Address to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Chapter of the NAACP

April 3, 2007

It is an honor and a privilege to address the campus chapter of the NAACP this evening. I am honored especially by Jonathan Reid’s invitation to speak to you because I have admired the NAACP and the principles it espouses since I was old enough to know about prejudice and its pernicious effects in our society. My admiration stems from a profound agreement with its mission and its vision. Founded in 1909, now almost one hundred years ago, the NAACP fights and has fought throughout its history “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”  It envisions a society that we all should welcome, one “in which all individuals have equal rights and there is no racial hatred or racial discrimination.”  Let me assure you that I and the administration of the University of Tennessee share these values and this vision, and that we are currently working to move our campus toward more diversity and more inclusiveness.

In my scholarly work I have found myself occupied with, mutatis mutandis, the same issues that are central to the NAACP. In my professorial career I have been a student of German culture and society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My earliest sustained work concerned the early nineteenth-century German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine, and in many of my essays I observed how he reflected on his own situation as a member of a minority in Germany and Europe in the themes and topics he chose. I wrote several articles about Heine’s reflections on the new world, noting in particular the way in which Heine chastised Europeans for their inhumane treatment of the native inhabitants they encountered. During the past few years I have been more centrally concerned about Heine’s Jewishness and how he tried to cope with his subaltern status in the face of discrimination and anti-Semitism. Perhaps my most intensively researched article on Heine dealt with a poem he composed in the 1850s entitled “The Slave Ship.”  In this poem Heine satirizes the European slave trade and its hypocrisy, exposing the mercantile calculations and the deplorable callousness of Dutch profiteers. In my research for this article I noted that Heine not surprisingly was well acquainted with the literature surrounding the slave trade, and that far from employing poetic devices for effect, he wove his knowledge into a macabre account of a voyage regarding the middle passage.

Another major emphasis in my work over the past twenty years has been the Holocaust. I have been especially interested in how Germans have come to terms with the deeds they perpetrated, and how they have reflected on or repressed their complicity in so many dreadful events. From my studies I believe I have learned that no one can really claim the moral high ground in dealing with prejudice. Often students in my classes would wonder at the ease with which Germans turned their backs on their neighbors, simply ignoring that former friends and acquaintances were mistreated, thrown into custody in prisons or concentration camps, and tortured or murdered. The students often claimed that they themselves could never be a party to such injustice.

Usually I responded with two points: the first is that the beginnings of all larger injustices start with smaller, seemingly insignificant violations, that the Holocaust in Germany was preceded by the denial of specific rights for the Jewish citizens of Germany, and that gradually this denial spread through administrative fiat and legislation to exclude Jews from all rights. At that point Jews became officially second-class citizens of Germany. Once they were second-class citizens, however, their expropriation economically and their physical annihilation followed without much protest and with increasingly severity. But the first step toward the eventual mass murder of a people almost always involves smaller violations and, perhaps more importantly, a change in consciousness that establishes a hierarchy in which one race or ethnic group or religion or religious sect is judged naturally superior to the other.

My second point was that no one should be smug or confident about how s/he would act in a situation similar to those situations that became everyday occurrences in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. We would all like to think that, had we been Germans faced with the inhumane treatment of innocent people, we would have protested against these actions and sought to protect innocent lives. But I think we are hasty and naive if we believe that those individuals who said and did nothing are simply evil or morally repugnant. Many sought to protect their family; others were just not courageous enough to do anything, but were otherwise decent human beings. Indeed, if we look around in the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will see numerous violations of the rights of individuals or groups of people, but we also will see relatively few protests against these violations. Moreover, we can unfortunately recount mass murders on a large scale in various countries and in various periods throughout recent history: in the first half of the twentieth century the destruction of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917; the mass murders of Serbs by Croatians from 1941-1945; the deaths of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, a crime perpetrated by Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy; and the Holocaust during the Second World War, in which not only Jews were murdered, but also Slavs, gays, the Sinti and Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as political opponents of the fascist regime. In the postwar period we can point to the massacre of between 100,000 and 150,000 Hutus by the ruling Tutsi minority in Burundi in 1972; the annihilation of 1.7 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s; the organized killing of Bosnians, especially Bosnian Muslims, in the former Yugoslavia from 1992-1995; the massacre of almost a million Tutsi and moderate Hutus by Hutus in Rwanda in 1995; and, most recently, the destruction of 200,000 people and forced evacuation of many more in the Dafur region in the western part of Sudan. This record of inhumanity for the past century is dismaying, and to those individuals who claim the moral high ground I would ask what are you doing now to prevent injustice in the world, or even injustice that surrounds you or is perpetrated in your name. My point is that we can be too quick to condemn the actions of other individuals, and that we would be much better served by examining carefully and critically our own actions, their failings, and their potential to alleviate injustice and inhumanity where it still exists.

These genocides over the past century tell me something else: we are wrong to believe that prejudice, biased behavior, discrimination, and injustice are the monopoly of any one race, religion, or ethnic group. In this country for many years racism has involved primarily the hegemony of whites over blacks, but there are few races that themselves have not contributed to genocides in the world. Although we may belong to a minority group in the society in which we currently live, that minority status does not grant us immediate moral superiority. Given a different set of circumstances, in which we might have more power or be part of the majority, we might perpetrate the same injustices we currently suffer. Conversely those of us born into a majority status should not forget that under a different set of circumstances we might be part of a minority against which discrimination would be practiced. It follows for me that racism is not simply derived from the color of one’s skin, but has to do with complex social and political circumstances. Above all it is a matter of the openness of one’s mind. Common to the bias and injustice around the globe is a lack of tolerance for others, a failure to be open to attitudes and habits of thought that differ from one’s own, a provincialism that claims to be right and righteous, to be the final arbiter on matters of propriety and taste. None of us are free from this habit of mind; indeed, if there is anything that higher education can accomplish besides mediating the skills for material success in the world, it is to instill the humility that comes with the recognition that the world and its inhabitants are many and varied, and that no single person or peoples holds the key to absolute wisdom and correctness.

I have now strayed rather far from what Jonathan asked me to talk about: my reasons for coming to Tennessee, my personal motivation for leaving Berkeley for Knoxville, and my goals as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Perhaps I can begin a return to the situation here by relating an event that occurred during the commencement ceremonies last December. Administrators walk down the aisle in pairs to sit on the podium. I was paired with Theotis Robinson, Jr., the current Vice President for Equity and Diversity. He related to me something that was shocking: in 1961 he was in the group of the first three African-American students to attend the University of Tennessee. Having grown up in New Jersey and attended universities in Philadelphia and Wisconsin before being hired in Berkeley in 1979, and having been a visitor at only northern institutions like MIT and Ohio State, I had not stopped to think that the University of Tennessee has a much different history with regard to African-Americans than the schools I had experienced. It is a mark of disgrace that I should be able to walk beside one of the first African-Americans to attend this institution; by all rights that person should have passed away many decades ago. I am still trying to understand the implications of the long heritage of segregation at UT for me in my position and for the University in general. But I do know that it is a tradition of shameful and wrongful actions and attitudes that we must make sure are resolutely consigned to the past.

My own experience with students of various racial origins was much different. I never attended a segregated school, and I rarely found myself in any region where segregation was a living tradition. My elementary school had students of different races, and the high school I attended in Asbury Park, New Jersey, was, if recollection serves me well, about half African-American. From the town I lived in, Belmar, students had a choice of attending Asbury Park or Manasquan High School, and as it happens the only students who chose Asbury Park were the Jews and African Americans. Although integrated schools appeared natural to me, I must say in retrospect that I was naively unaware of the social problems that existed under the surface. Running track and cross country, I had many black teammates, and we often joked with each other and got along well. Their relative infrequence in the college preparatory classrooms did not cause me much reflection. Only when I went off to school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 did I begin to understand the racial discrimination that existed even in this integrated setting. Contributing to my understanding were the riots in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which occurred not only in Watts and Detroit, but also in Newark and Asbury Park. These violent outbursts, as well as the more peaceful civil rights movement, had a profound effect on me and on members of my generation, both black and white.

My experience at Berkeley, of course, was one in which I couldn’t help being confronted with diversity. California is more complex in terms of racial and ethnic makeup than Tennessee. In Berkeley there is a substantial Asian-American population, and currently more than half the high-school graduates are Hispanic. The largest ethnic “minority” on the Berkeley campus, the Asian Americans, is actually a majority among the undergraduates. During the mid 1990s in Berkeley I was confronted with the anti-affirmative-action movement, which began with propositions to the Board of Regents presented by the governor, Pete Wilson, who was simultaneously maneuvering for a presidential bid. These propositions were meant to outlaw affirmative action at the University of California. I was a member of a small group of faculty that opposed these measures, and in that campaign I attended and spoke at meetings of the Board of Regents and wrote articles for the local newspaper. As you know, we were not successful. Subsequently state Proposition 209 was passed by Californians, superseding and affirming the actions of the regents against affirmative action.

Thus I came to Tennessee with a consciousness of diversity, the threat to it posed by politicians, the public, and even university boards, and the necessity of maintaining inclusiveness as a principle of higher education. I arrived just as the Geier decree was about to be lifted, and its cancellation has compelled the University of Tennessee to adopt policies and measures that maintain diversity without targeting African Americans. Paradoxically the progress made by the University in the last decade with regard to African Americans has led us to a circumstance in which it has become more difficult for us to sustain the modest progress we have achieved.

Before I open up the floor for questions, I would like to relate to you briefly what the University is doing about inclusiveness and what I have done in my more restricted area of responsibility. You may be aware that the African American Achievers scholarships as well as the African American Incentive Grants are no longer going to be awarded next fall, although the campus will honor the commitment to students who have received these awards in the past. In order to continue to attract a diverse class we have introduced two programs: the Tennessee Pledge and the Tennessee Promise. The Tennessee Pledge will guarantee a scholarship to any admissible student whose parental income falls at or below 150% of the poverty level. This scholarship, when combined with other federal and state grants, will cover all of a student’s mandatory costs without the necessity of loans. The Tennessee Promise targets 35 high schools across the state, most of which have not traditionally sent students to UT in high numbers, and many of which are located in the Memphis and Nashville areas. The Promise Scholarship will provide up to $5,800 per year for four years when combined with the HOPE scholarship and other university scholarships. Let me emphasize that neither of these scholarships will replace the AAA and AAIG awards. But we hope that they will enable the campus to maintain or eventually enhance the diversity of the student body that we have worked so hard to attain.

Finally, I wanted to relate to you my own actions since I became Provost. I should mention that I have made three academic appointments in my office since I arrived last summer: two of the three have been African-Americans. I hasten to add that I did not appoint these individuals because they were African-American, but because they were the best qualified for the positions. I have also become acutely aware that with the lifting of the Geier decree, the campus will have even greater difficulty hiring a diverse faculty. We have not done well enough in this area in the past, in part because the number of African Americans and other minorities in the search pools is so small and the competition for the most outstanding among them is so great. But we are committed to do better in the future, and in order to facilitate progress in this area I initiated last October an Opportunity Hiring Program aimed at increasing the diversity among faculty on the Knoxville campus. This program will mimic the faculty hiring program under the Geier decree, except that it is open to any candidate who will increase diversity and not just African Americans.

I’d like to address one more issue here. In recent months I have heard several accusations leveled against the campus and the University regarding institutional racism. I have taken these accusations very seriously, especially since I achieved a new understanding of the checkered history of this institution. I am happy to report that in my investigations of current practices, I find no support for these accusations. The rate of tenure for minority faculty members over the past decade is exactly the same as the rate for non-minority faculty members; African-American women have an even higher rate of tenure than the average. With regard to salaries I find no egregious cases, and again the evidence points to fairness and equity. Indeed, in almost two-thirds of the situations in which we compare African American compensation with non-African American compensation, salaries of the former exceed salaries of the latter. And with regard to student organizations support of those groups involving African Americans is equal to or greater than support for other student groups.

I am delighted that my worst fears were not substantiated by the facts, but I recognize at the same time that what we have done is not nearly enough. Even with the progress made during the Geier years, we have not attracted African-American students in numbers that are high enough; and with regard to faculty the appointments have simply been too few. The same holds true for staff, especially high-level staff. So while I do not believe that we are advancing the policies and practices that informed this institution for the first six decades of the last century, I also do not believe that we have achieved everything we must achieve. First and foremost we have not realized here at the University of Tennessee the vision promulgated by the NAACP, which I cited at the outset: a society “in which all individuals have equal rights and there is no racial hatred or racial discrimination.”  I do hope, however, that working together we can make progress on this all-important goal.

Posted: April 4, 2007