Adrianna Kezar in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Colleges can recover from racial crisis

Pullias co-director Adrianna Kezar was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new report she co-authored that explores what led to the University of Missouri’s 2015-16 racial crisis:

Many campus leaders will simply create a task force and put together a report after a racial crisis because that’s what they believe will resolve the issues at hand, said Adrianna Kezar, a professor and co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, who helped lead the research team.

Instead, Kezar said, college officials should reflect on what it means to have the “capacity” to respond effectively when a racist incident occurs — and adjust their approach accordingly….

A few months after a crisis, campuses can feel quiet, as though things are going back to normal, the report says. College leaders might think they’re “done,” Kezar said. That’s a problem. “In fact,” the report says, “quiet most often means that problems are simmering just below surface, which only invites setbacks.”

Many administrators don’t have a deep understanding of how much a racial crisis can emotionally devastate their campus, Kezar said. For many of the people at Mizzou who researchers interviewed about the 2015 protests, she said, “it feels like it just happened yesterday.”

Read the full article at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and learn more about or download the report,  “Speaking Truth and Acting with Integrity: Confronting Challenges of Campus Racial Climate.”