California Campus Sees Uneasy Race Relations

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By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: February 26, 2010

SAN DIEGO — It began, as so many racial flare-ups on campus do, with a prank that some called malicious, others insensitive.
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Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Students at the University of California, San Diego, occupied the chancellor's office on Friday.
Students at the University of California, San Diego, held an off-campus “Compton Cookout” Feb. 15 to mock Black History Month, with guests invited to don gold teeth in the style of rappers from the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, eat watermelon, and dress in baggy athletic wear.

Outrage ensued from the relatively small black student population here and their supporters, who grew more inflamed when a satirical campus television program broadcast a segment on the party and used a racial epithet to denounce black students.

On Thursday night, a third incident, a student’s hanging a noose from a bookcase in the main library, spurred a large, multicultural mass of chanting and drumming students to occupy the chancellor’s office for several hours on Friday and fed a simmering, some say much-needed, debate over race relations.

“The campus has been pretty silent about racism and nobody, until now, says anything,” said Aaron Gurlly, 30, an African-American graduate student who was among those occupying the administration building. The fallout from the incidents has jolted this campus in an era when many students and faculty believed that the progress of African-Americans nationwide have made such discussions passé.

But more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent).

Just a few years ago, the Los Angeles campus, one of the system’s most prestigious, was shaken with the news that only 103 black freshmen had enrolled, 2.2 percent of the class in a county that is 9.4 percent black. (The numbers have since ticked up to about 4.5 percent of the class.)

“We are constantly examining admissions practices, and there are no easy answers here,” said Nina Robinson, the university’s director of policy.

The San Diego campus, set on a bluff along the Pacific Ocean, has long struggled with attracting what the university calls “underrepresented minorities.” Black students make up fewer than 2 percent of undergraduates, among the lowest representation in the 10-campus, 220,000-student system.

The contours of the discussion were drawn starkly on social media sites, including rival Facebook pages. One declares “Solidarity Against Racism and Compton Cookout” (nearly 600 members) and another deplores what it considers political correctness with the title “U.C.S.D. Students Outraged That People Are Outraged About the Compton Cookout” (more than 440 members).

Some students believe what their peers perceive as an unwelcoming climate comes more from the campus’s reputation for scientific research than socializing and the fact that only 38 percent of students live on campus.

Inez Feltscher, a white senior who attended a teach-in Wednesday on race relations at the school that prompted hundreds of students of various races and ethnicities to walk out in protest, called the racial incidents disgusting. “But it’s not representative of the larger community at U.C.S.D.,” she said, “and people are afraid of getting labeled with that.”

The school’s chancellor, Marye Anne Fox, lamented the episode and has responded with a Web site, outlining a number of steps to improve the campus atmosphere. “I think we would all like to believe that racism was a thing of the ’60s, that it’s now passed us,” Ms. Fox said. “These incidents suggest it’s not.”

Students have accused her of responding slowly and maintaining a low profile — she sat taking notes at the teach-in. But on Friday she, uncharacteristically by all accounts, held a bullhorn and addressed protesters in a courtyard just outside her office before it was overtaken.

“We will not tolerate hate on our campus,” she said, reading from a statement in a voice still soft despite the bullhorn.

Later, Ms. Fox met with protest leaders, promising more attention to their concerns.

The administration is still investigating the Compton Cookout, and whether students can or should be sanctioned. The student association has suspended financing to all campus media while it studies what to do about the program about the party. And the police have not identified the student who admitted to the noose incident nor said whether charges would be filed.

Richard Louis Kizzee, 21, an African-American junior hanging out on the chancellor’s balcony at the office occupation, said he took heart at the protest’s cross-cultural flavor. “I knew the minority population was low here, but I didn’t think racism was so high or rampant,” he said. “But now, in response to what happened, this is what we should see.”

Rob Davis contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 27, 2010, on page A10 of the New York edition.