“This is a win,” protesters declared after three weeks occupying Seattle University’s humanities college.
They learned of their triumph on the evening of Wednesday June 1, when the provost of Washington state’s largest Jesuit university notified campus of his decision to remove humanities dean Jodi Kelly from office. He wrote in an email, “I have taken this action because I believe, based on information that has come forward over the past several weeks, that successful operations of the college at this time require that she step away from day-to-day management and oversight.”
The sit-in started out demanding reforms to “diversify” the Catholic college’s humanities curriculum—you know the story, too many dead white dudes. Since the occupation began, two official responses from administrators agreeing to a comprehensive curricular review only whetted students’ appetites for heads on sticks. They would press on until the offending dean was gone. (And why stop there?)
Dean Kelly’s gravest offense? Apparently, recommending a bestselling autobiography from the Civil Rights movement. She—now a trending hashtag, #DearDeanKelly—offered activist writer-humorist Dick Gregory’s Nigger to a student who asked for more “diversified reading.” She claims to have relayed to the student what Gregory wrote in the book’s Foreword concerning its provocative title “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word … again, you’ll know they’re advertising my book.”
While most uses of the word don’t actually amp up publicity for Gregory’s book, this episode at Seattle U certainly does. A few days before the dean’s removal, Gregory himself wrote in an essay for Inside Higher Ed, “I am not offended by Dean Kelly’s use of the word ‘nigger.’ In fact, I am pleased that she has the foresight to want to give these young men and women the knowledge, insight and experience of a civil rights activist that might just help them understand life a little better. I am disappointed that they seemed to have stopped at the title instead of opening the book and reading its contents.”
For what it’s worth, Seattle U president Stephen Sundborg, S.J., who relented to curriculum reform, actually agreed with Gregory regarding how best to help students understand the world around them—opposing Kelly’s dismissal until he just couldn’t any more. The sit-in gets the final say.
Seattle U’s ceding control to its students with but fleeting concern for their actual learning fits a discouraging pattern of administrators’ submission to students. But it also belongs to an aura of racial awkwardness afflicting the progressive Pacific Northwest.
Recently, in his CNN series United Shades, commentator-comedian Kamau Bell drew fresh attention to the whitening-effect of Portland’s gentrification: “When you are in Portland, it feels way more than 76% white.” And this summer in Seattle, Black Lives Matter protesters hijacked the largest Bernie Sanders rally to date to “call out” the candidate’s (and the city’s) whiteness; their display amplified an ongoing problem for the Sanders campaign.
With a lefty ethos of inclusivity but a population so very white, guilt is a greater constant than the perpetual misty rainfall—and submission to a radical minority, whatever the cost, is the only relief from it.
