Intervention
Campus Protests and Whiteness as Property

Last fall, the Provost and Chancellor of my university approved a proposal calling for the creation of an academic program in Hmong Studies. I was a member of the committee charged with developing the proposal, and although we didn't get everything we wanted at the beginning, we did get what we desired the most: a tenure-track hire in Hmong Studies. If you've been following higher education in Wisconsin, you know that Governor Scott Walker and the GOP-led state legislature hit the UW System with unprecedented budget cuts that prompted a devastating number of layoffs, departures, and early retirements among its faculty and staff. Our committee discussed how certain core courses in popular majors were unstaffed, potentially leaving hundreds of students in the lurch. We considered whether some faculty would question the creation of a new tenure-track position at a time when their departments were not allowed to search for replacement personnel. I don't know whether any objections snaked their way through formal channels, but I always assumed that making our proposal during a time of stark austerity could be regarded as premature, imprudent, maybe even selfish. Shouldn't we wait until better times to ask for a permanent position? I trust that most educators would arrive at such a rationale out of a concern for the needs of students foremost. But such a rationale is also racist.

In this blog I return to the critical race theory tenet of whiteness as property to explain the relationship between the curriculum and the racist status quo in higher education. In the wake of antiracist student protests on campuses across the country, administrators like Oberlin College's president Martin Krislov have rationalized the slow pace of reform by pointing to a policy that takes power out of their hands: shared governance. Krislov wants student protesters to understand that administrators cannot make unilateral decisions about just any issue related to student experience on campus. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities from the American Association of University Professors states that

The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. . . . Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal.

Faculty have described their relationship to the curriculum as one of "ownership," a metaphor that sparked a little pride in me when colleagues touted shared governance at my university. Yet we in the academy know that faculty do not own the curriculum equally, and we know how parts of it can be jealously guarded. Faculty who would resist a Hmong Studies program probably don't do so because they bear any overt racist hatred toward Hmong people, however; they do so because the curriculum in its current state is a property interest that produces clear benefits for them.

As I mentioned in my blog on the whiteness of the anti-vaccine movement, the tenet of whiteness as property comes from Cheryl Harris' influential 1993 article in Harvard Law Review. Harris posits that whiteness is more than a racial identity in the US; it is actual property whose value the law recognizes and protects. Harris cites Charles Reich's 1964 article "The New Property" in The Yale Law Journal as the work that expanded the idea of property to encompass

jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies, and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees. . . . Reich's argument that property is not a natural right but a construction by society resonates in current theories of property that describe the allocation of property rights as a series of choices. This construction directs attention toward issues of relative power and social relations inherent in any definition of property." (1728-29)

In other words, whiteness is property like any other reified relationship commonly understood to hold value—a medical degree, for example. The law protects the value of a medical degree by punishing anyone practicing medicine without one. Similarly, for most of our nation's history, a black person could be punished for pretending to be white, and accusing a white person of being black was like accusing a physician of being a quack—grounds for defamation. Whiteness, at the very least, promised that its owner could never be enslaved. Harris cites Jeremy Bentham's claim that "property is nothing but the basis of expectation" to argue that white privilege became a protected expectation of white people. "When the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy," Harris states, "it acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces Black subordination" (1731). How does the law or, in our case, institutional policy, reinforce the "settled expectations" of whites, and what does that look like in higher education?

To answer this question, we need to be familiar with the rights traditionally associated with property ownership, which include the rights of disposition, use, and enjoyment. For our discussion, the most salient is "the absolute right to exclude." To understand how whiteness is functionally like property, we can look at the idea of hypodescent. Colloquially known as the "one drop rule" in many states, laws of hypodescent excluded people from whiteness the way that trespassing laws excluded people from private property. Moreover, other forms of new property that serve to reify whiteness as an "object" can also count on legal protection against the intrusion of blackness and other non-white identities. One of these forms of new property is curriculum.

Scholars of critical race theory in education studies have focused on the exclusionary function of property to explain the persistence of racial disparities in the nation's schools. Terry Pollack and Sabrina Zirkel use the tenet of whiteness as property to explain why an antiracist policy shift at a diverse high school in California met stiff resistance from the parents of white students attending the school. Parental lobbying and media pressure forced the school to revise its policy so that white students once again retained their expected right to "use and enjoy" the curriculum as well as "exclude" others from it. As a result, white students also retained access to higher GPAs and better credentials for college application.

Yet only in extraordinary circumstances do outside agents force a curricular change at a university like mine, and this is because of the due process of faculty governance: curriculum committees, hiring committees, academic policy committees, and faculty senates. And although we appear to be living in extraordinary times in higher education, administrators can still stonewall demands for reform by insisting on the ethics of such processes. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Hank Reichman, chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance, suggested that student demands should be heard but that student protesters cannot be expected to have the "sophisticated understanding of academic freedom" asked of faculty and administrators. The interview turns to specific demands made at Hamilton College and Emory University regarding faculty hiring and evaluation:

At the same time, he [Reichman] said, the kinds of demands being made with regard to faculty members were in many cases ill-advised.

The demand at Hamilton to discourage white faculty members from chairing certain departments "would impose a prejudicial and possibly illegal racial restriction on the hiring of faculty," he said.

And the demand at Emory about faculty evaluations would require questions that are "far too subjective" and are "prejudicial," Reichman said. He added that "a better approach would be to permit students to file complaints about specific mistreatment, backed by evidence, and to handle those through mechanisms that guarantee any faculty member so charged with fair due process protections."

In order to make any lasting antiracist reform on campus, college faculty need to acknowledge how faculty governance can and does reinforce the "settled expectations" of white faculty.

As new property, the curriculum must therefore reflect the dynamics of social relationships, bringing with it "questions of power, selection, and allocation" (Harris 1728-29). The relationship between predominantly white institutions and the history of white supremacy in the US does not always manifest as obviously as a building or statue honoring a slave trader or segregationist. For example, my institution's present classification took shape in 1951 when it became part of the Wisconsin State University system (now University of Wisconsin system); it transitioned from a teacher's college to a four-year regional comprehensive university largely because of the enrollment demand generated by the GI Bill of Rights. Put another way, our curriculum changed, quite significantly, in order to accommodate the needs of students from the region, the vast majority of them white and many hailing from racially-engineered sundown towns. Nationally, the GI Bill widened the racial education gap by underwriting the rise of institutions like mine while underserving black institutions in the South. Once we consider how indebted the model of American higher education is to Europe, the question of how the college curriculum reinforces white supremacy barely needs to be asked. Whole academic disciplines developed out of the imperial impulse, from the precursors of today's area studies, to cultural anthropology, to my own discipline of English.

How exactly, then, does the curriculum produce value for white faculty as a property interest, and how is it threatened as a property interest by student demands?

1. Competitive industry metrics such as first-year retention, student-to-teacher ratio, and four-year graduation rates factor into institutional prestige, itself a form of new property threatened by the addition of antiracist curriculum. This article on Northeastern University's strategic "gaming" of U.S. News and World Report's college rankings system reveals how much these metrics can matter to an institution's bottom line. Perhaps the most common demand among the dozens of lists of demands from student protest organizations across the country is the call for mandatory courses in antiracism or critical race theory for all students. A course of this nature usually supplements the general education curriculum, an addition that not only would extend time to degree but also would impact accreditation timetables and increase class sizes (given that there are few faculty qualified to teach such courses). In academic departments with tightly-scripted comprehensive major sequences, adding even one additional three-credit general education course risks ballooning time-to-degree rates in the aggregate.

For an example of how faculty might try to meet this demand by working within an existing system, see the website dedicated to reporting the University of Missouri's response to student demands. Rather than create a single new course required of all students, MU administrators propose that certain existing courses be retooled for "cultural competency" credit (see below). Most egregiously, this offer conflates antiracism with "cultural competency" as a learning goal, allowing courses such as "Cross-Cultural Journalism" to satisfy the requirement. Many institutions within the University of Wisconsin system have operated on this same flawed "two fer" model for decades.

The advantage of this approach is that we do not affect the number of required gen. ed. Credit hours, which could have impacted accreditation of professional programs. Furthermore, with a broad distribution of courses, we will not adversely affect either the distribution of credit hours by college and by department, or the ditribution of funding by college and by department.

2. The curriculum can produce value based on its association with and replication of white cultural capital. For example, multiple demands given to Oberlin administrators concern its famed Conservatory of Music, including the following:

2. We DEMAND that Jazz Curriculum in the Conservatory be reflective of the students [sic] musical focus. Students SHOULD NOT be forced to take heavily based classical courses that have minimal relevance to their Jazz interests. Classical students are not forced to take Jazz courses, and seeing as how most Jazz students are of the Africana community, they should not be forced to take courses rooted in whiteness.

In this example we see that the value of the property of the white curriculum is directly diminished by an antiracist demand: classical courses would no longer be required of all Conservatory students. Yet to many, this demand would seem outrageous because of the neutral or even virtuous value assigned to the practices of "high" white culture. At a time when the relevance of fine arts and humanities courses are pressured by the popularity of pre-professional and STEM disciplines, maintaining the current curriculum can be a matter of programmatic survival at institutions less prestigious than Oberlin. The threat of antiracist protest isn't only about the curriculum that students demand be added; it is also about the curriculum that students reject as no longer essential.

3. De facto "ownership" of individual courses or programs by individual faculty members constitutes a clear property interest when it confers prestige or research opportunities. Many faculty leverage their academic reputations as subject area experts for outside professional activities such as consulting. As a pathway to research, senior undergraduate and graduate seminars are property interests for those faculty accustomed to publishing research findings conducted in the classroom or in the field. There may be a basis of expectation for the use of institutional equipment or facilities instrumental for producing research. We can safely assume that white faculty disproportionately benefit from this arrangement, so any revision of the curriculum responding to non-disciplinary or non-departmental pressures—such as the demands at Hamilton College—threatens to upset such an arrangement. A report on STEM faculty diversity in 2007 shows that the share of underrepresented minorities is a small fraction of the overall faculty in forty of the top departments of each field. Research on faculty entrepreneurialism determined that "hard and applied science faculty also tend to generate more supplemental income for consulting activities than non-science faculty" (Lee and Rhoads 745). Ownership of discrete courses or programs increases the marketability of individual faculty members, who are expected to replicate a successful curriculum at the institutions recruiting them. The old metaphor of academic "turf" battles is quite apt once race is taken into consideration.

4. Lastly, the value of curriculum as a property interest is tied to the meaning of student evaluations of instruction (SEI). Another popular demand calls for antiracist professional development for faculty, sometimes accompanied by a demand for instruments to evaluate and assess classroom climate. For example, protesters at Yale University demand the "inclusion of a question about the racial climate of the classrooms of both teaching fellows and professors in student evaluations." A similar demand appears on the list from Wesleyan University, specifically mentioning the problem of classroom "microaggressions." AAUP's Reichman advises against such reform, recommending extant due process procedures that would require a student to initiate a complaint. Adding a question about inclusivity to the standard SEI of my home department required a vote among the members of the tenured personnel committee. This is because student evaluations are a form of new property: SEI results inform resource decisions over hiring, tenure, promotion, and prestigious teaching awards. Our old SEI did not include any question suggesting that social group identity matters to student learning. While we cannot say for sure that white faculty will score lower than faculty of color on this question, white faculty resistance to such questions may be based on the perception that they will. Indeed, it is productive to read faculty resistance to trigger warnings not as the clash between abstract concepts of "academic freedom" and "political correctness" but as a contest over valuable property. What would more challenge faculty ownership of the curriculum than a student choosing to opt out of a few weeks of class because of a racist climate?

In stable economic times, incremental progress in diversifying the curriculum and personnel can mask the existence of a white property interest. In my experience, most faculty meet the news of diverse hires or academic programs with pleasure or, at the worst, indifference. The prospect of a Hmong Studies hire at my university would have caused barely a ripple of controversy if not for the budget crisis that fueled speculation of a zero-sum situation: Hmong Studies in, something else out. Racist defenses of the curriculum and personnel decisions usually arise only when white property interests are obviously and imminently threatened. This is why our current period of antiracist student protest is so important. Student demands do obviously and imminently threaten white property interests in the curriculum, and faculty defenses of the status quo will reveal the nature of those interests. If the bluster over coddled Millennials and trigger warnings are any indication, they already have.

There are too many faculty in the academy who openly dismiss antiracist curriculum as marginal, lacking rigor, or just unimportant relative to their own concentrations. They are often the greatest beneficiaries of a curriculum that reifies whiteness as logical, cultured, or professional. Most faculty are not like this, I would like to believe, because they see the justice and the good sense in putting a Hmong Studies scholar on the tenure track. However, the actions of these faculty too, in their capacity as governors of the curriculum, regularly belie their professed values of diversity and inclusion. Antiracist students and educators may find that framing curricular conflicts as property claims will lead to productive discussions with colleagues who are open to reality of institutional racism but less ready to see their investment in it.

My Colloquies are shareables: Curate personal collections of blog posts, book chapters, videos, and journal articles and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

My Colloquies are open-ended: Develop a Colloquy into a course reader, use a Colloquy as a research guide, or invite participants to join you in a conversation around a Colloquy topic.

My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.