College presidents think race relations on their campuses are “excellent” or “good,” but their rosy projections don’t mesh with student sentiment.
Even though campus protests at Yale University, the University of Missouri, and others have been common, 84 percent of presidents don’t see a problem on their campus, according to Inside Higher Ed.
A new survey from Gallup and Inside Higher Ed also found that, when those presidents look to other campuses, only 24 percent say race relations are “good” and 65 percent think they’re “fair.”
Like American voters who love their representative and hate Congress, college presidents see their school as an oasis of peace among deep problems in the country.
A few must be correct, but college presidents with protests thought the same thing. The myopia doesn’t stop with racial relations, either.
“This pattern of college leaders viewing situations on their own campuses much more positively than in higher education at large has been evident in recent Inside Higher Ed surveys of groups of officials on issues such as sexual assault, academic fraud in athletic programs and false reporting of standardized test scores,” IHE Editors Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman wrote in the report.
The only saving grace for that naivety is that 31 percent of presidents think race relations have worsened, and only 15 percent believe it’s improved.
They were also more inclined to see the protests as a threat to freedom of speech and academic freedom. “Fifty-four percent, strongly agree or agree they were concerned that some of the students’ demands and actions violated principles of free speech and academic freedom; 23 percent strongly disagree or disagree,” Jaschik and Lederman wrote.
Freedom of speech has been under threat on college campuses for years, well before the recent spat of protests. The recent statement by University of Illinois at Chicago Chancellor Michael Amiridis that he refused to cancel a Donald Trump on rally in the defense of free speech was a rare, but bright, instance of college administrations protecting speech.
Future protests over race relations will present a problem for college presidents to balance freedom of speech with protestor demands, some of which are absurd. For presidents who believe their campuses are islands of peace and tolerance in a tumultuous world, they’ll face a bigger challenge of addressing university problems while protecting the constitutional rights of students.
