Why aren’t Black students thriving at Chapman University?

Chapman University freshman Aissata Sall was groggy last fall when she logged in to her virtual 8:30 a.m. human rights class — until a couple words bolted her awake.

As her professor discussed examples of bullying in sports, he used a gay slur. Then he said the n-word.

At the end of class, when Sall told the professor his use of those words made her uncomfortable, she said he told her he was sorry she felt that way but being direct was just part of how he taught his course.

Sall was the only Black student in class — an experience that’s common for Black students at Chapman. No one spoke up to support her, though one classmate later emailed an apology for staying silent.

She reported the incident to Chapman’s Equal Opportunity and Diversity Office. To her knowledge nothing came of the investigation. That also is a common experience for students.

“I was shocked,” Sall said. “I feel like I shouldn’t have to teach my professor not to say slurs in class.”

Before coming to Orange last year from her home in Portland, Oregon, Sall hadn’t heard about Chapman’s long struggle with embracing diversity and supporting Black students. After her experience in class, Sall researched past complaints of racism on campus and learned she wasn’t alone.

“I realized that if this got swept under the rug, then it’s probably being done to other students as well.”

Now, when the semester ends in May, she might transfer. If she does, she’ll join the disproportionately high number of Black students who leave Chapman between school years.

Chapman is known for being particularly tough for Black students. The  film and Netflix series “Dear White People” was inspired by the challenges faced by Black students at Chapman.

Now, some students, faculty and staff say they’re working to change that narrative. And, in some measurable ways, that’s happening. Data shows the school has made progress in helping Hispanic students succeed, for example, with administrators touting initiatives aimed at boosting diversity across the university.

But students, staff and even top administrators say there’s a persistent disconnect between gains made on paper and the day-to-day experience Chapman’s Black students share.

“It’s difficult being a Black student at Chapman. That’s the reality,” said Justin Riley, who experienced those challenges himself as a Black Chapman graduate of 2007. He now works in the Dean of Students’ office on efforts to support Black students on campus.

“I think we need to accept that as a reality and ask: How do we make it less difficult?”

President Daniele Struppa promised in his Feb. 19 State of the University address to focus on boosting the graduation rate for Black students.

“We need to work, we need to have ideas and we need to put in place programs to change that number,” Struppa said.

Students who’ve been on the front line of the fight hope real change is ahead. But many are skeptical and burned out. All five students who serve on the Black Student Union’s executive board plan to step down at the end of this school year.

“We’re tired of feeling like we’re carrying the whole universe on our backs,” said Ramya Sinha, a junior who’s in her second term as president of Chapman’s BSU.

“I really feel as it they have just failed all of us.”

Data tells part of the story

Chapman’s overall makeup is becoming more diverse thanks to an effort rolled out 10 years ago to recruit more students from underserved communities.

“I often hear people commenting on how white Chapman is,” Struppa said. “But when you look at the enrollment by ethnicity, you see the dramatic change in just a few years.”

In 2015, 58.4% of undergraduates were white. In 2019, that number had shrunk to 51.8%, with the biggest gains in Asian and Hispanic students. The diversity gains have been even more significant for graduate students, which went from 46.7% white in 2015 to 36.3% white in 2019.

“Now we are becoming almost a minority majority school,” Struppa noted.

But that notion doesn’t resonate with many Black students on campus.

“Being a BIPOC (Black, indigenous and person of color) student on this campus, it doesn’t feel like that at all,” Sinha said. “It’s definitely a majority white campus.”

While the percentage of Asian students on campus has grown by nearly 4 percentage points, Black students have only seen a 0.3 percentage point gain. They made up 1.7% of Chapman’s population in 2019, while Black people were 2.1% of the population in Orange County, 6.5% of the population in California and 13.4% of the population in the United States.

The disproportionately small number of Black students has prevented historically Black fraternities and sororities from opening chapters at Chapman, which has been on the wish list for many Black students so they’d have a place to find built-in community.

What’s causing the problem?

That lack of community is one of the main reasons Black students aren’t thriving at Chapman, according to Riley, with many students voicing the same concerns and negative experiences that he heard when he attended more than 10 years ago.

When Riley was a student, he said he found community through his racial identity as the two-year president of the BSU but also from his teammates on the basketball team and his coworkers in the university’s admissions office. Without those built-in support networks, he said, Black students can find Chapman to be “a very isolating, lonely and frustrating place to be.”

Jerry Price, dean of students at Chapman, believes that sense of isolation is a driving factor behind why Black students aren’t graduating at nearly the same rates as their classmates from other communities.

Over the past decade the four-year graduation rate has gone up at Chapman, from nearly 65% to about 72%, with gains seen in most racial groups. Not so for Black students, who have seen their four-year graduation rate drop from 53% in 2010 to a flat 50% today.

A smaller but similar gap is seen in retention. Though Hispanic and Asian students are more likely than average to return to Chapman from one fall to the next, the retention rate for Black students remains the lowest of any racial group on campus.

“What’s important is keeping us here, and making sure we all feel safe and comfortable enough to stay here,” Sinha said. “(It’s) an issue, because a lot of us don’t.”

By comparison, Black students at UC Irvine, which is 15 miles south of Chapman in Irvine, stick around and graduate at rates just below university averages.

Price said academic preparation and economics might contribute to the problem, though he noted students from other communities that have historically faced similar systemic challenges are succeeding at higher rates than Black students at Chapman.

Another factor, Price said, could be local demographics. At all universities, out-of-state students are less likely to graduate on time. And since Orange County and California have fewer Black residents than the rest of the country, Black students at Chapman more frequently come from out of state, which adds another layer to the emotional isolation many experience.

Even students who come from communities with small Black populations — who’ve grown accustomed to being one of the only Black kids at their high school — can experience culture shock at Chapman, Riley said. They no longer have close, daily support of family, church or other social groups. At Chapman, Black students are suddenly a minority 24 hours a day.

To help bridge that gap, one of Riley’s first projects was to create a Black Resource Guide. The book includes information about on-campus student resources along with local Black barber shops, Black-owned restaurants and Black churches — spaces that are often harder to find in Orange County, which has its own reputation for white privilege.

But Price said the university knows external factors alone aren’t causing the problem.

“We have our own Chapman issues, too,” he said.

“It can be difficult to sort out what is an America problem, what is an Orange County problem, and what is a Chapman problem,” Price added. “But we know we have to take a hard look at some things in our own campus climate.”

Both Sall and Sinha said administrators’ failure to really listen to them, to validate their experiences, to take swift action to improve the situation for Black students, and to strongly condemn incidents of racism on campus, have contributed heavily to their frustrations with the school.

“It just makes me feel like I’m here to fulfill a quota,” Sall said.

Controversies blot progress

Many minority students and advocates on campus say it feels as if every time they make progress, a traumatic personal experience or a high-profile controversy overshadows the positives.

Toward the end of Sinha’s freshman year, Chapman made headlines for displaying vintage posters promoting the racist film “Birth of a Nation” in a high-traffic area on campus. The posters eventually were taken down, but not until students marched in protest and several meetings were held.

“Just seeing how hard it was just to get them to hear us and to listen to us and to understand why having a poster for a movie that pretty much incited the KKK and violence against our community, that was a big slap in the face,” said Sinha, whose two best friends, who are also Black women, left after that first year.

A year ago, when Sinha was a sophomore, student Dayton Kingery was arrested after going on a racist, homophobic rant in class. Following the well-publicized incident Kingery left the school. Chapman officials, citing student privacy, wouldn’t say if he was expelled or if he voluntarily withdrew.

And in August, Sall expressed frustration with Chapman leadership when the school did not condemn tenured Chapman law Prof. John Eastman after he wrote an opinion piece that questioned whether Kamala Harris — a biracial woman who was born in Oakland to immigrant parents — was eligible to be vice president of the United States.

While Chapman administration did not push out Eastman at that time, the op-ed drew wide criticism as being racist and an echo of the “birther” push against former President Barack Obama. Sall said friends messaged her asking, “This is the school you go to?” She was embarrassed to admit it was.

Chapman also has long attracted attention for embracing conservative figures. Three years ago, for example, the school was bitterly divided after accepting a $5 million donation from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation. And the school in recent years has invited far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro and Dinesh D’ Souza to speak on campus.

Though race issues aren’t overtly linked with such donations, Sinha believes the university’s fear of losing conservative donors stops administrators from taking swift and severe action against racist acts coming from students and faculty on the right.

But Price suggested Chapman administration might be more active than students realize when it comes to denouncing speech or actions that are racially insensitive. Privacy and personnel laws, he said, often prevent the school from disclosing details about student or faculty discipline.

“That lack of transparency helps breed distrust,” Price said. “That bothers me, but I’m not exactly sure what the solution is.”

Initiatives take aim at issue

Administrators tick off a growing list of programs aimed at better serving Chapman’s Black students. Some have been underway for several years, while Riley said others were spurred by a 12-step action plan that the Black Student Union sent to the administration in July.

The first item on BSU’s wish list is the aggressive recruitment of Black faculty. For now, Chapman’s faculty is 2.5% black.

Struppa said he allocated more money to faculty diversification with an emphasis on hiring more Black faculty. That money will be phased in over three years, and settle at $1.5 million annually aimed at boosting the number of Black instructors and professors. So far, Chapman has hired three new Black faculty members.

“These are not words,” Struppa said. “This is cold cash, if you want, that will help us recruit the kind of faculty we want to have on campus that we have not been able to attract in other ways.”

Chapman also has started a new program in Africana studies and approved a program in ethnic studies, though it hasn’t been rolled out yet.

The school added two mandatory diversity courses for incoming freshman this year, as the BSU requested, and launched an additional orientation geared toward Black students and their parents. The school also is considering mandatory diversity classes in the general education program, and it is looking to add a Black therapist and a new vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Riley recently led the school in creating a Black Alumni Association, which he hopes will create a mentorship pipeline that could help Black students. He also started a Black Staff and Faculty Forum, modeled off the school’s successful Latinx Staff and Faculty Forum.

“I give a lot of credit to the Latinx forum for the success we’ve had with our Hispanic students. And I believe that the creation of this new forum for our Black community will have the same impact on our Black students,” Struppa said. “They won’t bring success in a month or in six months or in a year, but you will see gradually the impact just as we’re seeing in other parts of the campus.”

Sometimes, Sall said, this list of incremental or planned changes can feel like “a bunch of white people patting each other on the back.” And Sinha said when Black students express frustration about the slow pace of change, they’re told they’re impatient or ungrateful.

“This work is always just met with challenges and walls and backlash,” Sinha said. “They don’t make it easy for these things to actually come to fruition.”

Riley can see major changes since he graduated in 2007, but he believes there is work to be done. Chapman still doesn’t have a black student resource center, for example, which are common on many campuses.

Also, the past year has been unusual. Many of Riley’s community-building ideas for Black students at Chapman have been on hold because the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the campus a few months after he started on the job.

Sinha also acknowledged that, beyond a surge of support early last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death, it’s been tough to keep people engaged in racial issues during the pandemic. Even the Black community just isn’t showing up, she said. For example, the annual BSU talent show, which was slated to be held virtually this weekend, has been cancelled due to lack of participation.

Sall said she might transfer to a historically black college, such as Spelman or Howard, or study abroad for her sophomore year.

But, she added, that decision hasn’t been made.

She said the support she’s found through the BSU and her small community of friends at Chapman might bring her back to keep making some good trouble for at least one more year.

“I’ve always been the type of person who wants to be involved and speak up against things,” she said. “So I guess this just kind of further motivated me.”

Source: Orange County Register