Students are sitting in at Seattle U to demand racial equity

Students are staging a protest at Seattle University, occupying the dean's office at the humanities-focused Matteo Ricci College and demanding changes to its Eurocentric curriculum as well as the resignation of Dean Jodi Kelly.

A revolving group of Seattle U students have been sitting in since early last week, and as Ansel Herz noted in the Stranger, they are part of a growing number of college students in the Puget Sound area advocating for systemic changes to the way their institutions tackle the idea of equity:

Fiza Mohammad, a 22-year-old senior majoring in humanities, said the tensions have been mounting for months for a couple of reasons.

First, racism and sexism are especially acute at Matteo Ricci because the humanities curriculum is based heavily on Western canon and European classic literature, i.e. stuff that old racist and sexist white guys wrote down, Mohammad said.

"I can count on one hand how many people of color I've read in the four years that I've been here," she said.

Second, there's a lack of diversity among the college's faculty. Only one out of nineteen faculty are non-white, according to the college's website.

Among the existing faculty, too many professors "do not know how to communicate about race," Mohammad said. "They call me aggressive and emotional." She said students had engaged with Kelly in private conversations about the issue, but Kelly said she was "afraid of the oppressed becoming the oppressor."

It's not clear what sparked the timing of this particular protest, but much of what they call for would be a welcome addition to training and hiring criteria for teachers at all levels:

Kelly issued a two-paragraph statement on Tuesday responding to the coalition concerns. In it, she promised to conduct a comprehensive review of the curriculum by the end of the year, hire a consultant to assess the college's culture and climate, and implement "racial and cultural literacy training" for the faculty and staff.

That's not enough for the students, whose 2,600 word petition released Wednesday calls on the college to explicitly teach the history of oppression and social movements, "stop using the bodies of students of color to advertise diversity," host listening sessions before the spring quarter ends, and much more. The students want a curriculum which:

Decentralizes Whiteness and has a critical focus on the evolution of systems of oppression such as racism, capitalism, colonialism, etc., highlighting the art, histories, theologies, political philosophies, and socio-cultural transformation of Western and non-Western societies.

Mohammad said the occupation will go on until Kelly steps down. Judging by posts with the hashtag #DearDeanKelly, the students are settling in for their first night in the college office with blankets and plenty of reading material.In recent months, students at the University of Washington, Seattle Pacific University, and Western Washington University have launched similar campaigns.