMSU’s six-year graduation rates as of 2005 were 46 percent for black women and 34.5 percent for black men. (The overall six-year graduation rate as of 2005 was 49.9 percent, with white students graduating at a rate of 51.3 percent.)

Among the other faculty who left, Matthews says, were two white women in the English department. (One was denied tenure, and the other took early retirement.) The last professor to leave, a black woman also in the English department, resigned this year because, Matthews says, she feared that she would not gain tenure.

Regarding the steady loss of black professors and Harper’s audit, Bubacz tells the Pitch, “I can’t speak for the past, but I can tell you we’re going to be addressing those things. We’re very serious about this. It’s not as if we commissioned the study and are going to put it on a shelf somewhere.”

Bailey tells the Pitch that the 17 percent graduation rate among black men is unacceptable and the 56 percent among women can still be higher. He and Bubacz have outlined three goals in the coming years. First, the university must create spaces where students feel comfortable and engaged. Second, the school needs to do a better job of getting the word out to students about the support groups available on campus. Third, Bailey wants to hire more minority faculty to ensure that an adequate number of mentors are in place.

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“The students often felt the greatest hostility was in the classroom, and that goes directly to the shortage of minority faculty,” Bailey says. “The more minority faculty we get, the better. And that’s at the top of our priority list.”

If Bailey’s other goals include creating places where students feel comfortable and engaged and getting the word out about support groups, he should study that 56 percent. Professors in the black studies program probably should, too.

Rooks says she’s surprised at the 56 percent, giving black women the highest graduation rate on campus. However, she notes, it’s consistent with trends across the country — women graduate from college at a higher rate than men. And black women have big advantages over black men, she says: People feel threatened by black men, women have better support at home, and families don’t encourage men to excel academically at the same level as they do women.

Matthews has a similar explanation. “Our primary theory is because of informal associations. Most of them are community students with really good family support. Traditionally it’s been harder for black women to make it, so they’re going to make sure, if they get a chance to go to college, they’re going to have every chance to succeed. So the family is behind them.”

Meanwhile, he says, “The men, they’re more survivors by the time they get here…. They have to work more and contribute financially to their families…. They really had to survive in terms of the streets. They feel isolated — they don’t feel as accepted. Black men are seen as much more threatening by the campus itself.”

Members of support groups and sororities and black faculty members interviewed by the Pitch say black men are not as involved on campus. Black women, on the other hand, are thriving in the two sororities and join more social groups, giving them a greater connection to the campus and their peers

Lacrecia Taylor, president of the African-American Student Union, says the organization has grown from about 50 members in 2004 to about 200 members this year. The group holds socials, cookouts, dances and parties across campus, and schedules tutoring throughout the year and study nights during finals. Though the organization is open to all, the majority of its members are black women. “As far as the graduation rates, yes, I feel that we add a little bit to the retention rates,” Taylor says.

“We’re not there to keep complaining about them,” she says of UMKC’s racial tensions. “We’re there to fix the problems.”

Taryn Counts, president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at UMKC and a member of the African-American Student Union, says she has used her peers as a crutch to get through tough times in class. “You kind of have a built-in sisterhood,” she says. “When you fall, when you struggle, you have someone to help you. So, say, if I’m not as good in history, I have somebody else who is good in history who can help me. And there’s constant encouragement.”

More full-time minority faculty would help students feel welcome, and recruiting a more diverse faculty should be a goal of the school, says Aretha Perry, a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority who is working on a master’s degree in higher education administration and works for UMKC’s Residential Life Office.

Perry agrees that UMKC needs to improve its racial relations. But she tells other minority students to be part of the solution. “I would encourage them to make sure that when the opportunity arises to participate in different focus groups to do so. Don’t just talk about how someone is not doing their job or there is room for improvement. Take the initiative to participate.”

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Matthews has clearly taken the initiative, but participation feels futile.

Recently, Matthews says, he called in the feds to help solve the racial problems on campus. In mid-June, Matthews says, he asked Bill Whitcomb, a mediator with the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service in Kansas City, to help with talks between the black studies program and the chancellor’s office.

Matthews says Whitcomb has told him that he has been unable to meet with university officials. “He’s saying they won’t talk to him,” Matthews says.

Diane Mitchum, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service, says from her Washington, D.C., office that neither she nor Whitcomb can comment on the status of the mediation request. “The work that we do is confidential,” Mitchum says.

According to Matthews, Whitcomb has contacted Bailey’s office several times since the third week in June.

Last week, when the Pitch asked Bubacz about Whitcomb’s request for a meeting, he replied with an e-mail: “As of July 7, 2006, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Administration is unaware of a request, or denial of a request, for mediation by faculty or administrators.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Matthews says when he hears of Bubacz’s response.

Last week, Matthews and his supporters held hourlong vigils each day in front of the African-American Culture House, praying to end racism on campus.

If university administrators won’t listen, maybe God will.