Declaring Dominican University a Sanctuary Campus

My university, Dominican University, has declared itself a sanctuary campus. We have a long history as a national leader in supporting the rights of undocumented students to access higher education, including regular fund-raising to make that possible. In 2014 I wrote:

Over the last few years at my Roman Catholic university, we have begun to act, both admitting and financially supporting undocumented students. It may seem risky, but as Donna Carroll, our president at Dominican University, always says, "It’s the right thing to do."

I saw our position around these issues as the strength of both being small (so a single act of leadership can really change course) and mission driven. I wrote:

Catholic colleges must commit to a core and challenging set of beliefs, but they do get to choose what to emphasize and where to concentrate resources. At their best, faced with the same financial pressures as all other institutions, Catholic colleges and universities have a mission that allows them to make arguments about justice, even ones that might risk alienating donors of particular political ideologies or even running counter to ideas held by some within the church. Dominican University provided health care to domestic partners for same-sex couples years ago because the universal right to health care, part of the dignity of the person, trumped other concerns. As Donna Carroll notes, "As the infrastructure of higher education become more and more like a business, it’s harder to take a stand that may compromise the business." Commitment to mission allows you to take such stands because they are right, not because they are wise.

Of course, such a position is also fiscally wise. We are a majority Latinx institution. We need to listen to and serve our core community.

Here's a link to the full statement of declaring Dominican a Sanctuary Campus.

Key passages:

BE IT RESOLVED, that Dominican University commits to a campus climate and an academic experience that promote the security and well-being of all persons, especially those who are underrepresented and struggling for voice and opportunity. To that end, as directed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the university will not provide access to student information, including any records that identify immigration status, except as required by federal, state or local laws, and only in the presence of formal documentation.
FURTHER, we affirm and will advance, to the extent possible, the 2011 Ruling by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which notes that law enforcement and ICE officials should enter the campus for law enforcement purposes without the permission of the university only under the most exigent and compelling circumstances.
FURTHER STILL, the university will continue to support undocumented students --- to promote academic access and success, provide financial aid, as possible, and ensure that Dominican University is a welcoming and safe environment for all, regardless of background.

I don't know if such declarations make a difference (though the money obviously does). What I do know is that it's the right thing to do and we all need to practice taking moral public positions, as the next few years will test us in that regard.

What Is Public Engagement?

I am not a fan of the label: Public Intellectual.

I think it's used to valorize certain kinds of public activity - oped writing, essays in fancy literary magazines, prestige stuff - and not others. For me, activism, community arts (music, theater, fine arts, etc.), working with local farmers, volunteering, and more, are at least as valuable acts of public engagement as a fancy essay in the New Yorker. When scholars engage the broader public, however you define it, in ways inspired or informed by their expertise, they are being public intellectuals.

Today I'm joining a professor of communication, of social work, and our director of ministry to discuss this at Dominican, where I teach. One day every fall we cancel classes to hold a symposium around the concepts of Caritas et Veritas, the motto of the Dominican Order of Preachers. Program is here.

My panel is:

11:15am F. Public Intellectualism, Scholarship, and Engagement
John DeCostanza, Jacob Lesniewski, David Perry, CarrieLynn Reinhard
This panel will address public engagement, community-based learning, community-based research, public intellectualism, and public scholarship. Each panelist sees the ability, and indeed the necessity, of engaging with the public outside of the classroom and off the college campus as a primary indicator that they have managed to fulfill their calling as academics and professionals in academic settings.

Watch for tweets using the #PublicScholars hashtage today.

Ableism is: Two Basic Readings

Today I'm part of a workshop on how Dominican might develop more curriculum around ableism. I'll be talking for about 5 minutes on my basic definitions of ableism - focusing on violence - and then participating for a few hours in a group effort to propose a set of linked classes. It's just the start of what I hope becomes a real institutional effort to engage with ableism throughout our curriculum.

It's a new conversation. Usually, conversations around disability on my campus are about disability ON my campus, not the major societal individual and structural acts of discrimination that cause so much hardship, and I'm very much looking forward to the collaboration.

Here are my two basic readings from two of my favorite autistic , one new, one old.

1. Lydia Brown: Ableism is not "bad words." It's violence

Brown writes, in the wake of Sagamihara -
The Sagamihara attacker was targeting the disabled residents of the institution.
He told police, "I want to get rid of the disabled from this world."
Don't you ever fucking dare try to say, "but who could hate the disabled?" to me again.
Don't. Dare.
We are not some innocent angels untouched by the realities of the world around us.
We are not unaware or oblivious to the existence of others, let alone of hate.
We know hate and we know violence, because it is written on our bodies and our souls.
We bear it, heavy, wherever we go. Ableism is the violence in the clinic, in the waiting room, in the social welfare lines, in the classroom, in the recess yard, in the bedroom, in the prisons, in the streets. Ableism is the violence (and threat of violence) we live with each day.

Language is part of ableism, just as language is part of racism, sexism, anti-LGBT ideologies, and more. But in the end, the language leads towards violence of all sorts.

2. Julia Bascom: Quiet Hands

1.When I was a little girl, they held my hands down in tacky glue while I cried.
2.I’m a lot bigger than them now. Walking down a hall to a meeting, my hand flies out to feel the texture on the wall as I pass by.
“Quiet hands,” I whisper.
My hand falls to my side.
3.When I was six years old, people who were much bigger than me with loud echoing voices held my hands down in textures that hurt worse than my broken wrist while I cried and begged and pleaded and screamed.
4.In a classroom of language-impaired kids, the most common phrase is a metaphor.
“Quiet hands!”
A student pushes at a piece of paper, flaps their hands, stacks their fingers against their palm, pokes at a pencil, rubs their palms through their hair. It’s silent, until:
“Quiet hands!”
I’ve yet to meet a student who didn’t instinctively know to pull back and put their hands in their lap at this order. Thanks to applied behavioral analysis, each student learned this phrase in preschool at the latest, hands slapped down and held to a table or at their sides for a count of three until they learned to restrain themselves at the words.
The literal meaning of the words is irrelevant when you’re being abused.

We're just at the start of our conversation on ableism - not just at Dominican, but globally - as it moves from within disability communities into broader discourse. Curriculum can be part of that.

 

Complicity - #ComplicitNoMore

Last Wednesday, a group of African-American students staged a public protest against racism on our campus. You can see video and read about it here. They chanted, "Silence no more," vowing to call out the racism that they saw.

As of yesterday, faculty response coalesced around the phrase "Complicit no more." There will be an in-person show of support today, posters to sign publicly, buttons, social media, and more.

I like this phrase very much, as it's aspirational and confessional. It acknowledges that each of us may be complicit in structural racism. It looks past specific incidents - a one student asked in class if they were talking to their drug dealer when on the phone (to use the calculator); a student in a suit asked if they had a court date; intimidation by security services - and pushes each one of us to get to work changing our campus climate. We are accountable.

Microaggressions matter. They compound. They exclude. And the fact that so many people think they don't matter is just a sign of the work we have to do.

Still more to come.

My Campus, Like Your Campus, Is Probably Racist

UPDATE: Dominican Star article on the protests. Administration has been speaking out in solidarity with the students and we'll see what happens. Meeting today at 8:30 of Faculty to discuss actions.

Last week African-American students at Dominican University protested racism on campus. Here are two videos. The first is a short protest in the cafeteria. The second is long and outside the office of our President. Both videos are shared with permission of one of the protest organizers.





So what are the issues on our campus? That's a bit complicated. We've had several incidents of racist graffiti in dorms and at least one racist epithet uttered on campus by one student to another in a public space. These have been scattered over the years (and were well publicized on campus in both our student media and official condemnatory statements from administration). Students also speak of micro-aggressions in the classroom, from faculty, although I don't have permission to share these details. I expect in the week to come to have more information, hopefully a statement with demands detailing issues and demanding change. I promise to share them as appropriate, always mindful of the students' right to control their own narrative. I'm not a disinterested journalist here, but a white male tenured faculty member.

The protests came as a shock to some of my colleagues, judging from comments on social media, and even more so to alumni who viewed Dominican as a safe, nurturing, space. We are a relationship-centered university. We form close bonds among students, between students and faculty/staff, and are proud of our community. We are, or will be soon, a majority Hispanic institution, with 65% of this year's first-year class Latina/o. Our ties in the Chicago Latina/o community run deep (as I wrote about in this piece on our president's leadership on immigration reform). We also proud of our commitment to social justice. To be told of a campus climate of racism jars against our sense of self and mission.

It's also certainly true. There's no reason to question the lived experience of others, especially students taking the risk to protest publicly. Moreover, Dominican, like all institutions, partakes of the hierarchies of the society in which it exists. There is no ivory tower. Racism permeates Chicago, Illinois, and America (and beyond). Why should Dominican be exempt? Moreover, to acknowledge its truth does not erase the good things, the real change that our students undergo as a result of their education here, or the intense efforts of faculty and staff to make our campus safe, inclusive, and welcoming. Structural change is hard!

I take these protests as a moment to self-examine, first of all. I know my values and I know how I want to behave. But I, too, partake of the hierarchies in which I live. The pernicious nature of micro-aggressions is that the aggressor can be fully ignorant of his or her actions and be fully of good will, yet still turn a campus into a hostile space.

The inequalities run deep. Here are two recent pieces on structural racism in American universities, both written by African-American women with PhDs. Stacy Patton, for Dame Magazine, writes about the ways that American colleges and universities were never designed with racial equality in mind.

The irony is that many predominantly White colleges and universities appear to have the signs of progressive campus cultures with healthy race relations, especially in comparison to their 1950s predecessors...The problem is that they are signs of an alleged commitment that is rarely realized, and they give the false, and dangerous, impression that race relations on campus are much better than they really are. It is no wonder that so many universities lack even the basic data on faculty diversity or a plan to address systemic racism (much less define it). 

Tressie McMillan Cottom, in The Atlantic, writes:

Given the history of racism, wealth, and institution building on which all U.S. universities are constructed, the debate about Calhoun is specific but not unique. It may also be missing a larger point about the relationship between memory and politics. The legacy of racism is not just carved into the facades of university buildings; it is found in the persistence of inherited privilege that shapes the composition of the curriculum, the student body, and the faculty.

These things are true at Dominican University, for all its lack of fame and money. It's in a fantastically wealthy mostly white suburb of Chicago (River Forest), surrounded by West Chicago (Austin neighborhood), the African-American suburb of Maywood, and the heavily-Latin suburb of Melrose Park. Our buildings are gorgeous and gothic. As the forest preserve to our west adopts the fall colors, the campus glows in the late afternoon with reflected sunlight. We should not be surprised with our African American students articulate ways in which this environment is less than perfect for them.

I am grateful to these students for speaking out and for letting me share these videos. More to come.

Dominican University - We're Doing Something Right

In my recent CNN piece, I wrote about my university with both pride and realism. We are a relatively low-cost private school that does some things exceptionally well. Those things that we do well cost money, though. I wrote:

The Pell Institute's publication "Moving Beyond Access: College Success For Low-Income, First-Generation Students" lists advising, tutoring, mentoring, and intense interaction in the classroom as among the key features necessary to retain first-generation students. In other words, it's not enough just to help students get into an affordable college. Once accepted, we have to help them succeed. I've seen advising, special programs and small classes work wonders at Dominican University, where I teach, and we're just one of many student-oriented universities that provide great supports for students who need it. But such programs and low student-to-faculty ratios cost money, and across the country, cost-cutting is making it harder for such students to thrive.

In an original draft, I received some pushback from my editor for seeming too promotional, so I added the vague "we're just one of many ..." clause. Since the theme of the piece is "quality matters" not "Dominican is great," I didn't argue, but I had the sense that we really are pretty good at Dominican and that it's not an accident.

My Dean saw my CNN piece and sent me an essay by education reformer Michael Danneberg (his bio) that specifically praises Dominican for our graduation rate. Graduation rates cannot be compared just by numbers, of course, because they have to be normed against expectations. High achieving highschool students are, obviously, more likely to graduate. According to Danneberg, "Dominican has the highest completion rate of similar colleges nationwide that serve similar students with similar levels of academic preparation."

That's pretty exciting and is also news to me. We have wonderful students and I knew we were crushing the expected graduation rate (normed for wealth, race, first-generation, etc.), but not to this extent. Here's the whole section from in which Danneberg compares us to a rival school (sorry St. Xavier) that is not doing so well: Dannenberg writes, speculating about where a hypothetical Midwestern philanthropist should give his or her money [my emphasis]:

Our Midwestern philanthropist should consider contributing scholarship aid forundocumented and other needy students only to needy individual colleges and universities that make a “meaningful commitment to diversity” and education equity. In higher education, that means schools that serve minority and working class students and gets them through — to degree completion in comparable numbers.

It just so happens there’s a great example of such a school in the Chicago area and a nearby example of a not-so-great school when it comes to educational equity.

Both Dominican University and Saint Xavier University are pretty good non-profit, private colleges when it comes to access and enrollment of students from low-income and working class families. But check out Dominican’s completion rate as compared to Saint Xavier’s. Not only is Dominican higher, but there’s virtually no education equity gap between white and underrepresented minority students. In fact, Dominican has the highest completion rate of similar colleges nationwide that serve similar students with similar levels of academic preparation.

Our philanthropist, all education philanthropists, should consider giving to Dominican University and similar schools doing a relatively good job on educational equity. And in the process they should challenge nearby Saint Xavier University and similar schools to do a better job.

So how is this happening? I have some guesses.

We have a shield!

First, our students are great. But I assume that our peers also have great students, though perhaps some aspect of the admissions process comes into play. There could be some micro-demographic that shapes outcomes.

Second, we have robust systems that create links between advising, tutoring (academic enrichment), student services of all sorts (under the Dean of Students) and faculty. People do fail at Dominican, but no one falls through the cracks unnoticed. We notice. We intervene. We often succeed in helping people get back on track.

Third, as a professor, I can say that since my first day on campus, I've been inculcated in a culture based on "relationship-centered" teaching. That doesn't mean easy, but it does mean treating each student with respect and the attention they deserve.

Fourth, we have small classes and only teach 3 per term, not 4 or 5. That costs money, of course. It's money well spent according to these outcomes.

Fifth, we have great leadership, from our President on down. Here's a piece I wrote last summer about her decision to make Dominican a leader in educating undocumented students. She has a fine sense of the balance of mission and business. I don't always agree with her (no one should every always agree with their leaders!), but I do trust her.

At any rate, I'm thrilled to have the things we do well noticed by an outsider. Dear Anonymous Midwestern Philanthropists - we're ready for you to fund us!

Undergraduates Doing Awesome Things

I am a professor at a small Catholic university on the edge of Chicago. We have an extremely diverse population of students, a teaching-centered institution, a social justice mission, and I go to work feeling extremely lucky in many ways.

But especially today. Today we are holding our Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Investigations (URSCI) expo. I am the Director of URSCI and love the way our students' best work takes center stage through this annual event. Here's a video on the kinds of work students do and a taste of how I'll be spending my day.



This is American higher ed at its best. Our country is full of small schools with, at best, regional reputations, creating space for students to achieve on wildly new levels. These accomplishments come out of close mentoring relationships, the willingness to say yes to student ideas, and modest internal funding. We graduate a very high rate of students who come from backgrounds that, at other schools, get left behind. Of course, we are tuition driven, so things always feel precarious.

Lately, I've been reading a lot of debates about big public universities vs community colleges vs elite privates vs the University of Everywhere (MOOC Heaven). My kind of institution - small, private, not elite, tuition driven, not as cheap as a low-end public but still pretty affordable, relationship-centered - doesn't really have a place in these big national debates. Maybe it should, because I think the types of students we serve best get left behind by the big technophilic educational disruptors.

But enough grim thoughts for today. I'm off to be inspired. See you tomorrow.