Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Earlier this year, I went to a conference on diversity in higher education. I was there as part of a group of professors from Boston University interested in learning more about how to recruit and retain faculty from minoritized communities. It was a productive trip, but one moment stuck with me more than all the rest.
A white colleague was at a roundtable chatting with a Black college administrator and talking about the hiring challenges we face at B.U. At one point, she stopped him and said, gently, “Don’t forget; you’re also in Boston.” She went on to explain that most scholars of color know well the city’s history of discrimination.
It was at this point that another woman, also Black, chimed in, telling my friend that there’s more or less a Green Book of colleges and universities for those in her field. (She’s a university librarian.) Briefly, it’s an annotated list of institutions that are hospitable to applicants of color—and institutions that aren’t. What she was likely too polite to say out loud is that B.U. is in the second category. Our institution, like our city, has a reputation for racism. And some part of that reputation is deserved.