As hundreds of faculty and staff continue questioning university leadership, Penn State administrators spoke during a town hall on Friday to defend the decision to overhaul a series of once-promised racial justice initiatives and discuss a path forward.
In a one-hour discussion organized by the Faculty Senate, university officials and faculty leaders reviewed key talking points surrounding Penn State’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The forum, framed as a stepping stone in a much larger discourse, aimed to clear the air and lay the groundwork for President Neeli Bendapudi’s tenure, which has now reached more than six months.
“No one gets married for the honeymoon. We enter into a marriage because we want to build a home and a life together. Building a home is work, and sometimes that work is messy,” said Michele Stein, Faculty Senate chair and teaching professor of biobehavioral health. “That home succeeds, though, when everyone involved is committed to working through disagreements together. So, if the honeymoon is over, then great. That means we’ve all decided to roll up our sleeves and sit down at the kitchen table together and get to work. We don’t expect that that work will be finished today by any means, but that today will be the start of our commitment to continually working together to make Penn State the home we know it can be for all of us.”
On Penn State’s Center for Racial Justice
Scrapping plans for an on-campus racial justice center was perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back, faculty argued on Friday. The move, announced in late October, came as Penn State planned to pivot toward supporting existing initiatives that would fuel diversity, equity and inclusion causes on campus.
Penn State’s proposed Center for Racial Justice was once framed as “just the beginning” of the university’s renewed efforts to promote on-campus equity, former President Eric Barron said in the wake of nationwide protests dating back to 2020. The center would, in part, provide resources to faculty, develop outreach opportunities and fund research examining racism, racial bias and more. It was slated to be housed within the university’s existing Social Science Research Institute.
On Friday, Bendapudi said Penn State is far from its goal of strongly supporting diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. While those conversations must continue, she said the university aims to favor quantifiable ambitions over structural changes.
“We have a long way to go,” said Bendapudi, the first woman and person of color to serve as university president. “To me, the better path was to hold ourselves accountable to something measurable – something that everybody could see, we could put it out there and talk about it every year.”
Recommendations to develop the center, among other initiatives, came in 2021 from Barron’s Select Penn State Presidential Commission on Racism, Bias and Community Safety. The center’s plans were revealed in October 2021 before administrators began a national search for a founding director this past March.
The decision to cancel plans for the center, faculty contended, was largely a top-down process. Julio Palma, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Fayette, argued scrapping those plans is to ignore the key recommendations of faculty experts, perhaps diverging from the university’s shared governance model.
“When we say that we’re going to support what we have in Penn State…Well, this center comes from faculty consultations,” Palma said. “It comes more than a year of [work from] the Commission on Racism, Bias and Community Safety and recommendations from our own faculty. The authors of the ‘More Rivers to Cross’ report also recommend having an institute about racial justice. These are all really recommendations from our own faculty, our own experts.”
Later, Bendapudi said she was “very open” to potentially developing a faculty oversight committee but would not commit to anything just yet.
“I want faculty involvement, and I want faculty accountability. I want it to be staff and students included,” Bendapudi said. “So, I would always want a body where we have all of us looking [at something] together. Absolutely, we’ll get input, and absolutely, we’ll look at how we are doing. I love that because I cannot do this on my own. It’s all of us working together.”
It’s unclear if Penn State’s recent financial troubles affected its decision to avoid funding the Center for Racial Justice. The university operated at a nine-figure deficit in the 2021-22 fiscal year, ultimately triggering cost-saving measures that include a widespread 3% budget cut, a “strategic hiring freeze” and increased tuition and room and board rates.
According to Spotlight PA, Bendapudi raised doubts about funding the Center for Racial Justice in private meetings with the search committee for the center’s director. Nearly a dozen faculty members on the committee later wrote that they were “extremely disappointed.”
As she noted in a letter announcing the scrapped plans, Benapudi said Penn State will invest in existing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives with funding that matches the center’s estimated costs over the next five years. The university once said those funds would round out to about $3.5 million, but on Friday, Bendapudi declined to commit any specific figures toward funding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, instead punting those discussions later down the road.
“If I sit here and tell you a number, I’m making that up,” Bendapudi said. “I don’t know yet. Let us look and come back to this in early 2023. Let us continue our conversation.”
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Efforts Moving Forward
With plans for a new on-campus racial justice center off the table, Bendapudi said Penn State will turn its attention toward existing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Those priorities, she said in a statement, are broad, but they largely focus on closing graduation rate gaps between student demographic groups, diversifying faculty across “all ranks, tracks and disciplines,” providing equitable professional development opportunities for staff and improving Penn Staters’ sense of belonging on campus.
Penn State would also work with its Office of Planning, Assessment and Institutional Research to establish a publicly accessible dashboard that would “clearly communicate” the university’s current status on diversity metrics.
On Friday, Bendapudi routinely stressed Penn State’s commitment to “moving the needle” on quantitative equity measures. A good starting point, she said, would be investing in students of color, as the graduation rate for Black students is currently 26% lower than their white counterparts, according to university estimates. The president argued quality investments in student success would help close economic gaps between campuses, noting that more affluent families are typically driven to University Park as opposed to the Commonwealth Campuses, Penn State’s “blackest and brownest.”
“If we don’t really invest in making sure our current students who are here graduate, what is happening is the worst of all possible worlds. They have some debt and nothing to show for it,” Bendapudi said. “We all know the path to economic freedom for the individual, for their family and community, college should provide that.”
Bendapudi repeatedly emphasized her desire to help Penn State retain and support diverse faculty at every campus throughout the university network. Doing so has been a decades-long problem at Penn State, as chronicled in a landmark, two-part report in 2020 that brought national attention to the challenges Black faculty face.
The report, titled “More Rivers to Cross,” found Black faculty rates at Penn State stayed practically flat over a 15-year period while non-Black faculty rates increased. The faculty-driven research also cited decreases in tenure rates for Black faculty.
The report’s second installment, published in March 2021, detailed racial discrimination faced by Penn State faculty, noting that more than half of Black faculty respondents said they at least “sometimes” experienced racism from supervisors and administrators. Ultimately, the report encouraged the university to pursue more substantial efforts to improve on-campus equity.
Marinda Harrell Levy, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Brandywine and an author behind “More Rivers to Cross,” pressed Bendapudi to outline specific initiatives the university will employ to counter racism and promote diversity, equity and inclusion. With few specifics to offer on Friday, the president said her administration will listen to faculty and staff and develop more structural approaches next year.
“When we just shift the narrative and don’t really change anything, one thing we know for sure is the bottom line is not going to change,” Bendapudi said. “You are not going to impact the recruitment and retention. You are not going to impact where the faculty actually get promoted, or where the staff members of color actually have an opportunity, because that’s just narrative. We are not addressing the systemic issues… If you haven’t tackled the barriers to getting there, you’re not going to see progress.”
Jennifer Hamer, a Penn State professor and the president’s newly named special assistant for institutional equity, argued it will require a change in culture to produce more meaningful changes on campus.
“We can say we can do all kinds of things. We can say it, and maybe the rhetoric will tone down and it will be a quieter university for a year or two, right? We actually have to change the culture of Penn State, and if we can do that, then I think we’re doing something different than any other university,” Hamer said. “Now, can we do it? I’m optimistic. I think we have the right people in the right place. We need more people in the right place, and that’s part of what I’ll be working on. But we simply have to. We’ve been doing diversity work for 60 years in higher education — and the needle has moved — but here we are in the 21st century, still working on a culture shift.”
Concerns Over the University’s Direction
While faculty concerns were on full display on Friday, the town hall’s panel represents just a small fraction of the larger frustrations with university leadership.
So far, more than 400 faculty have signed a letter questioning Bendapudi’s commitment to racial justice. Those tensions, worsened by the Center for Racial Justice’s cancellation, came to a head with a protest outside Old Main in early November. Internal letters and emails, including those obtained by Spotlight PA, argued current efforts are more performative than substantial.
During the town hall, faculty took issue with recent controversies on campus. The most notable flare in tensions came in late October when, at the last minute, the university canceled a controversial speaking event that would’ve brought Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to campus for a “comedy event.” Citing “the threat of escalating violence,” Penn State called off the event just about an hour before it was slated to begin inside the Thomas Building.
In a statement, Penn State said its police force determined it needed to cancel the event in the interest of public safety, nothing demonstrations “regrettably turned violent” without identifying specifics. Those at the scene reported a group of masked individuals entering the crowd and deploying pepper spray on protestors. Video by independent journalists Ford Fischer and Zach Roberts showed the incident as it happened, and Penn State’s police department later said its officers did not use pepper spray.
The protests did not result in widespread arrests, and no assailants have been charged to date for the use of pepper spray. One student is facing misdemeanor charges for allegedly ignoring multiple orders from police officers to leave the area during the protest.
Uncensored America, a student-run organization, hosted the founder of the far-right Proud Boys, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and recognized by the Anti-Defamation League as an extremist group with a violent agenda. The student-run University Park Allocation Committee independently approved a budget of more than $7,500 in student activity fee dollars to fund the event.
The event and its protest represented a major blemish for the university, faculty claimed on Friday. Kristin Thomas, an assistant teaching professor of recreation, parks and tourism management, argued the event’s aftermath — combined with the Center for Racial Justice’s cancellation two days later —would require work from the university to regain the community’s trust.
“I’ve made my best judgment, and I know that I’m asking you to give me time, to give me a little grace,” Bendapudi said. “The timing of the whole thing was terrible, and I know how much pain it caused, but my heart is in this work. My commitment is in this work.”
Palma noted the growing concerns from faculty groups, including the Coalition for a Just University and Penn State’s chapter of the American Association for University Professors. Ultimately, he said, they speak up to start conversations that hope to make Penn State a better place.
“I think faculty needs to be involved when we make bigger decisions,” Palma said. “The fact that we have an open letter with more than 400 signings, concerned about the direction of the university… Just like James Baldwin said when he was criticizing the United States, that is, ‘The reason I criticize the United State is not because I hate it, but because I love it.’ The reason faculty is concerned is because we love Penn State.”
