The University’s false announcement last Thursday that a noose had been found in the basement of Healy Hall was foolish and careless. Administrators were rash in announcing that a troubling crime had occurred on campus before they knew the facts of the case. But just as troubling was how the administrators responded to what they believed was yet another hate crime on campus. Their knee-jerk decision to send out a campus-wide email and hold a community meeting sent a clear signal: the University doesn’t understand how to react when they encounter a hate crime.
Georgetown administrators should be embarrassed that they invited students to comment on and learn more about these alleged crimes before they had all the facts. Now that we know that they acted without being fully informed, their community meeting and campus-wide email seem like transparent stop-gap measures to preempt bad publicity and placate students who may have been upset by the news. After all, a community meeting is a way for the University to seem responsive to a bias incident with the least amount of effort.
If Georgetown really wants to respond to racial bias on campus in a meaningful way, it needs to get serious about implementing the recommendations of the diversity working groups. Those recommendations were thoughtful, actionable responses to Georgetown’s diversity problems. So far this semester, however, the administration has not announced one concrete deadline for testing or implementing the three groups’ recommendations, such as the proposals to add two diversity-related courses to students’ core curriculum and hire more diverse faculty and staff. The University should articulate when and how they expect to enact these recommendations.
Forums on racial bias at Georgetown can be productive, but only if they are more than just an airing of grievances. The forum on the Hoya’s offensive 2009 April Fools’ Issue, for example, was worthwhile because it led the University to seek student input on campus racial problems. But community meetings are not the answer to everything—and they’re certainly not the answer when they’re intended to merely mollify upset students.
If a hate crime had taken place last week, it should have been a cue for the University to ramp up efforts to implement the diversity working groups’ well-researched recommendations, not start the conversation over again from the beginning. Administrators already has the tools at hand to create a more inclusive campus environment that will discourage further bias incidents—it remains to be seen, though, whether they will ever actually use them.
