CSUN President a Study in Tolerance
Once upon a time, a precocious young girl sat in a classroom in New Jersey and sadly learned that the Earth was becoming too crowded. Overpopulation, she was told, was fouling the air and water. The planet was at risk.
Suddenly, the solution dawned on little Blenda Wilson.
“I developed a fabulous, brilliant theory that everybody over 50 should be killed,” she recalled, laughing. “If you could imagine, I was 12 or 13, and 50 was just real old. And I touted it. I talked about it. . . . It was with a passion that I had this great theory.”
Blenda Wilson, 53, today is the president of California State University, Northridge, and occupies handsome but temporary quarters on the quake-damaged campus. It wasn’t clear where her story was heading. We were supposed to be discussing the latest social tremor to strike CSUN: a protest by the Black Student Union over the hiring of a white instructor to teach basic English skills in the Pan-African studies department. The students contended that Katherine Komis, because she is white, lacked the cultural understanding necessary to teach in the department.
So what was Wilson getting at? Was she comparing the BSU’s complaints to the folly of a child? Would the students find her words patronizing? Was she dissing the students?
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The short answer is no, and readers unfamiliar with Wilson should probably be informed that she is black. When she was inaugurated as CSUN president in April, 1993, Wilson became the nation’s only African-American woman to head a university serving more than 25,000. In a better world, a world where people are judged by the content of their character, her race might be irrelevant. But Cal State Northridge is not located in that promised land.
The flap over the hiring of Komis marks the third time during Wilson’s tenure that ethnic tension has put the campus in headlines. In early 1993, Wilson addressed an angry crowd of mostly Latino students who were protesting the reinstatement of a predominantly Anglo fraternity. The frat had been suspended for violating school racism codes because of a party flyer featuring lyrics to a drinking song that refer to a fictional Mexican prostitute.
Last fall, Wilson’s office monitored a feud between Jewish and black students over the BSU’s sponsorship of a lecture by Louis Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of Islam minister known for anti-Semitic remarks. After a BSU leader wrote a letter accusing Jewish students of “Hitlerian tactics” for scheduling an alternative event during Farrakhan’s talk, Wilson issued a statement declaring the letter “insulting and disrespectful to Jews.”
Farrakhan’s visit commemorated the 25th anniversary of a CSUN protest that helped lead to the establishment of the Pan-African studies department. Today, debate still rages over ethnic studies programs and whether they serve to divide or enrich our multicultural society. The recent BSU protest, such a slow-moving target, did critics a favor. In a society where many people, especially white men, object to “affirmative action” hiring policies, in a sensitive age in which a mild ethnic observation may elicit charges of racism, here was a group of black activists flatly advocating discrimination against whites. Critics took aim in letters to various newspapers, accusing BSU members of bigotry.
Wilson received correspondence as well. “The letters that disturb me the most,” she said, “are those that would suggest that some terrible crime was going on.”
Rather that condemn the protest, Wilson’s administration said it was interested in the students’ views but disagreed with their conclusions. Wilson and the African-American faculty members who hired Komis over several other candidates, some of whom were black, were steadfast in expressing the traditional values of the civil rights movement.
Wilson suggests the students’ dissent is typical and healthy on a college campus.
“Had there not been people who were unpopular . . . some of the accomplishments we’ve made would not have been achieved,” she said. The young “should be questioning the kind of world we created for them. . . . That doesn’t mean they’re going to be right every time they raise it. But if they didn’t raise it, our society would be in peril, I think.”
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But back to little Blenda’s plan to save the world. What was her point, anyway?
“Of course my family and friends thought I was totally nuts. And yet they didn’t act like I was a genocidal maniac.”
These days, Blenda Wilson’s notions for saving the world involve civil rights and civility.
“Tolerance,” she said, “is not something that is taught only in a course on ethics. It’s taught by how we behave daily on the campus toward one another. . . . Those are things that we teach day to day by what we expect and how we live together in the community.
“You can disagree with the idea,” she added, “without attributing bad motive and ill character to these students.”
Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, Calif. 91311.
