Invisible Men

The black studies faculty has firsthand insight into the problems, but administrators aren't calling. "They're not drawing on the resources they have right here," Forstater says.

Why?

"We're the troublemakers," Matthews says.

"This is typical denial," says Linwood Tauheed, who was recently made an associate professor of economics and also teaches courses in black studies.

Public criticism of the university began several months before Harper's audit, with the February 1 release of White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. It was written by the woman who had started UMKC's black studies program in 1994. Noliwe Rooks is now associate director of the African-American studies program at Princeton University, but her newest book includes a chapter describing the institutional racism she felt at UMKC.

Many universities around the country started black studies programs as far back as the 1960s, making UMKC decades late in getting its program off the ground. Even then, the university's motives were suspect.

Rooks came to campus to start a black studies program only after a lawsuit involving another black professor.

These days, Sandra Walker works for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. She says she has tried to put her days at UMKC behind her, though she knows she was the first in a chain of black professors who started leaving in the mid-1990s.

Walker filed a lawsuit against the school in 1994 alleging racial discrimination, sexual discrimination and retaliation by her colleagues and the administration. The school settled out of court, and Walker declined to speak with the Pitch about the settlement.

But she spoke candidly in front of an audience of students, faculty members, city leaders and state representatives gathered in the African-American Culture House for UMKC's Black Studies Conference on April 21. (The annual day of speaking out about the struggles and history that blacks have faced on campus and in neighboring communities fell on the same day that Harper's audit was released.)

In a videotape of the conference, Walker tells an audience of about 30 people that when she first stepped onto campus in 1968, she was one of few blacks enrolled that year. She studied sociology in what she described as a "benign" student experience. She'd just moved from Arkansas, where racism was up-close and personal.

Her second year at the school, several blacks who had been kicked out of Central Missouri State University enrolled at UMKC. "They revolutionized those of us who were here," Walker recalls.

The students started an African-American Student Union and pooled their money for school supplies and other things they needed to succeed on campus. They organized protests and created a support system throughout the organization.

After finishing her master's degree in sociology and working at City Hall, Walker was hired as the director of affirmative action and academic personnel at UMKC. During her time there, she recruited a record number of blacks for faculty positions, a handful of whom are still there. "I take great pride in that, but it didn't win me any friends on campus," she told her audience at the April 21 event.

Walker was soon promoted to dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; at the time, she was the only black holding an administrative role. Then, in 1994, she says she was stripped of the post and placed in an office that was formerly a closet.

Walker says she filed her discrimination lawsuit after making more than a dozen complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

While the suit dragged on in court, the university hired three new black professors. Among the hires was Rooks, appointed to launch a new black studies program.

"When I came for the interview, there was an excitement and enthusiasm from the faculty in the English program, saying this is a real strength, there will be a change, it's something we need," Rooks tells the Pitch. "It was almost a mantra. Everyone was expressing real support for this idea of black studies and real support for the idea of faculty diversity."

But she soon got the impression that the black studies program was a mirage. When she arrived, few people on campus stepped forward to support the program as promised. Rooks sensed jealousy among her colleagues. After her first year there, the dean awarded her $500 to write and print newsletters to spread awareness about the program.

"There would be grumbling and comments from people [colleagues] about how much support black studies was getting, how lucky I was doing black studies," Rooks recalls. "They didn't get $500, they didn't get to do a newsletter, things like that. They didn't acknowledge that it was what I was hired to do."

Meanwhile, Rooks says, she was struggling to establish a program without a budget, without clerical help or staff, while teaching full-time as a professor in the English department.

Talking with her black colleagues early on, Rooks learned that no black had ever been tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences at UMKC, and few were on track to earn tenure. "Given the racial makeup of the city in Kansas City, it should have been more shocking to me than it was that there had never been a tenured person and very few people on the tenure track. And people who had been on the tenured track all tended to leave."