Millennials often get saddled with the reputation of being lazy and entitled, but there is little doubt that this generation is socially aware and politically active. From Ferguson to Baltimore and other demonstrations against racial injustice, young people are protesting en masse and standing up for what they believe in. This has been a phenomenon several years in the making.
At the University of Missouri, escalating tensions about race reached fever pitch in 2015. Students were protesting that the administration hadn’t done enough to respond to a series of racist incidents on campus. This was followed by protests by graduate students who staged a hunger strike, and finally by the football team, which refused to play. That was enough to force the university’s president and chancellor to step down. But two years later, the school’s reputation has yet to recover.
Freshman enrollment at the Columbia campus, the system’s flagship, has fallen by more than 35 percent in the two years since.
The university administration acknowledges that the main reason is a backlash from the events of 2015, as the campus has been shunned by students and families put off by, depending on their viewpoint, a culture of racism or one where protesters run amok. [...]
Students of all races have shunned Missouri, but the drop in freshman enrollment last fall was strikingly higher among blacks, at 42 percent, than among whites, at 21 percent. [...]
Black students were already a small minority. They made up 10 percent of the freshman class in 2012, a proportion that fell to just 6 percent last fall.
This follows a national trend. Colleges and universities are notorious sites for student activism (generally on the liberal end of the spectrum) and how a university handles such events can greatly impact how the school is seen in the eyes of the public. University of California, Berkeley made national headlines this spring when students protested a planned speech by Anne Coulter. Several students this year at Historically Black Colleges and Universities protested conservative speakers being invited to their graduations. There were varying opinions about whether or not these folks should have been invited to speak at all or whether they had the right to. Of course, many of these speakers blur the line between free speech and hate speech in both what they say and the policies they advocate. But there remains a difference between this and outright racist incidents like the ones that were happening at Missouri. And this is part of the reason why students, especially black ones, are now shunning a school they don’t see as safe.
Aly Zuhler’s mother and cousins went to Missouri, and her mother would have liked for her to go there as well, she said. But Ms. Zuhler, who is Jewish and grew up in suburban St. Louis, said she could not stomach going to a place where blacks and Jews might feel unwelcome.
When she heard that a swastika had been smeared in feces on a dormitory bathroom at Missouri, she decided not to apply.
This wasn’t the only incident. Right after Ferguson, which is only a two-hour drive from campus, black students reported increasing incidents of racial slurs. One drunk white student jumped on stage during a rehearsal of a black group and started yelling racial slurs. Would you feel safe sending your kid to an institution like that? Especially if the administration seemed ill-equipped to handle these kinds of incidents? The declining enrollment at Missouri is not the fault of anyone individual but instead reflects a larger systemic failure to proactively address diversity and inclusion. Too often schools and organizations don’t consider these issues until there is a major problem. They forget that diversity and inclusion really should be part and parcel of values and considered in every aspect of the work they do—not as an addendum. Who is at the table making decisions, who is being considered in terms of the impact when decisions are made, how diverse perspectives are part of the decision-making process are all critical to building equitable institutions. The university missed the mark. And now they are suffering for it. Since enrollment is down, the library is now broke and asking for donations for books.
“I think we squandered a rare opportunity that we had to be a local, regional, national, global leader in terms of showing how a university can deal with its problems, including related to race relations,” Berkley Hudson, a journalism professor, said.
The protests could have been turned into an asset — a chance to celebrate diversity. “We still can,” he said.
Who knows if they can turn it around? They might be able to. But it will take a long hard look at how they failed and intentional work to make it better. And in the polarized political climate in this country where people are struggling with understanding diversity and how not to be terrible human beings, it seems doubtful.