From the Community | Don’t obey in advance!
Despite the nice words expressing “deep respect for diversity in all its forms,” it deeply troubles this 86-year-old Stanford graduate to read in The Stanford Daily that Stanford “has significantly reduced the content” on its websites supporting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). This is whitewashing the evil history of denied opportunities that have always kept shamefully significant numbers of the U.S. population shackled by a variety of chains – some economic, some legal and some cultural. An institution like Stanford has always made promises to be better than that. It is long past time we kept our word, and we must fight to do so.
As Michael S. Roth, the president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, wrote in a column titled “Dear Fellow College Presidents: We Need to Do More Than Wait This One Out”: “It’s one thing to be reminded that ‘elections have consequences,’ but quite another to insist that the best response to the abuse of authority is to be restrained, demure, neutral… Leaders in civil society shouldn’t be ‘demure’ in the face of authoritarian attempts to align all power with a president’s agenda.”
I am just one of endless examples. Thanks to Stanford, I spent much of my 50-year journalism career reporting on agonizingly difficult fights to correct this country’s failure to appreciate diversity. Today, I feel like those people who valued diversity back in the 1870s must have felt – betrayed by a failure to value and defend hard-won diversity with enough guts to stop the deliberate overthrow of Reconstruction.
I probably would never have discovered my passion for journalism, been elected into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame or enjoyed an exciting and valuable journalism career without Stanford‘s effort in the mid 20th century to create a more inclusive student body.
I applied to Stanford in 1958 as a transfer junior physics major. In the days before the Internet, interstate highways and cheap airline flights, you sent away for mail-order college catalogs to see which schools you might want to attend. Of all the colleges my parents and I poured over, the only one that did not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race was Stanford. I applied and was accepted. Tuition then was $335 per quarter, and one of my new dormmates tried to pay with a wheelbarrow full of pennies.
I knew nothing about journalism when I arrived, although I had delivered the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin by bicycle for years as a teenage paperboy. Back then, Stanford required students to take an “activity credit.” I could join a sports team or a theater company or a dance troupe, but I wasn’t excited about any of those choices. Finding the least objectionable to be the school newspaper, I walked up to what was then the bright red front door of a small on-campus wooden building, the Stanford Daily Shack, and joined the staff. I soon switched my major to journalism, beginning a lifelong love affair. Some of the best things colleges do is give students the opportunity to discover what they are passionate about.
As the years rolled by, I integrated the Associated Press as a full-time reporting staff, became their go-to national reporter for civil rights and urban unrest, held national and White House correspondent positions for the Washington Post, won Stanford and Nieman journalism fellowships, chaired the founding committee of the Black Journalists Association of Southern California, was a Pulitzer Prize juror for two years, a metropolitan editor and an editorial writer and even spent a couple of years on-air at KRON-TV before becoming a tenured journalism professor at San Francisco State University. As a teacher, it was wonderful to see how a high percentage of students from every culture were the first in their families to attend college. Our current MAGA administration might claim DEI lowers the quality of students and therefore education, but MAGA’s real goal is to bring back the chains of inequality that shackle people they don’t care about.
Avoiding those chains did not only benefit my family. I am especially proud of investigative reporting that helped right social wrongs. My 33 stories in the Los Angeles Times over two years uncovered the FBI and LAPD collaboration in framing Los Angeles Black Panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt. After he was named to be “neutralized” in J. Edgar Hoover’s secret COINTELPRO war on diversity, Pratt was convicted of a 1968 murder he didn’t commit. Among the dirty tricks used to convict him: law enforcement knew he was 400 miles away on the day of the murder because they had the Panther leadership under tight surveillance. Pratt served 27 years in prison before his conviction was thrown out.
My L.A. Times story on the inability of a low income family to get desperately needed major surgery raised enough money to get a heart transplant for Derrick Gordon. Derrick’s older brother Frederick barely made it to adulthood before his heart started failing due to a genetic problem. His mother built a bed in the back of her van and trucked him 350 miles to Stanford’s transplant program. Stanford turned him down, and he died soon afterward. At around the same age, Derrick’s heart began failing at about the same age from the same genetic problem. Again they made the hopeful drive to Stanford, And again Stanford said no. But after my front page story, $300,000 from 17,000 sympathetic readers and cash in hand, Stanford changed its mind.
In 2022, my oldest daughter, her mother and my three grandchildren gathered on campus to celebrate our three generations of Stanford graduates. One of my grandchildren, Erica Scott, was ASSU president. The profound effect we all had on our university and on the world only started because of how, in the late 1950s, Stanford seemed to be encouraging diversity.
The United States has never managed to resolve its founding tug-of-war between the people who value wealth more than well-being and those who know it must be the other way around. In these times when wealth is clearly winning, the well-being side needs all the support it can get. Right now, as digital technology keeps eliminating layers of human labor, we are watching cruelty win over compassion. Just imagine how much better off our world would be if we used the lower costs of automated digital production to improve the well-being of all people instead of starving the low-income to fatten the rich. Contrary to one of our most pervasive national myths, nobody is self-made. We all need help to become the best version of ourselves. If Stanford needs pushing to stay on the right side of history, we need to push harder! Don’t obey in advance!
Austin Long-Scott, AKA Austin Scott ‘61 (Well, ‘60 really. The switch in majors took an extra year.)
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