Dear Editorial Staff,

Last spring students of color on elite college campuses across America captured national media attention with their “I, Too, Am” campaigns. Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley and NYU were just a few of the campuses where students used photographs and social media to draw attention to the painful, marginalizing, racial experiences they encountered as students.

A similar sense of alienation lies at the heart of many racial campus climate issues here at Wake Forest University. Last year student activists demanded accountability for deeply troubling campus policing practices and large event management, which inequitably impact African American students.

Because of the clarity and persistence of their efforts, these students secured a report on policing; ensured the data were released; garnered support of alumni; prompted the highest levels of university administration to issue public statements affirming the value of diversity; produced compelling videos and a short film; established deliberative dialogues; refocused the efforts of multiple student organizations; prompted weekly meetings of campus leadership; inspired the launch on Deac Tank, which will provide funding for students to implement their initiatives; and as we heard at Wednesday’s Town Hall, they have secured meaningful change in party policy.

By any measure, this student movement has been wildly successful. But instead of feeling proudly empowered, the chalk sentiments that appeared on campus just two weeks ago reveal that many students still feel shut out, unheard and deceived. The dynamics of the Town Hall help illustrate why. University representatives had many of the right answers, but the responses still felt disconnected from the passion, the personal stake and the pain expressed by students. And that disconnect between policy and recognition is similar to the national “I, Too, Am” efforts. Those campaigns emerged in places typically heralded as models of diversity and inclusion.

Harvard recently admitted a record number of black students, and boasts the highest black graduation rate in the Ivy League. It has an active, thirty-eight-year-old Black Students Association on campus and the Hutchins Center houses a hip-hop archive and publishes the well-regarded Du Bois Review.

Princeton has a world class Center for African American Studies located in the heart of its historic campus. It is home to the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and its percentage of students of color has grown steadily for two decades. NYU is situated in our nation’s — and arguably the world’s  — most active, vibrant, diverse urban center. NYU boasts world-class scholars across various disciplines that actively engage issues of inequality in their scholarship. Its undergraduate student population is so diverse that no single racial or ethnic group constitutes a majority.

By meaningful measures of resource commitment, academic outcomes, and historical legacy, these universities could claim to be the best campuses in the country for students of color. But these are the places where a student-led effort emerged from a sense of racial alienation. Wake Forest is not similarly situated as a national leader of diversity, but the current administration has been meaningfully, if not perfectly, responsive to a well-organized student movement to increase equity and fairness on campus. Still, far too many Deacons still feel unwanted here.

This is where I hope we can pause together as a university community. We are not exclusively facing a challenge of policy; we are encountering a deep human need for recognition. People from marginal social groups desire recognition for their group, and they also want recognition of their individuality. We heard it from the first two students who spoke last night — Dani and Gracie. Not only were they pushing for Trans-fair policy, each was also asking to be heard and seen.

Recognition matters. Being invisible is psychically painful. W.E.B. Du Bois explained the feeling of being reduced to a category, asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Students are revealing that they are routinely misrecognized and subjected to micro-aggressions, such as presumptions about having lower intelligence, which diminish their ability to act as full citizens within their community. But then there is also the kind of awesome reality that the first two white students who spoke asked for lounge space for black fraternities and emphasized the need for a serious diversity curriculum. This is a substantial challenge. Yes, we have identifiable diversity weaknesses as a university. We need curricular interventions so that students grapple and debate issues of race, gender, class and sexuality as routine aspects of their liberal arts education. We need a more racially diverse faculty.

We should provide more social spaces that encourage students to encounter each other across racial identities, sexual orientations, national origins and Greek letter affiliations. We need a more robust discussion of how to identify and address campus sexual assault.

We need more gender-neutral bathrooms and updates to our health insurance policies to address the needs of our Trans faculty, staff and students. We need better labor practices with respect to our custodial and food service employees.

And yet, even if the university aggressively and intentionally implemented all of these changes, far too many would still feel alienated. So we come to the great challenge of a university.

I am proud of students who raised their voices. I am impressed by students who paused to listen. I appreciate efforts by the administration to respond. I am heartened by faculty who set aside class time to discuss. I am awed by staff who work tirelessly to create programs and opportunities.

We do not have the answers. But we are asking the questions. What does it mean to be here together? How can we see and affirm one another? What can Wake Forest learn from this moment? How can campus serve as a laboratory for democracy? How can we get better?

I have spent my entire life on college campuses — I grew up at the University of Virginia; spent four years as an undergrad here at Wake; five years earning a Ph.D. at Duke, three years as an adjunct at NCCU; seven as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago; five years with tenure at Princeton; three as a full professor at Tulane, then finally — twenty years after President Hearn handed me a degree — I returned home to Wake Forest University.

This bucolic, expensive, flawed, little place is the most extraordinary I have ever encountered. We do not shy away from the hard questions.

To struggle with this place does not mean it is not ours. We fight with Wake Forest, because we are fighting for Wake Forest. This is our home. I, too, am Wake Forest.

Respectfully,

Professor Melissa Harris-Perry