Sara Russo

The president and administration of Colgate University are considering instituting mandatory cultural sensitivity training for all faculty and students, after a private e-mail message from political science professor Barry Shain questioned the quality of education that minority and some female students receive at Colgate. The missive sparked a 70-student, seven-hour sit-in at the University's admissions office.

Organized by members of the campus' ALANA (African, Latin American, and Native American) Cultural Center, the sit-in was held to protest what the group viewed as a progression of racist incidents on campus. Foremost among events cited by the protestors, was the e-mail written by Shain.

Shain's e-mail was written in response to a request from senior Drahcir Smith that he appear on a student-produced television show called "Race-ing Time," which was to focus on racial sensitivity issues on campus. Declining to appear on the show, Shain explained, "My guess, and it is only that, is that some students are [overly sensitive about race] and many others not. Accordingly, I doubt whether I can add much to this particular conversation." He then briefly stated a few of his concerns about how race affects education at Colgate and offered to appear on a separate program dedicated to education at the University.

"I am, however, concerned about the quality of education minority and some female students are likely to receive on this campus because of the willingness of too many faculty to accommodate, in particular, students of color," he wrote. "In too many instances this means that students are invited to offer opinions about their 'feelings' rather than advance reasoned opinions derived from careful examination of the written materials encountered in class."

The e-mail also described Shain's concern that minority students were being coerced into taking courses outside the mainstream of academia and "that too many students of color are seduced into taking exotic courses that make few demands on them rather than those courses that force them to grow emotionally and intellectually."

"It seems to me that if students of color graduate with inferior written and analytical skills to those of their white colleagues, Colgate faculty are certainly not serving the needs of all of their students," he concluded.

According to Shain, who describes himself as a former '60s radical who is now conservative on a number of issues, the e-mail message was part of a "friendly exchange" between himself and Smith, and ignited controversy only after Smith showed the message to a few other faculty members at the school. "She took it to these two or three faculty members who were angry and quite incompetent and they saw this as a threat to themselves, and they urged her to see this as racist," Shain told Campus Report. "I think this is not the student's fault, it's a small group of faculty who are actively distorting and disrupting the learning processes in a far larger passive system of support from the administration and the active faculty who are willing and tolerant accomplices in this kind of behavior."

The e-mail record supports Shain's contention that the exchange between student and professor was initially quite friendly. After receiving the e-mail in which Shain described his views on education, Smith responded by inviting the professor to appear on a separate show on the topic that he had laid out.

"Thank you very much for your input Professor Shain," Smith wrote. "I have spent a while contemplating this, and I would love for you to come discuss this topic on the show this Sunday because I feel that it is an extremely valid topic. I would really appreciate it if you could come in and be on the show."

Shain insists that his comments were not racially offensive and depict a real problem at Colgate, in which white and black students alike are allowed to take courses with insufficient academic content.

"Students in these courses, particularly black students, are privileged because of their own experience of oppression," Shain told Campus Report. "So instead of being asked to read and write about difficult materials, they're able to communicate about the oppression they've experienced…for them to articulate it and be awarded relatively high grades for simply describing their own experience is a great disservice to them because instead of being pushed into reading and writing at the most difficult level that would cause them to grow, they're simply allowed to stay in their feelings and not have to develop analytical skills."

Charging that the professor's e-mail displayed prejudice against minorities and women on campus, and illustrated the need for drastic change, approximately 70 ALANA members took over the admissions office on Monday, November 26, and delivered a list of nine demands to the University administration, including a call for mandatory cultural sensitivity workshops for all professors and a re-evaluation of all tenure-track professors. They further requested a formal apology from the administration for recent racist events on campus and asked that the University "actively recruit non-athlete males of color."

Several administration officials attended the sit-in, including interim president Jane L. Pinchin and interim dean of the faculty Jack Dovidio, and spent the seven-hour period talking with the protestors and attempting to address their concerns.

"I take very seriously the charge of improving the circumstances of students of color at Colgate and thereby moving our wonderful college still farther ahead for all its student body," stated interim president Pinchin.

Dovidio agreed with Pinchin's comments, and promised that, "the University has planned to re-examine everything from faculty and student recruitment to pedagogy and curriculum."

Colgate associate vice-president for communications Sally Baker declared that she was pleased with the student sit-in and noted that it was a "great discussion for all involved" and that the administration is "very, very interested in coming to a solution to the problems."

Noting that one of the student demands had been the cancellation of classes for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, she said the university was able to respond "right away" by instituting an abbreviated day of classes in the morning and a program dedicated to Dr. King later on. "We're also already planning an afternoon and evening of discussions and workshops on the issues of diversity in an academic setting," she told Campus Report.

The e-mail and resulting sit-in have had far-reaching consequences for the University. Colgate's administration has stated that it intends to examine the possibility of making cultural sensitivity workshops for professors mandatory and more extensive, but that it first needs to examine the legal hiring contracts for professors.

"We hope we can incorporate more [diversity workshops], particularly stressing it more in the freshman orientation but also finding ways to do follow-up with all the other classes," Baker told Campus Report.

Shain believes that the changes demanded by the ALANA protesters are actually welcomed by the administration and most of the faculty at Colgate and fears that they may herald a wider movement to rid the campus of fraternities, sororities and Division I athletics, and to "diminish the normal, traditional identities of our students."

"Part of this process is that some of the classes, increasingly more, have been turned into encounter groups, in which students don't learn substantive materials, don't have to read difficult materials, are not engaged in rigorous thought which leads to open-ended conclusions, nor do they have to write discursive essays," Shain told Campus Report. "What they do in these classes is they discuss and try to uncover their hidden racism and sexism and homophobia."

Comments made by faculty members at an open discussion held at the ALANA center prior to the sit-in reveal that few of Shain's colleagues agree with the professor's views.

Assistant professor of education Denise Taliaferro stated her belief that the e-mail was merely a "conflation of whiteness and reason, nothing other than an articulation of white male hegemony."

"Shain speaks against most. He has a history of doing so," commented professor of religion and Native American studies Chris Vecsey. "He expresses his viewpoint often, and it is often unfounded. He admits here that his opinion is founded upon gossip. I found what he says to be so reprehensible. I will uphold his First Amendment right to speak, but bullies need to be responded to; responded to with force."

Free speech at the University has most recently come under attack by the students themselves. The campus newspaper, The Colgate Maroon-News, reports that a group of students has begun collecting quotes "concerning racially or sexually charged messages" from Shain and other professors that "could be deemed reprehensible in their opinion."

Although Shain has tenure at Colgate, he believes that the attempt to collect controversial statements from himself may be used against him at a later date. "What some are clearly aiming to do is develop some kind of suit against me for the equivalent of a 'hostile work environment,' that I'm making a hostile environment for my students," he told Campus Report. "So there are students, in my classes, taking notes verbatim that are being disseminated. I mean, everything I say in every class now immediately gets back to whoever it is that collects these things. And the hope is, at least for some, that they can build a case that I'm creating a 'hostile work environment.'"

The professor has already been asked to publicly explain his statement in class that "The Japanese are short and eat rice." Shain explained to Campus Report, "I said 'the Japanese are short and they eat rice,' which was in the context of talking about my wife's family" and how as the diet changes to include more protein, populations will grow taller.

While Shain is unhappy with the administration's response to the sit-in, he notes that most of his current and former students have defended him. "The black kids who have been my students, in the main, are very, very supportive of me," Shain explained to Campus Report. "Mostly these [protestors] are kids who have not had me who have listened to these hate-spewing faculty and don't actually talk to me."

Despite remaining uncertain of his future at Colgate, Shain has ardent hopes for the improvement of education at the University, and has found, ironically, that the recent controversy has drawn greater attention to his position that education at Colgate needs to be dramatically reformed. "Well, that's the funny thing about this whole imbroglio about this e-mail," he told Campus Report. "I think it's given me increased traction to push this real issue."