Re.: Washington State University, harassment complaints concerning Asian Americans

Dear Director:

I am a WSU Ph.D. graduate (history, 2003), lived in Pullman while attending WSU between 1998 and 2004, did my research and have published on Asian Americans in the United States, and have been an active attorney and member of the Washington State Bar Association and the Asian Bar Association of Washington since 1996. While at WSU, I taught undergraduate students, am currently teaching for WSU in its Distance Degree Program, and have also been working as an adjunct professor for various postgraduate institutions since 2001.

I am writing this letter to rebut statements that President Rawlins and others at WSU did or may have disseminated to the press about the above-referenced matter. Of particular concern is the appearance of his public pronouncements over the issues appearing in the Northwest Asian Weekly in the June 4-June 10, 2005 (vol. 24 no. 3) issue and the International Examiner in the June 15-July 5, 2005 (vol. 32, no. 12) issue. I have already sent a substantially similar response, with a request for its publication, to both papers, and I have received confirmation from the International Examiner of its intent to do so.

However, I had wished to contact your organization directly as well, as I believe, based on earlier news stories in the International Examiner, that the Organization of Chinese Americans was involved in some of the discussions with WSU administrators, and I wished to make sure that your constituency receives a comprehensive opinion of the situation at WSU from an Asian American, myself, who had personal, firsthand experiences there for approximately six years.

Please see my letter to the above-referenced newspapers, below:

President Rawlins's letter is an exercise in “double-speak.”

He states, “. . . acts of harassment and discrimination related to ethnicity . . . race, nationality. . . will not be tolerated . . . and cases of such behavior will be swiftly investigated.”

My own experience and observations during my six years there, between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2004 leads to the conclusion that not only is WSU a hostile environment for Asians, but also that WSU routinely ignores complaints about harassment and discrimination against Asians. Regardless of official, published and written policies, WSU ignores, tolerates, and perpetuates racism at all levels, even going so far as to - at least in my, own, personal experience - retaliate against those who complain.

In the first several months following 9-11, the Daily Evergreen, the school paper, documented and described incidents of race-based harassment against Middle Eastern students and Filipinos. The former occurred near the Student Recreation Center when a group of Middle Eastern students were verbally harassed by white students. The latter occurred at a football game when a group of white males verbally accosted a group of Filipino students.

About two years ago, while stopped at a red light at mid-day on Stadium Way, the main thoroughfare through the university, I witnessed the two young white females in the car in front of me, stopped just a couple of feet from the crosswalk, honk their horn at an Asian male who was crossing with the light. The Asian male appeared startled, after which the two young white females started making gestures at him through the car window. I recorded the license plate number and description of the car, as well as of the two young white women, and reported it to campus police. Several hours later, I called campus police again to see what had come of the incident. The officer with whom I spoke said that another officer did locate the car, tracing it, along with its registered owner, to an apartment in Pullman, which he also identified and located. However, the responding officer did not go any further than confirming the identity of the vehicle and its owner. According to the officer providing me with the information, the responding officer would not even knock on the door of the suspect, as he did not wish to inconvenience or disturb her. A week or so later, I again called campus police to see if anything further had come of the incident. I indicated to him that I am an Asian American attorney. His response was that it is a “felony” (his exact word) to impersonate an attorney. He seems to have assumed that there is no such thing as an Asian American attorney. This was the gist of the conversation; nothing further came about the original act of harassment that I had witnessed and reported.

In another instance, in the CUB (student center) flower shop, I witnessed a middle-aged white woman repeatedly respond sarcastically to a young Asian male student who was asking her about some merchandise. He asked her several questions, and the response to his broken English was the same in each instance: an offhand look, and a voice, tone, and demeanor full of scorn, contempt, and sarcasm. I reported to the incident to the manager of the complex, and, to his credit, he investigated, thus becoming one of only two white persons on campus during my six-year tenure to take seriously an allegation of race-based hostility against Asians (the second one was a white male supervisor of the university benefits office, who apparently followed up on my complaint to him when the maybe-high-school graduate aged white woman at the benefits office refused to give me an informational brochure about student health insurance, admonishing me, a forty-year old licensed attorney and Ph.D. candidate, as one would a five-year old child who cannot understand the English language).

Between 2003 and 2004, an Asian American professor conducted a survey of WSU undergraduate students, finding that they made significantly more negative comments about faculty of color than about white faculty. The study was based on a variety of questions asking for respondents' perceptions in which all information for all hypothetical faculty - both white and non-white were the same with the exception of ethnic-sounding names for the non-white faculty.

In 2004, an Asian faculty member received highly-questionable student evaluations filled with extremely hostile remarks. The incident was immediately reported to each and every office and contact person identified in the numerous posters on campus decrying discrimination and harassment. The white female director of the university's Center for Human Rights, Ann Dougherty, did not respond to e-mails, telephone calls, and paper notes for months. A female staff member in the Center initially discarded one of the e-mails to her office (she admitted later that she had simply deleted it). The University Ombudsman, Ken Struckmeyer, who was the university administrator charged with mediating incidents concerning student conduct and was also president of the faculty senate at the time, never seriously investigated the possibility of discrimination. Instead, he violated his office's own written policies about confidentiality by revealing the identity of the victim to the chair of his department, thus divulging confidences to someone who had no prior awareness of the incident or any interest or involvement in the matter. During the course of one meeting with the Asian faculty member, he made a joke about his experience working with a Vietnamese man while working with him on a landscaping project, remarking that the Vietnamese was more suitable for the physical labor because he was close to the ground. Thereafter, over a period of several months, he repeatedly ignored e-mails and telephone messages from the victim. He then concluded, without ever seriously looking into the allegations of racism, that there was no racism because, in essence, he said so. Ann Dougherty of the university's Center for Human Rights finally responded to the Asian instructor's concerns about racism - after some four or five months. She, too, concluded that there was no racism. She declared that there was no racism because she said so, not because she ever looked into the incident; she never did. The Asian faculty member then contacted Felicia Gaskins, one of the top administrators at the time who was responsible for diversity issues. To this day, Gaskins has never responded to any of the following: the e-mails or telephone messages concerning the incident; the Ombudsman's refusal to take the allegations of racism seriously; and Ann Dougherty's outright refusal to have the Center for Human Rights investigate the possibility of racism.

There are additional also experiences based on my own, personal experience.

When I began my Ph.D. program at Washington State University, the computer technician who was responsible for giving access to a computer lab shared by all graduate students in the sociology and history departments repeatedly ignored my requests to get an account, as well as a code for accessing the lab. After he repeatedly ignored e-mails, telephone messages, personal requests, and paper notes, I complained to the faculty contact for the lab. He then became verbally abusive and borderline physical with me, sticking his index finger in my chest like a gun, creating an incident which I then reported to campus police (I did not file formal charges because I had just started my program there and was fearful of repercussions).

After I did gain access to the computer lab, while printing dissertation notes one afternoon, a Ph.D. student from the sociology department accosted me, shouting at me, following me around the computer lab in the presence of about half a dozen other white graduate students and one Latino student, saying that I was wasting university resources. For about ten minutes, he followed me around the lab, shouting at me at the top of his voice, then followed me to my seat, where I had sat down to try to get back to work. About a week later, there was an investigation of me, not of the white student. Apparently, one of the half dozen white graduate students - he happened to be the one sitting in the opposite corner of the lab and, therefore, physically unable to actually see anything I was printing because a row of monitors blocked his view - had made a complaint about me for using the facilities, which were for the use of all graduate students - without distinction as to race, as far as the theory supposedly went, although the realities seemed to indicate otherwise. I considered reporting this incident to campus police, but again desisted for fear of repercussions because of my untarnished reputation among faculty in my own department (I finished my program with a cumulative 4.00 GPA).

During my stay in Pullman, I was the prototypical “invisible Asian,” i.e. visible to my colleagues only as the “model minority” but invisible when it came to any kind of social or sports activities. Perhaps not. I was quite visible, I recall, on the other hand, to other white graduate students who resented having to listen to me talk in discussions. I offended some white graduate students in my own department by not keeping my mouth shut. One white graduate student used to roll his eyes whenever I spoke, and a white female graduate student told me, when the professor left the room one time for a break, to not use up everyone's time by opening up my mouth (I did not keep my mouth shut, and I may very well have been the only one in class who ended the semester with a straight “A” for that discussion series). Near the end of my Ph.D. program, a new M.A. student, who was several years behind me, thought it was a joke to pencil in racial caricatures on the cover of my seminar paper, on which there was a photo of a Filipino man. Also in my program, in one classroom discussion, one of the most-respected white male Ph.D. candidates nonchalantly referred to “Chinamen,” something that apparently caught no one's attention - save mine. In the teaching assistant offices, white undergraduate students looking for directions or for a particular faculty member routinely walked in, glanced at me, then proceeded to look for a white graduate student, assuming, apparently, that I did not know English.

When I worked as an adjunct professor in the Political Science Department and had an office several floors below the department, staff in the other department refused to let me use staff lounge, kitchen, or refrigerator on my floor. So, if I wished to use any of the facilities, I had to go up three flights of stairs (as it turned out, this was a moot point, and I never had to make that three-flight trek, since no one in my own department ever notified me of or invited me to any of their meetings, social gatherings, or even for coffee and doughnuts). When I said “hello” or smiled at staff and other faculty on my floor, almost without exception, they would turn their faces away from me.

President Rawlins further states in his letter to the Northwest Asian Weekly, “ . . . We are working with (italics mine) the Washington State Human Rights Commission.” Perhaps. But unless I am mistaken, the reason this may be occurring is not likely because the university initiated the process; I believe that the reason they are working “with” the Human Rights Commission is because complaints were filed against the university. In other words, it was a complaint against the university; the university was not initially a partner in the process. Rather, WSU was the defendant in a complaint of discrimination; it was not a “partner” seeking to redress a wrong - it was the guilty party. From my understanding, the university initially ignored the incidents, much as it did my concerns throughout my six-year tenure in Pullman.

President Rawlins further states, “ . . . we will educate members of our university community bout discrimination and harassment . . . ” Perhaps. A major problem at Washington State University, though, is that, to my knowledge, at least during the time I was there, there was not a single non-white person in a position of authority and with discretion to pursue matters of discrimination. Those non-whites holding positions regarding diversity issues did not have any real authority to pursue or investigate matters even if they were sympathetic. All those with actual, concrete authority to pursue such matters, during the time I was there, were whites: white men; and white women, who flatly refused to acknowledge or investigate race-based discrimination. For all I know, the purpose of the Center for Human Rights is to enforce the legal rights of whites; it is not there to help humans of dark hue. Those in position to use discretionary authority did so only to: investigate and retaliate against a victim of discrimination, letting perpetrators go scott-free, making a mockery of the plethora of empty words on official campus posters about respecting diversity and not tolerating racial bigotry; refuse to inconvenience two decent young examples of white womanhood about an incident as trivial as harassing a yellow-hued male out of sheer fun; and tossing out, and then simply ignore for months, allegations of race discrimination in employment.

President Rawlins is engaging in clever double-speak by mischaracterizing the university's part in the current investigation of harassment, racism, and discrimination against Asians on campus; or he is completely out of touch with the realities of the hostility whites at WSU - students, staff, faculty, and administrators - level against Asians on campus. He is hopelessly naïve or simply blind, too, to the reality of white administrators simply refusing - because of their own race bigotry? - to take complaints of discrimination against Asians seriously.

Sincerely,

Michael Serizawa Brown, esq., Ph.D., J.D.