Dive Brief:
- The University of Missouri named a professor in its law school as the interim chief diversity officer as part of its efforts to address racism on campus after student and faculty protests, including a hunger strike.
- The Huffington Post reports Chuck Henson, an associate dean in Mizzou’s law school, will take on the vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity role, filling a position that was announced with several other initiatives last month as a way to address a hostile racial climate.
- Henson has a background in civil rights law and discrimination and has written and spoken about racial profiling and the conditions in Ferguson, including the unrest following Michael Brown's death and the Department of Justice's findings of racist behavior among police officers.
Dive Insight:
The announcement of Henson's appointment came amid a flurry of administrative activity at the University of Missouri this week. A graduate student was entering his second week of a hunger strike when football players announced they would boycott their remaining games if the president of the university system did not resign. The faculty threatened a walkout. President Tim Wolfe resigned Monday, followed by news the chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, would take on a new role.
Henson spoke late on Tuesday: "This isn't something that can be automatically fixed. It took time for it to get this way. … There will be a long period of listening as things start to be done because there is so much frustration on all sides at this point. There is a lot of pain."
The State University of New York system announced recently that it would require diversity officers at all of its schools and the University of Oklahoma added the job following a racist fraternity chant that went viral in the spring. While the latter appointment and Mizzou's clearly have been damage control, many other institutions have long had diversity officers even without such intense prompting. And some have criticized the SUNY policy as incredibly late.