Eugene Weekly : Views : 06.01.06

A Tale of Two Colleges

Change comes more slowly to larger institutions.

BY MARK HARRIS

In looking at the Diversity Plan struggles at the UO (see cover story last week), I cannot help reflecting on the parallel processes occurring at LCC.

As current chair of LCC's Diversity Council, I know comparisons are inevitable. Not only do we exist in the same community; we share student bodies, and we often share or interchange personnel.

I think that because LCC is smaller and younger than the UO, it changes faster as an institution — though to someone from L.A., like me, that progressive change seems to come glacially, like rush hour on the Santa Monica I-10.

When Cheri Turpin, my partner in a historical project called "I, Too, Am Eugene," uncovered the Klan's influence in Eugene, part of my schadenfreude — contemplating UO faculty burning crosses at various buttes overlooking our fair valley, and then kicking it at the Elk's Club, Chamber of Commerce, Town Club or upscale private library for brandy and cigars — confirmed what I suspected: Eugene is a small Southern town in the Northwest.

The racial preference here is clearly white, with racial and ethnic slurs going essentially unpunished. Some of the people who utter them have even been promoted and retained, as if the Klan were still openly operating in Eugene.

That influence cannot be underestimated today. I've sat on numerous Lane hiring committees in which white faculty and staff from the UO are clearly at a numerical advantage. It's not simply that at Lane you hire your UO friends, family, members of your church, or other people you feel comfortable with. It's not simply that at one time, such people were once illegally given double points in hiring processes over candidates outside of Lane, the UO, or Oregon. It's also small-town xenophobia, nervously vocalized.

At its most innocuous, that fear of the non-white "other" makes some suspicious even of highly qualified African faculty with degrees from European institutions of higher education. Said Africans, who speak at least five or more languages other than English, instruct white Oregonian students who are hungry for a perspective outside of that provided in their education.

Diverse instructors, managers and classified staff are not hired fast enough to achieve affirmative action goals within this century, and they do not last long unless they develop skins like rhino hide. In 1992, I was the sole minority hire out of 1,400 applicants (160 of them minority candidates) for 44 faculty positions at Lane.

Those numbers tell a tale which can be read in a climate that both breeds racist comments and responses to them. The LCC president responded immediately and publicly to comments such as, "I didn't know so many niggers were working here, and I work here." When, five months ago, a student was called "nigger" in a certain UO courtyard, the dean of that college failed to do the same.