Amid "Stressful" Times, Wake Forest University Tries To Bridge Racial Divides

After allegations of racial bias surfaced at Wake Forest University two years ago, administrators say they have been implementing new policies and procedures to address the issue. 

Among other initiatives, a bias reporting system was launched in 2014, as well as a police accountability task force. The group oversees recommendations that include bias training, hiring a more diverse police force, and changing on-campus event management. This spring, a committee is making recommendations on how to best improve the cultural diversity requirement for a student's curriculum. 

But there still are students that say the university isn't taking racial bias seriously enough. 

In an interview with WFDD, Penny Rue, Vice President of Campus Life at Wake Forest University, says universities are on the front lines of confronting larger societal problems.

"A lot of millennials believe we live in a post-racial society and then reality hits and it's a complicated issue," says Rue. "Our society has deep divides about race, deep structural inequalities, and university is the place where you really come to grips with that. It might be the first place that you see it. So, we've got that complicated mix that we have to tease out during the college years."

Interview Highlights: 

One of the most controversial parts of the university's response was the Williams/Moss Report which was commissioned to analyze the police department. It shows no evidence of racial bias. The statistical analysis supporting that claim is incomplete at best. But the department's data also show wide disparities between the arrest rate of black and white students. Rue says this report was just a small part of a much larger university response.

“I think the individuals who conducted the report conducted the report with integrity. If you read the report, it's got really terrific information—that they called qualitative information—about the issues that they found and unearthed throughout all of their interviews. I found the statistical presentation not particularly enlightening. You're dealing, in our case, with pretty small numbers and comparing them to other jurisdictions wasn't meaningful to us.

I'm happy to meet with students who have strong opinions about that. It's up there for the sake of transparency. We have in many different ways said that we would have stated the conclusions differently. We knew there was a problem. We agree that there's a problem. We're working on the problem. "

On whether issues of racial bias are ingrained within the larger university system across the country:

"Racial bias is systemic problem in American society. I think some of the most exciting work  around racial justice is coming out of universities. But I gathered with my colleagues last month in very candid conversations and universities are stressed right now. We're sort of the crucible of these conversations and it's an exciting time to be at a university, but it's also stressful for the students, the student activists—self-care is sometimes not in their curriculum—and particularly for the front-level staff that are working in solidarity with them.