Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College

A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a college dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away.

Smith College is an elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class neighborhoods.

Smith College is an elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class neighborhoods.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Michael Powell

By Michael Powell

Published Feb. 24, 2021Updated March 3, 2021

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN picked up the story of a young female student harassed by white workers. The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the student’s case, said she was profiled for “eating while Black.”

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.

“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

In an interview, Ms. McCartney said that Ms. Kanoute’s encounter with the campus staff was part of a spate of cases of “living while Black” harassment across the nation. There was, she noted, great pressure to act. “We always try to show compassion for everyone involved,” she said.

President McCartney, like all the workers Ms. Kanoute interacted with on that day, is white.

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Some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students. “My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity. In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

Then in the autumn of 2019, the religious studies department proposed a class on Native American religion and spirituality. A full complement of students registered but well before classes began, a small contingent of Native American students and allies pasted bright red posters on buildings on campus reviling the course as harmful, intrusive and disrespectful and attacking the instructor, who was young, white and not on a tenure track. He had an academic background in this field and had modeled his course on that of his mentor, who was a well-known professor and a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The administration declined to challenge the student protesters and had the instructor submit to sessions of “radical listening” with the protesters. In the end, the religious studies department dropped the class.

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,” Ms. Shaw, who is also a 1993 graduate of Smith and who worked in the residential life department, said in one of her videos. After months of clashing with the administration, Ms. Shaw resigned last week and appears likely to sue the school, calling it a “racially hostile workplace.”

Her claims drew headlines from Fox News to Rolling Stone this week. Alumni, faculty and students continue to debate the issue. All of this arose from the events of July 31, 2018.

A Summer Day

Ms. Kanoute, New York-raised, a 5-foot-2 runner and science student, was the first in her family, which had emigrated from Mali, to attend college. She worked that summer as a teaching assistant and on July 31 awoke late and stopped at the Tyler House dormitory cafeteria for lunch on her way to the gym. This account of what unfolded next is drawn from the investigative report and dozens of interviews, including with a lawyer for Ms. Kanoute, who declined several interview requests.

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for teenagers. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

Ms. Kanoute took her food and then walked through a set of French doors, crossed a foyer and reclined in the shadowed lounge of a dormitory closed for the summer, where she scrolled the web as she ate. A large stuffed bear obscured the view of her from the cafeteria.

A janitor, who was in his 60s and poor of sight, was emptying garbage cans when he noticed someone in that closed lounge. All involved with the summer camp were required to have state background checks and campus police had advised staff it was wisest to call security rather than confront strangers on their own.

The janitor, who had worked at Smith for 35 years, dialed security.

“We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” the janitor told a dispatcher according to a transcript. “I didn’t approach her or anything but he seems out of place.”

The janitor had noticed Ms. Kanoute’s Black skin but made no mention of that to the dispatcher. Ms. Kanoute was in the shadows; he was not sure if he was looking at a man or woman. She would later accuse the janitor of “misgendering” her.

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The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee has made public her complaints of a push for white staff members to embrace an ideology of structural racism.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”

Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.

Stumbles Over Race

Ms. McCartney and her staff talk often of their social justice mission, and faculty say this has seeped into near every aspect of the college. A committee of students and faculty members has proposed a minor in social justice studies. That said, the president had stumbled in ways that left her bruised by the time of the 2018 incident.

In 2014, she moderated an alumnae discussion in New York on free speech. A white female panelist argued it was a mistake to ban Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because he used the N-word; that panelist then uttered the word in hopes, she said, of draining the word of its ugly power. Students denounced Ms. McCartney for failing to denounce that panelist. The president requested forgiveness.

Later in 2014 she wrote to the college community, lamenting that grand juries had not indicted police officers in the deaths of Black men. “All lives matter,” Ms. McCartney concluded in an inadvertent echo of a conservative rallying cry. Again, Smith students denounced her and again she apologized.

Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”

The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Ms. Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes. She felt faint. “Oh my God, I didn’t do this,” she told a friend. “I exchanged a hello with that student and now I’m a racist.”

Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

The Investigative Report and the Aftermath

On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

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A view of Paradise Pond from the President’s House at Smith College.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The report said Ms. Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong “pattern of discrimination.”

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

A few professors have advised Ms. McCartney to stand up more forcefully for line workers lest she lose their loyalty.

Asked in the interview about employees who found the training intrusive, the president responded: “Good training is never about making people too uncomfortable or to feel ashamed or anything. I think our staff is content and are embracing it.”

Coda

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

As for Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.

This past autumn the school furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”

She talked to a reporter recently from a neighbor’s backyard, as a couple of hens wandered the patio.

“What do I do?” she asked, shaking her head. “When does this racist label go away?”

Smith College and the racist incident that wasn’t

A bogus claim of racial harassment led to campus workers being threatened and humiliated.

MATTHEW STEWART

4th March 2021

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The New York Times recently reopened a story that it first reported on in July 2018. Back then the Times joined other national media in recounting an alleged story of racism at Smith College, an elite all-women’s school in Northampton, Massachusetts. Last week’s update by reporter Michael Powell amounts to an overdue correction, one that exposes yet another case of media confirmation bias and reveals an illiberal campus climate created from the stuff of social justice.

Oumou Kanoute, a black student, claimed that on 31 July 2018, while she was eating lunch in a dormitory lounge, she was harassed by college employees, then confronted by a campus security officer who she speculated could have been armed. The American Civil Liberties Union publicised her cause, validating her claim that she was victimised for nothing more than ‘eating lunch while black’. Smith College president Kathleen McCartney immediately issued an elaborate public apology to Kanoute, who three weeks later Facebook-posted personal information about a cafeteria worker and a janitor she accused of harassing her, calling them racists.

Kanoute not only claimed to be shaken by the incident — she also ramped it up to an existential level, claiming to be outraged that so many at Smith questioned her ‘existence overall as a woman of colour’.

The fallout for the accused workers was severe, including, variously, being put on paid leave, being pressured to attend ‘mediation’ with Kanoute, and having their job location reassigned. Most seriously, those whom Kanoute doxxed were harassed, hate-mailed and threatened to the point that it affected their health. That fall, Smith ramped up mandatory anti-bias and racial-sensitivity training sessions for all non-faculty employees.

While national media were quick to run with this story of campus racism, it took more than two years for the truth to emerge, even though it was available only three months after the incident in a detailed report, prepared by an independent law firm specialising in discrimination cases. The report’s key findings explode Kanoute’s original claims.

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It turns out that she was eating in a cafeteria that was expressly reserved for children attending a summer camp. She then took her meal to an area that was also closed off for the summer. The cafeteria worker politely reminded her of these restrictions; Kanoute continued nonetheless, but the cafeteria worker did not insist she move and did not report her.

A janitor, whom Kanoute later accused of being a racist, was not actually on campus when the incident occurred. Another janitor, who called security when he saw her, was only following the policy he had been given in the case of trespass. The transcript of his call to security reveals that he made no remarks about her race, as she was dimly visible.

The campus security officer who then attended was not armed. No campus security personnel carry firearms. The officer in fact recognised Kanoute and apologised for bothering her, even though she was in an off-limits area. Kanoute recorded this encounter herself. Other claims made by her, and widely publicised in the aftermath of the incident, also proved to be false, including that the reporting janitor ‘misgendered’ her.

In short, it looks as if Kanoute was determined to find slights where none existed, and to respond not only with exaggeration, but also without scruples.

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The question arises as to why national media ran with the claims of one young woman on one small, albeit prestigious, New England college campus. This story stemmed from a viral Facebook post, which should not in itself be sufficient cause to pursue such a small story and ought to occasion more scepticism. The story was run as an item of national import only because it fit a progressive narrative that holds sway in powerful newsrooms. The apparently desired conclusion was: if this sort of thing is happening at a leading, progressive place such as Smith, what might be happening on other campuses?

Only this particular incident never actually happened, at least not as Kanoute was presenting it. But much of the legacy media never bothered to find this out. As Powell slyly states in his Times piece, ‘less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the matter found no persuasive evidence of bias’. Powell is to be commended for reopening this incident for renewed public inspection. Other outlets haven’t even bothered to print corrections.

He was undoubtedly responding to the more recent story of Jodi Shaw, a white woman and Smith alumna who was until recently employed by the college’s ‘residence life’ department. Shaw has made public her letter of resignation, in which she cites a ‘racially hostile environment’ and describes a work environment obsessed with race:

‘Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the colour of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions on to themselves and others.’

Shaw also describes mandatory ‘anti-racist’ training sessions in the wake of the Kanoute incident. One workshop ended with the declaration that Shaw suffered from ‘white fragility’. That she has had to sacrifice her modest salary, as a working mother, makes a nonsense of her alleged ‘privilege’. Powell’s piece, unusual for a piece in the Times these days, notes the class issues at play here. Kanoute was enrolled at a prestigious college whose annual price tag is now some $78,000. The college employees whom she accused of racism made far less in annual salary.

While Kanoute received an immediate and fulsome public apology from the university president, the exonerated employees did not. They were, however, rewarded with those training sessions. Some have since been furloughed. Powell quotes a recently retired service employee who is also a Smith graduate: ‘Four people’s lives were wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology… How do you rationalise that?’

Luckily for McCartney, a handy way out exists. ‘It is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias’ in the Kanoute incident, she said following the release of the report that exonerated her employees. Never mind that no biased behaviour was exhibited, and that ‘implicit racial bias’ is a disproven psychological phenomenon.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, distinguished African-American professor of law Randall Kennedy has noted that many ‘racism on campus’ stories crumble under scrutiny. He writes of the yawning gap between unsparing allegations of racial hostility and the lack of actual incidents cited. He finds unsatisfyingly generalised allusions and verbal formulations that leave him in doubt of what ‘precisely, [accusers] have in mind’.

Much of this comes down to the voguish concept of ‘lived experience’, and the idea that an alleged victim’s subjective impression of an incident is paramount. This concept is ripe for abuse and prone to encouraging a mentality of victimisation, even among those fortunate enough to attend a top-tier college. ‘Lived experience’ is a subjective phrase now being misused in circumstances that call for objective truth or verifiable data. It is used as a warning: ‘My claims are not subject to scrutiny. They are for belief only.’

We are not talking here about outright and deliberate hoaxing, but about people who come to believe, or want to believe, or have been trained to believe, that an American college campus is a terribly racist place to find oneself. But actual hate-crime hoaxes are also a problem on campus, as Wilfred Reilly has detailed. Is there any reason to have confidence that authorities will consistently respect due process, retain reasonable scepticism, and strive for impartiality if faced with a hoax?

We can expect more spineless doubletalk from those in authority when confronted with unfounded accusations of racism. College presidents seem eager to take the lead down this rhetorical path. In turn, we can expect to encounter an increasing number of false accusations. The climate is ripe for them, and those tempted to play the game will be justified in thinking that they have much to gain and little to lose.

Matthew Stewart has written for City Journal, Law and Liberty, Quillette, Areo, Academic Questions, and more. He teaches at Boston University.

How Racist Are Universities, Really?

Hyperbolic accusations do more harm than good

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By Randall Kennedy

AUGUST 12, 2020

t is no surprise that universities have become targets of the activism erupting in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. University police forces have been implicated in racist malfeasance. Universities oversee labor forces which reflect the class and racial divisions partitioning society at large. Universities are the site of cultural battles over iconography (Calhoun College at Yale, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Washington and Lee), and the propriety of taking race into account in admissions. At a time when racial reckonings have visited the NFL and Nascar, The New York Times and Vogue, Minneapolis and Mississippi, it was inevitable that they would visit campuses, too.

And they have. Recently, chairs of African American studies departments at Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and other Catholic universities and colleges asserted that “systemic racism and white supremacy are problems” at their campuses. “Symbolic statements, marches, token town halls, or other typical measures to pacify our campus communities,” they warned, are insufficient “while grave inequities persist.” A letter to the trustees and president of Dartmouth from professors and staff there called for the dismantling of “structures that implicitly or explicitly work against and devalue Black, Brown, and other people of color at Dartmouth.” Faculty and staff members at the University of Chicago set forth “a set of specific and immediate actions the [university] must take to begin to repair and redress its long history of willingly enabling and directly contributing to structural racism.” If their requirements remain unmet, they said, they will decline to participate in university affairs, urge colleagues at other institutions to boycott the university, and prevent the university from using their accomplishments to launder the “neglect and derision of people of color and scholarship and teaching on race.”

These and similar protests are part of an international eruption of outrage against racism and an insistence that positive change — real change — be pursued immediately. That dissent is splendid in many respects, displaying creativity, persistence, and bravery in demanding the redress of long-neglected racial wrongs. After all, according to virtually every indicator of well-being imaginable — life expectancy, wealth, income, access to education and health care, risk of victimization by violent criminality, likelihood of being arrested or incarcerated — a distinct, adverse gap separates Blacks from whites. The dissidents and their allies have refused to allow business to proceed as usual. They have pushed racial inequity to the front of popular consciousness. They have crammed into a couple of months more public education about matters of race than has taken place in years. They have been the heroes of the George Floyd moment.

Activists have crammed into a couple of months more public education about matters of race than has taken place in years.

But being on the side of anti-racism is no inoculation against error. An allegation of systemic racism leveled against a university is a serious charge. If the allegation is substantiated, it ought to occasion protest and rectification commensurate with the wrong. If an allegation is flimsy or baseless, however, it ought to be recognized as such. Engaging in the urgent work of anti-racist activism should entail avoidance of mistaken charges that cause wrongful injury, exacerbate confusion, and sow distrust that ultimately weakens the struggle.

One might wonder about the need to voice such an obvious observation. The fact is that this moment of laudable protest has been shadowed by a rise in complacency and opportunism. Some charges of racism are simply untenable. Some complainants are careless about fact-finding and analysis. And some propose coercive policies that would disastrously inhibit academic freedom.

n exemplification of both of these disturbing tendencies is found in the ultimatum delivered in July 2020 to the president of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, in a letter that was signed by about 350 professors, lecturers, and graduate students (on a campus with a faculty numbering around 1,280). The signatories included a number of Princeton luminaries, including Tracy K. Smith (the Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. poet laureate and chair of the university’s Center for the Arts), Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (chair of the Department of African American Studies), Jhumpa Lahiri (director of the creative-writing program and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Paul Muldoon (professor in the humanities and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for poetry), Michael Wood (a professor emeritus of English and comparative literature), and Nell Irvin Painter (a professor emerita of American history).

“Anti-Black racism,” the ultimatum reads, “has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup and its hiring practices. … We call upon the administration to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations. ” A long list of demands follows. In order “to become, for the first time in its history, an anti-racist institution,” the university is called upon to “redress the demographic disparity on Princeton’s faculty immediately and exponentially by hiring more faculty of color”; “elevate faculty of color to prominent leadership positions”; “implement administration- and faculty-wide training that is specifically anti-racist”; “commit fully to anti-racist campus iconography”; “remove questions about misdemeanors and felony convictions from admissions applications”; “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous Studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference”; “require anti-bias training for all faculty participating in faculty searches”; “give new assistant professors summer move-in allowances on July 1 that cover rent deposits, first month’s rent, and rent and food for the summer.” The ultimatum also insists that the university “constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty. ”

Should one believe, as the ultimatum charges, that anti-Black racism is “rampant” at Princeton despite its “declared values of diversity and inclusion?” The exploitation and exclusion of African Americans is, indeed, deeply embedded in Princeton’s history. Its early presidents were slaveholders who occasionally auctioned their human property. John Witherspoon, for instance, was a member of the Continental Congress and signatory of the Declaration of Independence who lectured against emancipating slaves and later opposed abolition in New Jersey. The anti-Black prejudice of another president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, seeped into public policy during his stint as president of the United States. Because of his racism, the university has removed his name from its school of public and international affairs and otherwise demoted his standing on campus. No African American graduated from Princeton until 1947. The university did not hire a tenure-track Black professor until 1955. Because of reactionary racial attitudes that casually manifested themselves on campus, Princeton was widely seen as the “Southern” Ivy.

Since the 1960s, however, and with increasing momentum, Princeton has persistently made special efforts to recruit, admit, and graduate African American and other minority students. While many have participated in this metamorphosis, no one was more consequential than the late Princeton president William G. Bowen, an impassioned advocate for racial affirmative action as both an administrator and a scholar. His 1998 book (co-written with Harvard University president Derek Bok), The Shape of the River, is an oft-cited brief for race-conscious measures designed to ensure racial integration at selective institutions of higher education. His successors have also been strong proponents of racial affirmative action. A new Princeton is eclipsing the old.

Moreover, Princeton has served as the professional home of a range of distinguished educators of color, including Toni Morrison, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Valerie Smith (president of Swarthmore College) and Ruth Simmons (president of Prairie View A&M University and president emeritus of Brown University). These are formidable personalities with a demonstrated ability to make known their views. None of them have castigated Princeton in a fashion consistent with the charge that it is a place at which racism is “rampant.” When Cornel West retired from Princeton in May 2012, he spoke of having been “blessed” by his association with an institution that had evolved from being known as the northernmost tip of the Confederacy into a community “consecrated by a new legacy.”

Obviously there are differences of opinion among Princetonians of color; some did sign the ultimatum. But if racism is as big and stultifying a presence as the ultimatum suggests, it is a mystery that so many Black Princetonians could have somehow overlooked it.

f Princeton’s racism was as conspicuous as alleged, one would expect the ultimatum’s authors to be able to dash off some vivid, revealing examples. Instead, they refer with unsatisfying generality to “micro-aggression” and “outright racist incidents,” leaving readers uncertain about what, precisely, they have in mind.

To be fair, the authors do get specific with respect to certain matters. They maintain that a “glaring” example of the university’s “failure” to “elevate more faculty of color to prominent leadership positions” is that “never once has the Humanities Council been directed by a scholar from an underrepresented group.” The Humanities Council brings together leaders from a wide range of academic departments, fosters interdisciplinary initiatives, and advises the university administration. The letter writers also assert that “the Council’s most important outward facing program, the prestigious Society of Fellows, has never once had a director of color.” Assuming the accuracy of these facts, do they make a convincing case of racial “exclusion” in the broader context of racial change at Princeton?

No, they do not. The claim of racial exclusion is implausible. For years now, throughout the university, there has existed a self-conscious impulse to promote people of color to positions of leadership. Either today or in the very recent past, Black professors have been chairs of the departments of history, anthropology, English, religion, African American studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Black professors have also served as the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs and as the director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Scores of scholars of color have been Humanities Council fellows. The general counsel of the university is Latinx. The dean of admissions is African American. The recently retired vice chair of the university board of trustees, Brent Henry, a Black lawyer keenly attuned to matters of racial equity, has been for at least the past decade one of the three or four most important figures in the governance of the university.

Current trustees include Terri Sewell, an African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Henri Ford, the Haitian American dean of the University of Miami School of Medicine; and Melanie Lawson, a seasoned African-American television journalist. These people, all Princeton alumni, are alert and capable and in demand. They are by no means needy. They could associate themselves with any number of prestigious enterprises. They would surely decline to contribute to or be involved with the sort of institution that the ultimatum depicts. This power and privilege is possessed also by many of the authors and signatories of the ultimatum, which accounts in part for the whiff of bad faith that suffuses the whole affair.

he ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019-20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”

The suggestion that these statistics show racial unfairness in hiring at Princeton is misleading. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans in recent years earned only around 7 percent of all doctoral degrees. In engineering it was around 4 percent. In physics around 2 percent. Care must be taken to look for talent in places other than the familiar haunts of Ivy League searches. But even when such care is taken, the resultant catch is almost invariably quite small.

The reasons behind the small numbers are familiar and heart-breaking. They include a legacy of deprivation in education, housing, employment, and health care, not to mention increased vulnerability to crime and incarceration. The perpetuation of injuries from past discrimination as well as the imposition of new wrongs cut like scythes into the ranks of racial minorities, cruelly winnowing the number who are even in the running to teach at Princeton.

The racial demographics of its faculty does not reflect a situation in which the university is putting a thumb on the scale against racial-minority candidates. To the contrary, the university is rightly putting a thumb on the scale in favor of racial-minority candidates. That the numbers remain small reflects the terrible social problems that hinder so many racial minorities before they even have a fighting chance to enter into the elite competitions from which Princeton selects its instructors. The ultimatum denies or minimizes this pipeline problem.

What I am saying is widely known within the university but largely unspoken, because it has become bad manners for a person of progressive inclination to point out obvious fallacies of the sort that damage the credibility of the Princeton ultimatum and similar protests. As everyone knows, some signers of group letters join out of feelings of general solidarity, rather than specific agreement. And peer pressure accounts for the apparent approval of some who actually disagree but want to protect their reputations.

But a lack of candor is not limited to some of the dissidents. The evasiveness, if not mendacity, of administrators is a large part of the problem. They often pander to protestors, issuing faux mea culpas that any but the most gullible observers recognize as mere public relations ruses aimed at pacification. In July, for example, in the course of saluting Black Lives Matter, the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth stated: “We know there are no easy solutions to eradicate the oppression and racism Black and other students, faculty, and staff of color experience on our campus.” The Board then proceeded to list several remedial initiatives it was authorizing, none of which, singly or collectively, came close to addressing “the oppression and racism” that it appeared to concede as a major feature of life at Dartmouth. It is easy to see how the disparity in scope between the problem and the response would lead many to conclude that the authorities at Dartmouth did not actually believe their self-criticism. No wonder faculty dissidents responded with demands that the administration “take concrete steps to unravel its built-in structural racism perpetuated through the superficial and short-term fixes that our senior leadership constantly applies to the problem.”

Being on the side of anti-racism is no inoculation against error.

Whatever wrongs universities have perpetrated or neglected to rectify are compounded when university authorities speak thoughtlessly or insincerely about matters that cut so deeply. When a substantial number of professors indict a university on charges of “systemic racism,” the president of the university ought to state publicly whether or to what extent he or she agrees with the charge. Bureaucratic obfuscation ought not to be permitted. Neither should silence. Mistaken indictments that are opposed only by conservatives become entrenched and reiterated despite their weaknesses. And people are misled. Minority students who take such indictments at face value — unaware of strategic hyperbole — become overwhelmed by unrealistic fears of encountering racist assessments that will unfairly limit their possibilities for advancement.

everal of the Princeton ultimatum’s long, odd list of demands are flagrantly problematic. When the authors say that the university should “[c]onsider giving faculty of color a full year of course relief to run [faculty-hiring searches],” they are urging something that is both unwise and illegal. The most egregious demand, however, is for a faculty committee to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.” If adopted, this proposal would throw a pall over intellectual life at the university. An investigatory and disciplinary apparatus for a vice as vague and contested as “racist behaviors” would quickly lead to a level of fear and resentment, inhibition and threat that would poison the community to an extent that is difficult to exaggerate.

When apprised of this provision, some signatories hoped that it would silently be abandoned. But not all. Andrew Cole, a professor of English, for instance, explicitly defended it: “In a country so embarrassingly incapable of acknowledging its history of racism and anti-Black terrorism,” he wrote, “it strikes many of us as a curious indirection to talk about academic freedom when we speak of anti-racism.” Starting with the proposition that “racism” is unethical, and that the university prohibits unethical research, Cole concludes that the university has an obligation to root out racist research, racist publication, and racist teaching.

Cole’s argument is specious. The university’s prohibition on “unethical” research applies to research based on fraudulence — for example, a researcher claiming to have tested 10 animals when she only tested five — or to violations of protocols guiding research on humans. Determining whether research is “racist,” by contrast, takes one into a realm of ideological contestation in which, at a secular, modern research university, there should be no imposition of orthodoxy of the sort that the ultimatum threatens.

Yes, Princeton University does officially endorse certain tenets. It endorses democracy, freedom, the value of truth seeking, and policies that expressly welcome the education of students regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or place of birth. So the university does adopt certain political positions. But it does so sparingly, diffidently, in a minimalist spirit that enables it to host a broad range of scholarly and artistic constituencies, methodologies, commitments, and styles limited only by guild-based conceptions of competency.

A professor at Princeton University need not worry about being investigated or disciplined for writing a book propounding the idea that the world would have been better off had England squashed the American uprising in 1776, or that it is preferable to say that “women” get pregnant as opposed to saying that “people” get pregnant, or that abortion is a moral abomination, or that restricting abortion rights is a moral abomination, or that racial affirmative action has been a failure, or that racial affirmative action has been a success, or that it is perfectly appropriate to enunciate the word “nigger” in full for pedagogical purposes, or that the N-word should never be voiced under any circumstances. The existing horizon of intellectual freedom at the university is gloriously wide open — as it should be.

How would the anti-racism committee demanded by the letter decide whether to investigate a complaint? Having investigated and found an infraction, what kind of discipline would it levy? Would a professor be engaging in censurable “racist” conduct if she argued on behalf of broad rights to abortion? Some claim that such a position is “anti-Black.” What about a professor arguing in favor of decreasing the size of police forces? Some argue that that position is “anti-Black,” too, since it could lead to greater vulnerability of Black people to violent criminality. What about a professor arguing in favor of freely permitting inter-racial adoptions? Some insist that such a regime facilitates anti-Black cultural genocide. And what about a professor who expresses admiration for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? After all, the leader of the Nation of Islam taught that whites were, quite literally, “devils.” To open the door even a crack to the possibility of “investigations” into such matters under the aegis of the university is antithetical to the freedom essential to intellectuals and artists in institutions of higher learning.

Non-governmental cultural institutions — newspapers, journals, museums, and so on — are essential, vulnerable, and under attack. This is particularly true of the selective, cosmopolitan research colleges and universities, which many on the political right especially loathe. The aspiration of those institutions is to search for truth, cultivate knowledge, and nourish and satisfy curiosities about virtually everything. They fall short, of course, as do all institutions. But nowhere in American society is more of a concerted and intelligent effort being made to exemplify respect and collaboration. The Princeton ultimatum engages in unwarranted vilification, which is wrong. For progressives, such vilification is also profoundly self-defeating.

A version of this article appeared in the September 18, 2020, issue.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

Two years after ‘eating while black’ incident debunked at Smith College, the nation learns the truth

JENNIFER KABBANY - FIX EDITOR •FEBRUARY 25, 2021

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Regular readers of The College Fix know that in October 2018, an “eating while black” incident at Smith College was debunked, as we covered then the fact that a law firm completely cleared those involved of any wrongdoing, racial or otherwise.

This week, the whole nation learned it, too, thanks — surprisingly — to an expansive new report in The New York Times that has gone viral.

In the summer of 2018, then-Smith College student Oumou Kanoute, a teaching assistant and RA, had claimed that while she ate lunch in the cafeteria, she was confronted by a campus security guard who demanded to know what she was doing there.

On social media, Kanoute, who is black, accused those involved in the incident of racism and being racist. It became known as the “eating while black” incident.

In reality, the investigative report found, Kanoute was relaxing in a Smith building closed to the campus community as it was hosting a kids summer camp.

An old janitor with poor sight who saw the room in use called campus security — as he had been advised to do if he saw anyone in the building as it was for young guests. The security guard who spoke with Kanoute was kind and polite the entire time, video shows.

MORE: Smith investigates employee for following its own procedures on ‘suspicious behavior’

But the damage from Kanoute’s false claims continue to have repercussions to this day, as the Times piece illustrates:

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it. …

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.

The Times piece notes how the university’s reaction to Kanoute’s false claims — it never apologized publicly to the falsely accused employees and enacted massive anti-racism and bias programs — created a tense and sometimes racially charged environment on campus.

It also details how the four employees trashed by Kanoute’s allegations have continued to suffer from them in various ways.

“We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department, told the Times. “How do you rationalize that?”

Kanoute’s attorney saw it differently, telling the Times: “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society. Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

But Shaw sees it differently. She recently resigned from Smith College, alleging years of discriminations — because she is white.

“I can no longer continue to work in an environment where I am constantly subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin color. I can no longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that my personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate but instead are a manifestation of white supremacy,” her letter stated.

Read the Times piece here.

Read Shaw’s resignation letter here.

Read the report that cleared the employees here.

MORE: Meet the Smith College employee whistleblower exposing anti-white racism

IMAGE: EQ Roy / Shutterstock

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Liberal orthodoxy, race and power: How an accusation of racism, and resulting lack of evidence, is riling Smith College

By MICHAEL POWELL

THE NEW YORK TIMES |

FEB 26, 2021 AT 7:30 AM

The campus of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 23, 2021. A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a Smith College dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away.

The campus of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 23, 2021. A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a Smith College dorm. An investigation found no evidence of bias. But the incident will not fade away. (Christopher Capozziello/The New York Times)

NORTHAMPTON, MASS. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN picked up the story of a young female student harassed by white workers. The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the student’s case, said she was profiled for “eating while Black.”

Less attention was paid three months later when a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.

Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Kanoute and her ACLU lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.

“My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.

In an interview, McCartney said that Kanoute’s encounter with the campus staff was part of a spate of cases of “living while Black” harassment across the nation. There was, she noted, great pressure to act. “We always try to show compassion for everyone involved,” she said.

McCartney, like all the workers Kanoute interacted with on that day, is white.

Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity. In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.

Then in the autumn of 2019, the religious studies department proposed a class on Native American religion and spirituality. A full complement of students registered but well before classes began, a small contingent of Native American students and allies pasted bright red posters on buildings on campus reviling the course as harmful, intrusive and disrespectful and attacking the instructor, who was young, white and not on a tenure track. He had an academic background in this field and had modeled his course on that of his mentor, who was a well-known professor and a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The administration declined to challenge the student protesters and had the instructor submit to sessions of “radical listening” with the protesters. In the end, the religious studies department dropped the class.

Snow covers the campus of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 23, 2021. Race, class and power collided at Smith College, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves.

Snow covers the campus of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 23, 2021. Race, class and power collided at Smith College, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves. (Christopher Capozziello/The New York Times)

The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, embrace an ideology of structural racism.

“Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,” Shaw, who is also a 1993 graduate of Smith and who worked in the residential life department, said in one of her videos. After months of clashing with the administration, Shaw resigned last week and appears likely to sue the school, calling it a “racially hostile workplace.”

Her claims drew headlines from Fox News to Rolling Stone this week. Alumni, faculty and students continue to debate the issue. All of this arose from the events of July 31, 2018.

A summer day

Kanoute, New York-raised, a 5-foot-2 runner and science student, was the first in her family, which had emigrated from Mali, to attend college. She worked that summer as a teaching assistant and on July 31 awoke late and stopped at the Tyler House dormitory cafeteria for lunch on her way to the gym.

This account of what unfolded next is drawn from the investigative report and dozens of interviews, including with a lawyer for Kanoute, who declined several interview requests.

Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.

“We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.

Kanoute took her food and then walked through a set of French doors, crossed a foyer and reclined in the shadowed lounge of a dormitory closed for the summer, where she scrolled the web as she ate. A large stuffed bear obscured the view of her from the cafeteria.

A janitor, who was in his 60s and poor of sight, was emptying garbage cans when he noticed someone in that closed lounge. All involved with the summer camp were required to have state background checks and campus police had advised staff it was wisest to call security rather than confront strangers on their own.

The janitor, who had worked at Smith for 35 years, dialed security.

“We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” the janitor told a dispatcher according to a transcript. “I didn’t approach her or anything but he seems out of place.”

The janitor had noticed Kanoute’s Black skin but made no mention of that to the dispatcher. Kanoute was in the shadows; he was not sure if he was looking at a man or woman. She would later accuse the janitor of “misgendering” her.

A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”

That night Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”

Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”

McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.

Stumbling over issue of race

McCartney and her staff talk often of their social justice mission, and faculty say this has seeped into near every aspect of the college. Students can now obtain a minor in social justice studies. That said, the president had stumbled in ways that left her bruised by the time of the 2018 incident.

In 2014, she moderated an alumnae discussion in New York on free speech. A white female panelist argued it was a mistake to ban Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because he used the N-word; that panelist then uttered the word in hopes, she said, of draining the word of its ugly power. Students denounced McCartney for failing to denounce that panelist. The president requested forgiveness.

Later in 2014, she wrote to the college community, lamenting that grand juries had not indicted police officers in the deaths of Black men. “All lives matter,” McCartney concluded in an inadvertent echo of a conservative rallying cry. Again, Smith students denounced her and again she apologized.

McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”

The school’s workers felt scapegoated.

“It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”

The Tyler House dormitory at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., Feb. 23, 2021.

The Tyler House dormitory at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., Feb. 23, 2021. (Christopher Capozziello/The New York Times)

The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?

The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.

“This is the racist person,” Kanoute wrote of Blair, adding that Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”

Blair has lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes. She felt faint. “Oh my God, I didn’t do this,” she told a friend. “I exchanged a hello with that student and now I’m a racist.”

Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Kanoute, she said she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.

Smith College put out a short statement noting that Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.

By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”

Smith officials pressured Blair to go into mediation with Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.

The report and its aftermath

On Oct. 28, 2018, McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, McCartney said the report validated Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The report said Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong “pattern of discrimination.”

McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the ACLU of Massachusetts and Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

“It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.

Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.

The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.

A few professors have advised McCartney to stand up more forcefully for line workers lest she lose their loyalty.

Asked in the interview about employees who found the training intrusive, the president responded: “Good training is never about making people too uncomfortable or to feel ashamed or anything. I think our staff is content and are embracing it.”

A coda

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

“I was accused of being the racist,” Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ‘nother level.”

He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

As for Blair, the cafeteria worker, stress exacerbated her lupus and she checked into the hospital last year. Then George Floyd, a Black man, died at the hands of the Minneapolis police last spring, and protests fired up across the nation and in Northampton, and angry notes and accusations of racism were again left in her mailbox and by visitors on Smith College’s official Facebook page.

This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”

“I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’ "

She talked to a reporter recently from a neighbor’s backyard, as a couple of hens wandered the patio.

“What do I do?” she asked, shaking her head. “When does this racist label go away?”

c.2021 The New York Times Company

REASON ROUNDUP

On Elite Campuses Like Smith College, Woke Students Have All the Power

Plus: Neera Tanden under siege, drama at CPAC, and more...

ROBBY SOAVE |

(Wikimedia Commons / Daderot)

During the summer of 2018, a Facebook post by a black Smith College student named Oumou Kanoute went viral. Kanoute recounted being harassed by a college janitor and police officer who had accused her of trespassing while eating inside a dormitory lounge. The incident left her shaken and frightened—in Kanoute's telling, she was persecuted for the crime of "eating while black."

The Washington Post and The New York Times both covered her story, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) came to her assistance. As a result of the attention brought to the situation, many of the employees involved—particularly the janitor and a cafeteria worker who had spoken with Kanoute—were publicly branded racists and subjected to extreme opprobrium. Kanoute eventually received a formal apology from Smith College's president, Kathleen McCartney.

"This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives," said McCartney in a public statement.

Yesterday, the Times revisited the story, adding some key details. It turns out that Kanoute was trespassing: The dormitory in which she ate lunch was closed to students for the summer. Only children attending a summer camp were allowed to use the building's cafeteria. The janitor who approached Kanoute—a nearsighted man in his 60s—had every reason to call security, and the officer who showed up apologized for bothering the student. Contrary to Kanoute's claim that she thought her life might be in danger, the officer was quite unarmed.

According to the Times, Smith commissioned a report on the incident, and that report

cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.

Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute's lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. "I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I," she wrote, "it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias."

The report said Ms. Kanoute could not point to anything that supported the claim she made on Facebook of a yearlong "pattern of discrimination."

Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. "We were gobsmacked — four people's lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology," said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college's facilities management department. "How do you rationalize that?"

Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute's lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.

"It's troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society," he said. "Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism."

The revelation that the entire narrative surrounding the incident was a lie has not changed matters one bit at Smith. Employees must now undergo rigorous anti-bias training. Faculty are exempt from these sessions, but they are encouraged to attend "white accountability" Zoom groups, in which they are supposed to interrogate their prejudices.

The Times story is worth reading in full, because it's a welcome instance of the mainstream media giving much-needed attention to the phenomenon of ostensibly progressive (though considerably privileged) college students weaponizing false claims of racism or sexism to punish ordinary, innocent people who irked them. It's a tactic that is spreading from elite college campuses to elite media institutions—like the Times itself—which disproportionately hire graduates of places like Smith. And it's spreading still. As Andrew Sullivan once observed, "We all live on campus now."

FREE MINDS

Amazon is no longer carrying When Harry Became Sally, a socially conservative take on transgenderism by Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Amazon has not offered an explanation, but appears to have recently crafted a policy against "content that we determine is hate speech," according to The Washington Free Beacon.

As a private bookseller, Amazon is not required to stock its virtual shelves with any particular tome. But refusing to sell Anderson's book will prompt understandable charges of rank hypocrisy. Prime users can currently order Mein Kampf and have it delivered in 48 hours.

FREE MARKETS

The White House is still backing former Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget, but Senate Democrats are postponing committee votes on her nomination. According to Reuters:

Biden, a Democrat, still supports Tanden, an Indian American who would be the first woman of color to lead the agency.

"Neera Tanden is a leading policy expert who brings critical qualifications to the table during this time of unprecedented crisis," his press secretary, Jen Psaki, wrote on Twitter.

Asked later at the White House whether Tanden had offered to withdraw her nomination, Psaki said: "That's not the stage we're in."

QUICK HITS

• The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) begins today, and former President Donald Trump is slated to speak on Sunday. Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wy.), who voted to impeach the president, thinks Trump should not continue to play a role in the Republican Party's activities, but she seems to be vastly outnumbered.

• Hillary Clinton is writing a thriller.

• Mercia Bowser, elder sister of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, has died of COVID-19.

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing his own #MeToo scandal.

• Fans of Frasier and Avatar: The Last Airbender have reasons to celebrate.

Crying ‘racism’ at Smith College

What happened at Smith College in 2018 caught my eye partly because I’d had an experience somewhat like it, albeit on a purely personal scale.

By Gene Lyons

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Had I not once spent a semester living adjacent to the Smith College campus in Massachusetts years ago, I’d probably never have read Michael Powell’s extraordinary New York Times account of a tragi-comic racial debacle there.

Ho-hum. Isn’t this what they do at these fancy private colleges now: turn themselves inside out in furious arguments about race and sexuality?

Back then, I was teaching at a nearby state university. Our home in the woods had burned down, and a colleague on sabbatical generously offered his Northampton house rent-free.

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I don’t believe I ever set foot on the Smith campus, although our beagle, Joan, cleverly turned herself into a campus dog and gained several pounds. It took months to work her back into shape after we moved back to the country.

Nevertheless, what happened at Smith College in 2018 caught my eye partly because I’d had an experience somewhat like it, albeit on a purely personal scale. At Smith, a young Black student was approached by a (white) campus security officer who asked why she was eating all by herself in a dormitory closed for the summer, and was she OK.

Definitely not. The student took to Facebook to complain that the experience had left her near “meltdown.” “All I did was be Black,” Oumou Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” She mentioned the security guard’s “lethal weapon.”

She accused several college employees of bigotry, publishing their photos and email addresses.

The campus erupted into an episode of moral panic like those that have periodically swept New England since the 17th century. Smith president Kathleen McCartney offered a fulsome, some would say groveling, apology and suspended several employees. The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN reported the outrage at face value. Militant students made denunciations and threats against the suspended employees.

”Racist” was the least of it.

Smith College announced “anti-bias” training for staff and faculty, complete with intrusive psychological queries. The ACLU demanded separate dormitories for “students of color” (a practice formerly known as “racial segregation,” but who’s keeping score?).

Eventually, the college got around to investigating the offended student’s complaints, hiring a law firm experienced in such probes. Uh-oh. Pretty much none of her allegations checked out. The security guard, like all campus cops, was unarmed. The employees she pilloried had been off duty that day.

One falsely accused janitor quit his job. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he told a reporter. “I believe in money privilege.”

Tuition and fees at Smith College come to $78,000 a year.

The college released the report exonerating its employees, but they got no apologies. They were pretty much all laid off due to COVID anyway. Kanoute seems no longer available for comment, probably best for all concerned.

My own experience at the large state university up the road was comparatively benign, although it could easily have wrecked my academic career. It definitely helped me decide I didn’t want one.

As a graduate of a Southern university (University of Virginia), it took me a while to understand that I’d arrived on campus under suspicion. Granted, I’d met people in Charlottesville who hadn’t gotten over the Civil War, but they were regarded as cranks. And true, certain Massachusetts colleagues openly patronized the person described as my “pretty little wife” due to her Arkansas accent, but ordinary New Englanders asked her questions just to hear her talk. No harm, no foul.

Then I assigned a failing grade to a Black student, basically to be sure she was alive. Mildred had done poorly on the midterm, and then vanished. She submitted no term paper and was a no-show for the final. I figured an “F” would smoke her out if she hadn’t left school. Indeed, she did turn up with a preposterous alibi about cutting her foot on a discarded light bulb.

I agreed to let her make up the work. The paper she turned in was derisory. Her exam revealed no familiarity with the course work. I gave her a minimal passing grade and figured we were done.

The good news is that the subsequent formal investigation was conducted by a senior faculty member not associated with my department’s “radical” faction. After conducting interviews and scrutinizing Mildred’s written work — what little there was of it — he ruled that I’d treated her as strictly as I treated all my students, finding no evidence of racial bias.

That was a joke. I was a pushover.

Mildred, however, was a pioneer. In basketball, it’s called “working the refs.” In academia, it’s known as “critical race theory.”

A few days after my exoneration, a colleague commiserated that an “aristocratic Southerner” like me must find State U’s diverse student population challenging. Ethnically, I am an Irish Catholic from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I figured I needed to quit before I got fired.

Gene Lyons is a columnist for the Arkansas Times.