Teaching "Diversity" at K-State
The case, covered in detail in last week’s Chronicle, involved journalism adviser Ron Johnson, who oversaw the school’s newspaper, the Collegian, which had just received an award as the best daily college newspaper in a national competition, the latest in a series of awards it has won. Johnson received glowing praise from student journalists with whom he had worked over the previous 15 years, and he comes across in the article as both a sensitive and knowledgeable figure—seemingly the ideal for the position. And he upheld the school’s clear policy that the journalism adviser should have no say regarding the content of the newspaper, since doing so at a public university like Kansas State would violate the First Amendment.
His offense? He ran afoul of the school’s diversity coordinator, associate provost Myra Gordon. At Virginia Tech, Gordon had overseen a controversial faculty diversity initiative that built off the writing of Cathy Trower, who has argued that “merit is socially constructed by the dominant coalition” and that white male (and only white male) job candidates should be required to demonstrate a commitment to diversity before being hired.
At K-St., Gordon backed the president of the school’s Black Student Union, Natalie Rolfe, who complained after the Collegian failed to cover the Big 12 Conference on Black Student Government, which Kansas State hosted in February 2004. (The article doesn’t mention whether the BSU issued a press release before the event, but it appears that the organization did not.) In response to Rolfe’s complaint, the newspaper’s editors publicly apologized for not covering the event, developed a new system for reporting to ensure that all campus events received proper coverage, and planned “additional diversity training.”
These moves did not satisfy Rolfe, who said that she wanted"a system to make sure the paper's more friendly to the campus” (interesting conception of a newspaper’s role). She then organized a protest march, with 50 students wearing T-shirts reading “W.W.R.G.?,” for “When Will Ron Go?” Gordon, meanwhile, told Rolfe,"I'm backing you all the way,” and publicly stated that Johnson should be fired. (Gordon refused to comment for the Chronicle story.) Johnson then was removed from his position, after the college dean issued a report accusing him of a poor attitude in dealing with students—even though the dean hadn’t interviewed any of the students on the newspaper’s staff, and has refused to say with which students he did speak.
Imagine, for a moment, that the following occurred: a state university newspaper received several national awards, and its journalism adviser, an African-American female, had developed a warm long-term working relationship with the students under her charge. The paper then failed to cover a conference bringing together campus affiliates of, say, the Center for Individual Rights, after which the newspaper editors publicly apologized and agreed to undergo ideological diversity training to ensure they were more sensitive to conservatives in the future. Nonetheless, the student leader of the campus CIR demanded the dismissal of the journalism adviser.
Does anyone think that Associate Provost Gordon would have backed the CIR in such a dispute? Or that the university’s president would have gone along with the dismissal? Perhaps you might want to tell Gordon or President Wefald yourself.