{"id":1129,"date":"2018-05-23T04:00:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T08:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/memory\/?p=1129"},"modified":"2018-05-22T10:20:33","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T14:20:33","slug":"lemon-project-symposium-dom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/memory\/2018\/05\/23\/lemon-project-symposium-dom\/","title":{"rendered":"Lemon Project Symposium Presentation: Faculty Response to Institutional Change by Dominique Harrington"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph courtesy of The Lemon Project at the College of William & Mary.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On March 16, 2018, five undergraduate students who have worked with the Race & Racism at the University of Richmond Project had the opportunity to present at the Lemon Project Symposium at the College of William and Mary<\/a>. The panel, entitled “Seeing the Unseen and Telling the Untold:\u00a0Institutions, Individuals, and Desegregating the University of Richmond,” was moderated by Dr. Nicole Maurantonio and featured\u00a0Dominique Harrington, Madeleine Jordan-Lord, Elizabeth Mej\u00eda-Ricart, Jennifer Munnings, &\u00a0Destiny Riley. Below you will find the text and slide images of Dominique Harrington’s presentation, focusing on the research she conducted as a 2017 A&S Summer Research Fellow with the project. Click here to read more of her writing from last summer<\/a>, and here to explore her exhibit “Faculty Response to Institutional and National Change (1968-1973).<\/a>”<\/p>\n

Dominique “Dom” Harrington<\/strong> is a rising senior from Indianapolis, IN majoring in American Studies and minoring in Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.\u00a0 She is a part of the Dean’s Student Advisory Board, Students Creating Opportunities, Pride, and Equality (SCOPE), and she is both an Oldham and Oliver Hill Scholar. She has worked on the Race & Racism Project for two years and looks forward to continuing to work for the project during her final year at the University. Last summer, she completed a digital exhibit on faculty response to institutional\u00a0and national changes from 1968-1973.<\/em>
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Thank you Dr. Maurantonio and thank you to William and Mary for putting on this wonderful symposium.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been involved with the University of Richmond Race & Racism Project since the Fall of 2016, however, I\u2019d like to focus my presentation on the work that I completed last summer.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to start by giving a brief overview of the work that I\u2019ve done with the project, then I\u2019ll give you an example of one of the favorite documents that I worked with, and then I\u2019ll end with my reflections on the importance of the work we\u2019ve been doing.<\/p>\n

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The majority of the documents I worked with were from President George Modlin\u2019s papers during his tenure as president at the University from 1946-1971,\u00a0 which are part of the collection at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society<\/a>, an archive on campus.<\/p>\n

Within this collection, there were letters from faculty, alumni, students, and educational leaders like the Chairman of the Special Committee on Racial Discrimination of American Law Schools. This committee navigated how to deal with integration at member universities. There were also a number of annual departmental reports which I found to be particularly interesting.\u00a0 So much so, that they ended up serving as a springboard for creating my final project.<\/p>\n

As I examined these reports, I noticed that the Race & Racism Project to that point had highlighted students, employees, and even past presidents, like I did with the exhibit that Madeleine already presented on<\/a>.\u00a0 However, major players on the university campus were missing: faculty.<\/p>\n

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Within the reports that faculty members submitted between 1968-1973, I noted that\u00a0 faculty were responding to three issues: religious discrimination, integration, and student dissent.\u00a0\u00a0 This timing is important.<\/p>\n

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, racially restrictive covenants became illegal in real estate,\u00a0 and two Olympic athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, staged the iconic silent protest<\/a> by raising their fists instead of placing their hands on their chests during a medal presentation ceremony in Mexico City.<\/p>\n

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That same year, in 1968, the University of Richmond enrolled its first residential black student, Barry Greene, on its main campus.<\/p>\n

Barrier shattering changes filled the rest of these years as well, particularly with the rise of liberatory movements for women, black folks, the LGBTQ community, and even the anti-war movements that swept the nation.<\/p>\n

Because of my major, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to study these decades\u00a0 through both national and state level lenses, however it begged a driving question for my research with this project: How were faculty at my university responding and engaging with these historic changes?<\/p>\n

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The faculty I examined belonged to one of three colleges: Westhampton College, Richmond College, and University College on Lombardy Avenue (or UCLA).\u00a0 Westhampton College, established in 1914, and Richmond College, incorporated in 1840,\u00a0 were the women’s\u2019 and men’s\u2019 colleges, respectively. UCLA was a satellite campus downtown to connect UR to the business community of Richmond. Before Richmond College was officially established in 1840, it was a Baptist Seminary; these Baptist roots shaped every aspect of the University, that is, until the 1960s and 1970s when both faculty members and students began challenging the constraints, and sometimes discrimination, that came along with this Baptist affiliation.<\/p>\n

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The digital exhibit I curated this summer grapples with a few driving questions, but\u00a0 the main one was : (1) What role did faculty play in challenging, perpetuating, and\/or remaining complicit in systems of oppression?<\/p>\n

From my questions, I argued that not only do faculty need their place in narratives of Race & Racism at the University of Richmond, they were also responsible for being complicit in, and in some cases, actively resisting systems of oppression that shaped the campus environment.<\/p>\n

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Because of time constraints, I\u2019d like to just share one portion of my exhibit that I found to be particularly interesting.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by dissent. Oftentimes, the breeding grounds for this dissent were college campuses–the University of Richmond included.<\/p>\n

In 1970, the Westhampton College Dean of Students, Clara M. Keith, submitted an annual report on student life (available here<\/a>) to the Dean of Westhampton College, Dr. Mary Louise Gehring, and President George Modlin for that school year.<\/p>\n

This report was unique because there was a dramatic shift in Westhampton College student life with the administrators noting changes in the students’ lifestyle, attitude, and mood resulting in shifts in the “traditional boundaries of education.”\u00a0 Students were demanding autonomy in areas such as sex, drinking, parietal hours, and self-government.<\/p>\n

For the next portion of the report, Dean Keith described some of the subcultures she had noticed: the change conformer, absurd plastic hippies, and the system dissenters.<\/p>\n

She said, “system dissenters” were students who used “the dissent situation as a forum for (their) own inadequacies and is characterized by apathy, and sham rebelliousness.”\u00a0 They wanted immediate change and created chaos, and although there are only a few, “enough naive ones (could) be led along this path.”<\/p>\n

We don’t know the names of these students.\u00a0 We don’t know what they did on campus, and how their acts of rebellion spurred changes in the quality of students’ lives. However, we do know that they made enough of an impact for the Dean of Students to dedicate the vast majority of her annual report to disparaging those engaging in dissent from the traditions and social norms of the University. And rather than responding to students seeking change with empathy, Dean Keith responded with a tone of contempt–completely dismissing the students by assuming that they were “acting out.”<\/p>\n

To avoid jumping too far to conclusions, there’s an ample amount of information I don’t have about Dean Keith–like her intentions behind the rhetoric she used.\u00a0 However, that doesn’t negate the fact that the way she described her more radical students impacts how we see them today.<\/p>\n

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In reflecting on my work this summer I found a reading that we did in a group meeting, Jarrett Drake\u2019s, \u201cDocumenting Dissent in the Contemporary College Archive: Finding our Function within the Liberal Arts,\u201d<\/a> to be the most influential.<\/p>\n

Drake calls upon archivists to carve out space in the archive that demonstrates how our respective institutions have been opposed (to varying degrees) to “full liberation or independence”.\u00a0\u00a0 At times, the University of Richmond was in direct opposition to their student’s increasing need to break free from oppressive traditions that elitism and sexism imposed upon their day to day lives.\u00a0 As an activist archivist, Jarrett Drake explained, the explicit function of liberal arts institutions isn’t to recreate systems of oppression, yet still, they continue to be guilty of doing so.<\/p>\n

To me, I think that this project is attempting to reconcile with just that.<\/p>\n

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When I\u2019ve attempted to explain what I was up to last summer, one question that really made me think was \u201cThat\u2019s cool and all but what\u2019s the point?\u201d\u00a0 Being a humanities major, I\u2019m used to folks downplaying the importance of engaging with ideas both past and present.\u00a0 But I\u2019m thankful for the question because it really caused me to reflect on the work that my teammates and I had done.\u00a0 Most of the documents I worked with were constructed about 50 years ago so why are they still relevant?<\/p>\n

The University of Richmond is completely different right?\u00a0 In 1968, UR admitted it\u2019s first black student on its main campus.\u00a0 Three years ago, the University of Richmond hired its first black President.<\/a>\u00a0 So yes, the University has seen a lot of change.\u00a0 However, working on this project has been a bit disheartening because I\u2019ve also seen just how far we haven\u2019t come.\u00a0 Minority students then, and minority students today are asking for some of the same changes: a more diverse and inclusive student body, and more faculty of color.\u00a0 Minority student both then and today are still trying to carve out spaces in an institution that wasn\u2019t built\u00a0 with them in mind.<\/p>\n

Dominant narratives like that of progress need to be challenged, especially now in the age of alternative facts.\u00a0 To much dismay, I\u2019m not convinced that the majority of this country knows as much about where we have been, regarding our racial history, than they should.<\/p>\n

For instance, perhaps if the country, as a whole, were more knowledgeable about the history of slavery and the Civil War and the ideologies in which they were grounded that persist today, we would be able to have more fruitful conversations about the place of confederate flags\/statues in our communities<\/p>\n

And so, perhaps if members of the University of Richmond community could actively engage with the truth of the past, we could have more fruitful conversations about how to make our campus community a more equitable place for everyone to thrive, not just survive. As a queer, black, woman at the University of Richmond, this project is relevant because it\u2019s both cementing my story, and those who have come before me, unheard and unknown.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

The rebels that I mentioned in my example were the ones that were making necessary changes on our campus and for that, I believe they deserve their place, their independence, and their liberation. So, here’s to those, as Dean Keith described in her report,\u00a0 with their “wigs, beads, and perspiration stained Levis.”\u00a0 Here’s to the change conformers, the absurd plastic hippies, and the system dissenters.\u00a0 I think the world could use a bit more of them\u2026.especially now.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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