Shaun Harper: For the record, I think it’s terrible. I think it’s absolutely appalling that students in 2025. Who make campuses diverse are having experiences that are almost identical to students in 2005 and students in 1995, and perhaps even students in 1985 and 75. I’m troubled by that. Actually it makes the study of campus racial climate not just. An empirical exercise for me, or not just a line of inquiry for me. I actually care about institutional transformation. I care about success and belonging and justice and reparations and, it, it frustrates me to no end honestly, as I continue to read these studies in 2025 that are so like the kinds of studies I was reading when I was a graduate student.

Raechele Pope: Hey, what’s up everybody, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Raechele Pope. Today we are discussing the campus racial climate, the past, the present, and the future. Our conversation is prompted by the recently published article entitled Three Decades of Campus Racial Climate Studies and 25 New Directions for Future Research by Doctors Shaun Harper and Oscar Patron.

This important research extends the groundbreaking scholarship that Dr. Sylvia Hurtado launched more than 30 years ago with her 1992 article, the Campus Racial Climate Context of Conflict, and the 2007 book chapter that she and Dr. Harper co-authored. Nine Themes in Racial, in Campus Racial Climates, and Implications for Institutional Transformation.

Together, these studies have shaped how we understand race. Racism and belonging across higher education. In today’s episode, we’ll explore how research on campus racial climate has evolved over the past three decades. What remains to be done and what the future of this critical work might look like in a rapidly changing higher education landscape.

Now Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays and find details about this episode or browse our archives@studentaffairsnow.com.

Today’s episode is sponsored by the Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership, courageous Leadership, to reimagine the future of higher education. As I mentioned, I’m Raechele Pope. My pronouns are she and her, and I’m a professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs Program at the University of Buffalo, and I’m recording today near the University of Buffalo’s campus on the Unseated Land of the Haudenosaunee people.

Now let’s get down to this conversation. Dr. Hertado Harper and Patron, thank you. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having. Would you please begin by telling us a bit about you? I know Dr. Hertado and Harper, everybody knows you or knows something about you, so you can start that wherever you want.

You’re a little newer to us, but boy did you walk in and make a big splash. So just tell us a little bit about your role. A bit about your pathway and your connection to this topic. I think why don’t we start with you Dr. Hertado Sylvia.

Sylvia Hurtado: Thank you. Thank you, Raechele. I’m currently a distinguished professor in education at UCLA.

My pronouns are she her Aya, and I want to acknowledge that I work on the land of the Gabrielino and Tonga peoples that are the traditional caretakers of the unseated land of Tamon Gar, which is the LA Basin and the South Channel Islands. And I think. Looking back, I think I started this work because I actually was interested in what happened to me as an undergraduate going to a predominantly white institution, and I thought there was something going on in the environment that needed to be documented.

So that’s how I started. Thank you, Shaun,

Raechele Pope: Dr. Harper.

Shaun Harper: Yeah, thanks. I’m Shaun Harper. I am a provost professor and university professor at the University of Southern California. I am right across town from Sylvia. She is my crosstown friend and collaborator. I came to this topic interestingly.

Out of complete fascination. I went to a historically black university where I felt entirely affirmed and a strong sense of belonging and so on. And then I transitioned to graduate school at a predominantly white. University. And I was just absolutely fascinated by the obvious climate differences.

It was really that experience that became a researchable topic for me. And I’ll say more about that as we get into the conversation.

Raechele Pope: Thank you, Shai. Dr. Patron Oscar?

Oscar Patron: Yes. First of all, thank you for having us, for having me as a part of this important conversation.

My name is Paton and I’m an assistant professor of higher education at Indiana University in Bloomington. And amongst the things that I study, it include ra student experiences for racially minoritized communities. I study their successes. A amongst other things. All of those topics that I study, they fall within the larger umbrella of campus racial climate.

So while I don’t necessarily center climate in the work that I do, it falls within that larger. And so with Shaun, we, we’re, we’ve been collaborating on a few different things and in, in conversation about our research this possibility came up, this opportunity came about. And of course, I was super happy that this opportunity came about. I didn’t think twice about it because it very much relates to the work that I do and to the things that I care about. So I think that kind of speaks to how I, I came to study these topics.

Raechele Pope: I think that’s amazing. And I wanna just point how they said this to Shaun, when we, before we got on the camera, and I think it is equally as true for Dr.

Ordo that I am just. I’m stunned and I stand in awe of the kind of work that you do. Particular, all the work that you do, but particularly that work about mentoring and working with newer and younger professors and pulling them into this process. And I see it in the things that you write. I see it in the people that you have built up.

So I wanna say thank you and Oscar Kar you corrected my pronunciation. Say it for me again. I know it’s not Oscar. Yeah

Oscar Patron: I didn’t mean to correct your pronunciation. No. I didn’t feel

Raechele Pope: it that way.

Oscar Patron: It’s just simply my name. But it’s ska. Ska, but I’m not, I wanna say i’m not mad. I’m not mad at Oscar. I get it. But yeah, that’s my name.

Raechele Pope: I wanna say it like you want it said. All right, so let’s get back to this work. Sylvia, you launched this entire line of research more than 30 years ago at a time when very little had been written about the experiences of students of color on predominantly white campuses.

Looking back now at that article. The one I referenced earlier, the campus racial climate context of conflict, what do you think was its most significant contribution to higher education, scholarship and practice?

Sylvia Hurtado: Sure. Thanks for that question because prior to this work there had been some limited studies and I did a review and one of the ash Eric volumes actually covers.

Research up until that time. To the nineties. And this was early late 1980s, early 1990s. And one of the things that it did, it was the first national study of about. Diversity.

And campus racial climate because previously Walter Allen had done something on about a campus study on blacks and black campuses and blacks and white campuses.

He had done that work and I had, as a grad student, I had learned from that we were able to put items on the national survey. Several us were interested in diversity and so I was very interested in understanding this issue of a campus racial climate. Because as I said, of my own experiences that there’s something’s really going on, it needs to be documented, particularly for students of color.

And the sample was large enough to compare African Americans, Latinos for the first time, and white students, which I did. And at the time, there were not as many Asians in the larger population of. Institutions.

So it was the first national study that actually asked diversity questions. The second it was multidimensional in that it wasn’t just perceptions of, do I belong?

But it was also. Questions about hostile environment

Perceptions, but also about not just perceptions or psychological components, but behavioral. Interactions across race had not been asked in a survey before that time. So we interactions across race and also perceptions of institutional commitment.

So there were several com dimensions to it that began to say. Really, I think what we wanted to do was document, or at least I did the experiences of students of color in particular.

And now the work I think is much more focused on, and we are interested in institutional change and understanding more about the institution, certainly using student perception that also faculty and staff when it comes to climate issues.

So I think those were the major ones and I think it was coming off of also a lot of the work that had been done in terms of desegregation of of higher education. So I built on that work as well. Is that what happens when you start to desegregate? These are some of the, both the theories but also what’s actually happening on campuses.

So that was really I think the initial contributions and maybe my colleagues here have more to say what they got out of the article, but. Initially, I think that was what we were I was mostly focused about, and also several other grad students who had questions about faculty, et cetera, which were not part of my work, but became part of others’ work.

Raechele Pope: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. What would you Dr. Hertado opened it up for either of you to say, wait a second, there was something else, I got out of this. What would you offer, Shaun? Is there something you have.

Shaun Harper: Yeah. Actually I think this is a perfect segue to the Yeah.

Genesis of my first collaboration with Sylvia. As I said, in introducing myself, I went to Albany State a, his historically black university in Georgia. Full disclosure before I got there. I used to actually envy my high school peers and friends who went to the big schools, university of Georgia and Georgia Tech and places like that.

I had no idea that many of them who were black. Were experiencing such racism and racial hostility until I got to Albany State and they got to the places where they went, and many of them ultimately didn’t complete at the places or graduate from the places that they had chosen. And I knew that something was up.

That it wasn’t them, because these were incredibly smart people who went off to college with tremendous promise. So it was an open question of what happened to them? When I got to Indiana University as a master’s student I started reading. About the campus racial climate at predominantly white institutions.

And, it started to fill in the blanks for me the explanation of what happened to my friends who were black who went to these big PWIs and, didn’t have a good experience and ultimately didn’t complete so. As a master’s student and I continued on as a PhD student. Writing increasingly about racialized experiences, not just for black students, but Latinx students and other students of color.

I could not. Do that work without constantly citing Sylvia’s 1992 groundbreaking article. I cited it in just about every paper that I wrote. Not because I was lazy and didn’t wanna go find other stuff, but because it was, that was that groundbreaking. Most people know that George Coup was my dissertation chair.

But few people actually might recall that Debra Carter was my doctoral advisor before I got to the dissertation stage. And Debra was Sylvia’s student. I learned so much from Deborah Carter and from the work that she and Sylvia had done on campus climate as a follow up to the 1992 piece that I felt like I was like part of the family, in 2005 I was an assistant professor. I had met Sylvia once. Ash and I was like a fanboy in the audience, and I remember her being very kind to me when I introduced myself to her. But I literally had met this woman one time. Somehow I had the confidence as an assistant professor to pick up the phone.

I didn’t email her. I picked up the phone and I called her at UCLA. I don’t know what I don’t know where that came from. I picked up the phone, I called Sylvia and I said, Hey, you may not remember me. We met once at Ash. I know you meet a lot of people. I’ve been doing this work on campus racial climate and I got some data and I’m persuaded by and influenced by your 1992 article. I wanna do something with the data that I have, and I wanna do the synthesis of the existing research post 1992. Will you please write this paper with me? That’s incredible. She said, yes without a blink. I couldn’t see her face. We weren’t on Zoom, we were on the phone.

But like she didn’t skip a beat. She said, yes. Like I didn’t have to. Persuade her or convince her or anything. That was the origin story of the 2007 piece. That publication remains my most cited publication, yeah. Of all time. And I remain all these years later. So genuinely grateful to Sylvia to saying yes to a complete stranger who was an assistant professor.

So as I started thinking about the 30 year revisitation, I wanted to pay it forward. Some people sometimes get gossipy. They might presume that maybe Sylvia and I since had a falling out, and that’s why she wasn’t my collaborator on the 30 year piece. No, actually the real answer is it is the Sylvia Hurtado tribute piece as a tribute to her.

I wanted to do this with an assistant professor because I know firsthand what that collaboration with Sylvia did for me. I wanted to do that for Oscar.

Raechele Pope: That is an amazing origin story and that the pain it forward, is just an amazing tribute. Sylvia, I hope you can one, just hear that because I know what it’s doing to me as I’m hearing it.

And Oh, scar, I hope you hear that. Thank you. That lineage that you have, in the next. What, 20 years or whatever and how you’ll do that.

Sylvia Hurtado: That’s the what scholarship should be about. Yes. That we’re passing along the baton and we’re improving. We’re taking it to the new levels and we’re bringing new people into asking the questions and finding new answers.

Yeah. Yeah. Let me,

Raechele Pope: lemme play with that study. Lemme just move us back here for a second to, I wanna talk about one of the things to me. That was lemme ask about how this moves on, how it changes. When we talk about the study of racial climate and how it’s evolved over these three dec decades, what’s changed in how we ask the questions and how we design the studies, or even in how we define climate?

What are the, some of the ways in which that’s changed? I’m gonna ask Shaun, or to start us here. As we talk about that, then we’re gonna come back to that 2007 piece.

Shaun Harper: I’ll defer to Professor Patron.

Oscar Patron: Thank you, Shaun. You’re very kind. And I will say that I love your story. It’s a beautiful story and I was not aware of all those details. So thank you for sharing that and. I will definitely, as someone who truly cares about mentoring and advising, I’m gonna take what you just said close to my heart and I’m gonna carry it with me so that, as I move forward in my career, I can do similar sorts of acts with students that I work with.

So just thank you for that. So I’ll add a little bit to this question and then I’ll turn it over to Shaun to add a couple more things or a few more things. So one thing that, that I think I, I wanna share related to this question is that, there hasn’t been a ton that has changed.

Oh. Like of course there’s been additional areas of focus. But when you look at the outcomes, when you look at student experiences, a lot of the things that were shared in the 2007 piece, and even in the 1982 piece, they still came up in this latest edition of the article. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I think that’s very telling. And to, even though there hasn’t been a ton of changes, I do think that there’s been specific things that have been added to this area of study. And so just to give you some, or an example of that, or a couple examples. One is the area of microaggressions.

Microaggressions became significant topic of study and research, I think in the early two thousands. And one of the things that we found in this latest article, this 2025 piece, is that there’s been an uptick. Of microaggressions in the studies that we covered, that we found.

And I think that adds nuance to this study because of course, for people that are familiar with the microaggressions research, we know that there’s different types of racial. Microaggressions. And so that’s something that perhaps wasn’t studied to the same extent beforehand because maybe the topic wasn’t as much introduced into higher education and other fields, psychology and others.

Another. Another point that I think is important that sort of like signals that there hasn’t been a ton that has changed is that these studies that we included in this latest piece, they don’t necessarily like they’re not explicit in calling out racism and other systems of oppression.

And we make that point in the article. That very much aligns with another very important piece that Shaun wrote in 2012, right? About the ways that higher ed scholars talk about race and the ways that they don’t talk about race. And that’s still very timely and we still see that happening today.

Those are two ways that I think demonstrate that yes, there’s been some changes. Yes, there’s been some additions, but when we take a step back and when we look at the broader picture, has, it, has a lot really changed. Has there been drastic differences? Yeah I’ll leave it there and turn over to Shaun and Sylvia to maybe add more to that.

Raechele Pope: Let me just say before we open it up to them is, I think you’re right. Which is depressing is all hell. The students are still experiencing the same things. The faculty are still experiencing the same things. But I was wondering, is it, have our ways of studying it changed our methodologies, our approaches.

Like I know with the 2007 article, for example, you extended it to really looking at qualitative research in a way that hadn’t been looked at. In any real depth prior to that. It mostly was a focus on quantitative research. We couldn’t get journal, couldn’t get qualitative work into journals, depending on how far back we go.

And so that’s changed. So as depressing as it is, as the experiences haven’t changed, I’m wondering if we’re looking at it differently, if that gives us a fuller picture or whatever.

Oscar Patron: Do you want to go, Shaun, do you want me to comment? You go for it. So I’ll let you share more, right? Yeah. But I will briefly share that. Like you just mentioned, there has been an increase in and I think it’s also important to. Because we present the data for these, for this latest piece in terms of three categorical clusters.

And so when we look at the specific areas of focus for each of those, I think we will notice trends, right? In terms of is it qualitative work? Is it quantitative work? And so I think that, for example, when we’re looking at, student experiences. There has been an increase, I think, in studies that have taken qualitative approaches more so in the last couple decades.

I, again, I think it varies but I think that looking at those specific clusters can perhaps tell a different kind of story.

Shaun Harper: Yeah, I think that’s right. Oscar and I will talk about two of the clusters, and we’ll leave the third as a cliffhanger because we want people to read the article.

So he is right When when we analyzed and synthesized the literature on minoritized students’ experiences most of those studies were qualitative. Interestingly in the cluster on cross-racial engagement or what we used to call, what we used to call cross-racial interaction lopsidedly, those studies are quantitative.

Across the clusters. Sure. There has been more methodological sort of variety, if you will, but with the end clusters they tend to be lopsidedly a single method. One of the things that. We call for in, in the 2025 piece. As we start looking forward, and I know we’ll talk a bit more about that later in the conversation, is for more mixed method studies.

But not just for the simple fact of not just for fun, but because it can add, some complexity that has not yet been brought to the study of campus climate. I do wanna go back to. Something else that s Oscar said about microaggressions. I want to acknowledge that Harvard University Professor Emeritus Chester Pierce had been studying microaggressions since the 1970s.

In fact, he was the architect of the term. I also want to acknowledge that Kimberly Crenshaw, UCLA Professor. And Columbia University Professor Kimberly Crenshaw, was the architect of the term intersectionality and introduced that in the late 1980s. And, it, it picked up steam in the nineties.

All of that to say like these concepts have been introduced and utilized in other fields long before they made their way finally to the study of higher education. So Oscar is right that, from 2007 onward, one of the, big things that we saw is that there was in fact a tremendous uptick in the kinds of studies on microaggressions and the kinds of studies that took intersectional approaches which I think is good.

For the record, I think it’s terrible. I think it’s absolutely appalling that students in 2025. Who make campuses diverse are having experiences that are almost identical to students in 2005 and students in 1995, and perhaps even students in 1985 and 75. I’m troubled by that. Actually it makes the study of campus racial climate not just. An empirical exercise for me, or not just a line of inquiry for me. I actually care about institutional transformation. I care about success and belonging and justice and reparations and, it, it frustrates me to no end honestly, as I continue to read these studies.

In 2025 that are so like the kinds of studies that I was reading when I was a graduate student,

Raechele Pope: right? Yeah. We have not seen a difference in their experience and yet we keep noting it and all of the ways that they said was important. It’s not anecdotal. We’ve got research that demonstrates this and we’re still not seeing our practice change, and more importantly, their experience change.

So I do wanna, so you look like you wanted to say something there? Yeah.

Sylvia Hurtado: I just wanna pick up where Shaun was leading to, because I think in my transition in the work, actually, I always did mixed method. But journals don’t like mixed. It’s really hard to. Published, particularly in the early days mixed method.

So I always collected both, but more recently, of course in the last few years, really integrating them more and then being able to talk about what you learn when you combine the methods. Including document analysis, but. Overlaying it. So it’s not a triangulation, but it’s a crystallization.

Of a portrait of an institution and its constituents, its students, its faculty, its staff, and how they feel about the institution, how the institution can’t change. So I think, yeah, I think it’s a really great area to go into in terms of doing more mixed method to say for example, the quantitative will tell you about what basically students, for example, black students are less act.

Actively engaged in campus rituals, which bond the community well, but it doesn’t tell you why, right? When you ask the questions, when we did qualitative studies, we found out some of the campus rituals were dangerous for black students.

And they would actually say this, and no one actually had ever uncovered that.

And then we would read in the. Campus newspaper or the newspaper from the local community with the documents that there had been lynching in the town where these students were actually studying. So obviously those different dimensions add layer and understanding much more about the context, which I think is really important with qualitative work, but also mixed study work to do more work on the context on why.

Why things stay the same and do not change and how we need to transform it. Go ahead Shaun. I see there’s something that sparked for you.

Shaun Harper: Yeah. So this is where we get to have just like fun ideating. One of the things that we call for in the 2025 piece is more ethnographic work. On climate.

And as Sylvia was talking about, the quantitative and the qualitative, helping us understand campus rituals and so on and so forth. Ethnographic methods will also help us answer in an instant why black students aren’t participating. For instance, in certain rituals. If you actually go to the place and you just stand there and you look around, you’re like no wonder.

Yep. There is a cultural absence of black culture. There is a palpable sense of anti-blackness. As a matter of fact, nobody even thought about black people when they were putting together these spring flings or, these whatever, events. So we do think that, ethnographic and, other kinds of observational methods could be useful in explaining some of these trends.

Raechele Pope: And some of the traditions are by themselves dangerous for certain students. What looks like harmless fun. When you see a white male student running across campus and grabbing something out of someone’s room as part of a ritual you get that same thing having a black man or a Latinx man going in and doing that’s a crime.

All of that. He’s gonna get

Shaun Harper: arrested.

Raechele Pope: Yes. Yeah.

Shaun Harper: Yes.

Sylvia Hurtado: I think another element that the, that research is beginning to show a little bit, and I source I’m not part of your study, but is that we are finding that even though we have students on campus, they feel invisible. And this is particularly true of American Indian students.

And. With the quantitative work, their numbers are so small, they’re not often included. Institutional researchers won’t include the numbers ’cause they’re free, they’re identifiable, which is crazy. Don’t send them a survey then.

And when you talk with them, you realize this is how the invisibility gets multiplied at different levels and students express that.

And so I think for the past we really haven’t really captured that invisibility but also. The campus privilege that’s afforded different racial groups.

That I think you can com you can pick up with both a mixed method and qualitative study is able to do that. You have to have, institutions aren’t very good at looking at themselves and so sometimes you have to have these external.

Researchers come and help with consultant and being able to see some of that, you can provide them the tools, but there’s also an interpretation gap, I wanna say, particularly in the quantitative work, that they’ll say, okay, we did the study, we don’t know what to make. They don’t know how to make sense of it.

And I would come back and say yeah, I, I’ll explain this, we’re also doing the qualitative component. So anyway, what I’m saying is. Who does it is very, who’s doing the study is very important as well, and I do often suggest someone outside the institution to be able to look at it in a new, fresh way to help the campus.

And I do want institutions to be reflective, but sometimes they can’t see what’s there because they’re. Norm, they’re, they’ve normed the environment to their ways white, middle class ways of thinking and acting, et cetera. So anyway, I’m just saying that it’s actually fun. This is the ideating part.

It’s really fun to go to campus and say, wow, this is an amazing culture. And this is an amazingly, biased culture that’s existing and privilege, culture of privilege that exists here. And it takes somebody else to say that. ’cause an institutional researcher is not going to say that. Sure. I think that

Raechele Pope: one of the things that happens too is that there’s a pr push.

I think we’re, before campuses would take the information and at some level try to do something with it or at least talk about it. Now, I found many campuses won’t even release the data. That was gathered if it puts them in a negative light or afraid of a pushback. I’ve been on a number of campuses in a consulting role where their response is if it’s going, if there’s a potential for it to make the evening news, we don’t want to deal with it.

Which is a strange strange thing. So administrator thing,

Sylvia Hurtado: administrators have always been. Worry of that. But for almost every climate study that I’ve done, I’ve found some positive things. Yeah. But also the negative things that they need to take care of. Yep. So it’s, okay. Wow. You’ve got a huge sense of belonging on this campus.

That’s wonderful. But hey, there’s variation in groups. That’s right. There’s also this, there’s other pieces of this so yeah. I’d have to, I had to convince people. Need to know, they need to know more and ask more questions, not ignore what exists.

Shaun Harper: I think that’s exactly right. I started making funny faces, Raechele when you were talking about things making the evening news and it used to be that administrators were a bit more open.

I don’t know, like in my experience in the early years, so I did my first campus racial climate. Assessment in 2005 at the University of Texas at Austin.

And I just remember like in the early years, I would go and do all of this work and write these fabulous reports with lots of rigorous analysis and forward thinking recommendations.

And I run into people like six months, a year or whatever, later at a conference or something, and they’re like. Did you ever send a report? And I’m like, yeah, of course I did. Because it never saw the light of day, right? It took me a few years to figure out a way around this particular problem.

So now when I do qualitative climate assessments, I make it a condition of bringing me and other researchers from the USC Race and Equity Center aboard that. If you’re gonna bring us, before we leave your campus, we are going to do an open forum. In which we present some of our preliminary findings. Now they’re preliminary.

Listen, we just did the last focus group two hours ago. So we’re gonna go back and like rigorously and systematically analyze the data. But before we leave here today, we are going to tell you some of the things that we have heard and found. To Sylvia’s point, sometimes that stuff is positive. Yeah. And there are things that are scalable and keep doing that and do it more for these other groups, so on and so forth.

But other times there are serious challenges and opportunities. So you know, everybody who participates in our interviews, we tell them. We’re gonna be doing the presentation at three o’clock tomorrow, or three o’clock on Friday or whatever. Please come back so you can see how we’re gonna be a good steward of the stories and the examples and the data that you’ve entrusted us with.

That seems to help because then. Folks will hear the preliminary findings, and then we tell them at the end of it we’ll have the full report to the institution within six weeks or within eight weeks. So then those folks are on standby looking at their watches like, okay where is it?

And Right. We’re expecting to see it.

Raechele Pope: Oh, I think that makes a difference if people are expecting Good one. So let me, I wanna switch gears completely for a second. I wanna go into the most recent article. I wanna make sure I give that some space because that is an important piece too, and I want people reading that.

They probably already have, when it came in my mailbox, I read it immediately. And so I’m just, for those you who haven’t seen it one of the things that was really important to that is you devoted substantial. Space in that article and in the Title two, the 25 New Directions for Future Research.

The question is two things. One, why did you choose to emphasize what we haven’t studied yet rather than simply revisiting. What we have and which are the most important? If you were to name two of those that really need to be the focus that those new directions, what would you name? Scar.

Let’s start with you.

Oscar Patron: That’s a great question. I think that the short answer and we can take this in so many different directions, but I think one short answer that comes to mind is opportunities. Like it’s literally all about opportunities. As we reviewed the articles right in our study of course we noticed patterns and we noticed trends in the work.

We then use those patterns right to guide, to help us guide the field, to help us guide. Other educators administrators, student affairs professionals, about different things that they can engage with. Like real tangible work, right? Like actionable things that they can do. Oftentimes, one, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that institutional stakeholders note that they do not know where to start, or they don’t know how to do the work. And to be honest with you, I get pretty tired of hearing that same thing over and over again. I get tired of hearing reasons for why we can’t do the work, right?

And so here’s a list.

Shaun Harper: Yeah.

Oscar Patron: You can choose one of these things. You can choose a couple of these things, right? Don’t continue to hide behind. Reasons or excuses for why you can’t push the work forward. And so I think that these 25 actionable recommendations, implications, are meant to guide people who maybe don’t know where to start, right?

And then other people who are already doing campus racial climate work. This is also just a list of things that we notice that the field overall can benefit from when it comes to starting campus racial climate. I also wanna clarify. And perhaps Shaun can may agree with what I’m gonna say, right?

Is that we’re not saying right, that these 25 things have never been studied. At no point do we really say that. But at the end of the day, these are great ideas that can be taken up.

These are thoughtful, meaningful things. That, that if people take on these things, then we can make substantive, we can make practical contributions, we can make conceptual contributions to this work.

So yeah, I think those are some of the things that I would share in regards to that question.

Shaun Harper: Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I’ll say thinking about the first half of the question why did we devote such significant attention to, laying out some future research directions?

Here’s where it goes back to the Sylvia Hurtado of it all. We were incredibly intentional. Okay. Spoiler alert for people who’ve not yet read the article. Both in the abstract and in the article itself. The first two words are Sylvia Hurtado intentionally, right? Because we wanted to honor the work that had been done.

So part of our impetus for laying out a future research agenda is that. Sylvia’s 1992 article inspired so much of what happened in subsequent years in the study of campus racial climate. So this was, once again, our way of paying it forward. We wanted to do for the field. Some version of what Sylvia had done for the field and some version of what Sylvia and I together had done for the field in 2007.

I also want to just take a moment ’cause I haven’t talked about this publicly. I don’t think I. Sylvia was Ash President, president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. SOTU was Estella Ben Simone. Both of them are dear friends and role models and mentors of mine. One of the things that I noticed about both of those women, both of whom are Latinas, is that they unapologetically leveraged their ash presidential platforms to give permission.

To other scholars, white scholars and scholars of color alike, to study things in new ways. To advance and innovate the literature, to make the study of higher education more inclusive. When I became Ash president, I had Sylvia on one shoulder and Estella on the other saying, go. Do that same thing, give permission.

So I brought that same energy. When Oscar and I wrote this piece, this article, I was like, listen, here’s a real opportunity for us. To give license to graduate students and to the early career scholars who will be told by their faculty advisors, oh, that’s too narrow, or, no, nobody’s gonna care about that.

Or, oh, it’s too focused on race, or, oh, it’s too focused on Asian Americans. No, it’s not. We need that. We need more of that. So part of what I wanted to do here. Thanks to Professor Patron for joining me and the task was to give folks permission to study the things that need to be studied given the realities of the campus racial climate. Alright. Look, I’m running long, so let me just say one more thing you asked. Okay. What are our favorites on the list? I’ll just give you one. It’s the 2025 of it all, shouldn’t we study in the future the campus racial climate in the second coming of Trump?

Shouldn’t we study what shifted in the campus racial climate following the assassination of Charlie Kirk? Shouldn’t we study what happened? 2025 when culture centers were shut down. Longstanding programs and resources for students who make campuses diverse abruptly were stripped from campuses and, mentors of students of color and queer students and students with disabilities and veteran students were wrongly fired for no reason.

Somebody has to study. What happened during this year and the residual effects that will certainly continue for years and years.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. Yeah. That is going to be, it’s, and it’s, that’s, I love the end of that, that this is going to, it’s not just gonna be what happens in 25 or in the next four years.

The effect of this is going to last for a long time. We

Shaun Harper: need to rebuild. And I can’t

Raechele Pope: get past the fact that it happened four years, four and five years after the promises that came in 2020.

So that’s disheartening.

Sylvia Hurtado: So we’ll have to rebuild, but hopefully we’ve got some good research to help us rethink.

And transform, in other words. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have separate kinds of initiatives that could be siloed, but really how do we get the change embedded in the daily work of everyone? That’s the heart. That’s the hard part, because it’s rethinking who you are as an institution and what you do in your job, and can you be culturally responsive in your work?

And I think that. I think we can help people with that, but it’s much harder to do that. ’cause someone said, oh, are we gonna invest in hiring new people? And all of that. I was like, yeah, but some of these people stay around for a very long time. Staff and faculty. So I’m not saying that the answer is certainly, training because they’ve outlawed that as well. But I’m saying there are ways to think about being much more culturally relevant in what we do and even in like mathematics. So I think there’s ways to do it because we’ve done some of the research.

But it’s like implementing is gonna be the will to implement and.

To stand out there and say, we can do this, I think is really important and we’ll need everyone working on this. We need, like I said, we need more leaders, more warriors who are willing to say, we need to do things differently and this is what we’re going to do. We’re gonna be not simply inclusive, but we’re really gonna be, embedding the values in what we do. And that’s the hard, that’s the really hard part. ’cause then that changes. So it takes leadership. We wrote a little bit about that in, in 2007. It takes institutional change, deep institutional change to do that. But we may have our biggest work yet ahead of us because we were not gonna build.

I don’t think we’re gonna rebuild the same way.

Shaun Harper: We can’t.

Sylvia Hurtado: Yeah.

Shaun Harper: It will be foolish to rebuild the same way. As a matter of fact, there’s been so much grief this year and all that has been taken so unfairly, so unjustifiably from us all and from our democracy. I share in that grief, but I also have.

Some healthy optimism about what can become of higher education moving forward as we, we’ll have no choice but to rebuild. Some of these things, right? Because there’s frankly, there’s gonna be too much conflict. There’re gonna be too many lawsuits. There’s gonna be too much attrition. It’s all gonna be costly, so we’re gonna have to rebuild back a lot of this stuff.

I wrote an inside higher ed article about this and, I framed it around. Six weeks before my freshman year in college, there’s a catastrophic flood of the college that I chose, and somehow miraculously, we opened six weeks later. I remember showing up there as a freshman, as a first year student, and there was mud everywhere.

It was so muddy. I lived in a trailer. I lived in a mobile home. My, my first quarter in college because all of the residence halls were flooded and there was just, it was mud everywhere. It was hard to imagine what rebuilding would be like. But I remember four years later on the eve of my commencement, we ceremoniously moved out.

The last mobile home, the last trailer, it was a trailer of classrooms from the campus of Albany State University. So I think of that same way, right? No, albany state didn’t rebuild back in the exact same flood zone in the exact same way because then if the river floods again, like we’re doomed.

It’s gonna be mud everywhere again. And a loss of life and buildings and so on. We had to build back smarter. And I think we’ll do that in higher education as well.

Raechele Pope: Another, can I say Yeah, go ahead.

Oscar Patron: Something really just very quickly I very much wholeheartedly agree with Shaun’s point, and I wanna underscore that point because reality is that a lot of the things that are happening now, some of these things are beyond our immediate control.

There’s just some things that we have no say over them. However, we do have a lot of say in terms of how do we respond in terms of we know this is happening, what do we do about it now? And so as educators, I do think that we have more power than we oftentimes think we do. And I’m including students in this group, and I say we and that’s great.

I choose to be optimistic because of that. I choose to be optimistic because the people that are on this Zoom call, right? And on this podcast call I know the kind of work and the things that we care about. And so we are presented with an amazing opportunity. While we would not wanna be here, while we did not ask for this, we are here now.

So how do we respond, right? I’m with it. I’m with it a hundred percent.

Raechele Pope: Yeah, I get that so much. And I think it’s important. One of the last questions, ’cause we are running out of time, there are so many more things to talk about. I always say with all of these conversations, we should be doing two of ’em, like the sequel.

But one of the things that I wanted to ask at the end was the one area of hope. And so I’m glad that both Sylvia and Shaun, all three of you actually pointed to that because one of the criticisms of higher education has always been that it moves glacially slow. Change can’t happen very quickly. We have two examples now of change happening very quickly.

One being our response to COVID. There’s no way we could move that way and look at what we did in two weeks. Campuses were up and running and giving classes, et cetera. And the second being dismantling of everything. A note was put out there and then they started closing offices and responding far before they were asked to get rid of people and offices and programs and so on.

And so that there is an opportunity for us to know that we can move quickly. And that we will rebuild and have to change. And so I appreciate your leaving and leaving our viewers with this that this isn’t the end of this. This is, we will have to rebuild and we have to figure out how to do it and to look at new ways of doing it.

And there is goodness. Of that, and unfortunately we are outta time and so I’m gonna stop. Don’t be surprised if I send you another email and say we need a part two here. So Doctors Hertado, Harper, and Patron. I really wanna thank you for joining us today. Sharing your insights, your decades of scholarship, your continued commitment to understanding and transforming the campus racial climate.

Your work has shaped how generations of scholars, educators, and practitioners think about these things now and will think about ’em in the future. And it’s, they’ve changed me. I’ve been so influenced by the work in that will continue to be influenced by the work that you’ve done and continue to do.

I also wanna thank our sponsors today. Evolve. Evolve is evolving. Doctors Brian Aurora Don Lee, and our own Keith Edwards are excited to announce the Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership. Evolve offers leadership coaching journeys for executives, emerging executives, and emerging leaders.

As well as for a specific leading equity focused cohort. If you’re ready to evolve your leadership team or invest in your personal leadership, let’s connect to talk about in-person, hybrid and online modalities to evolve your leadership for us all. And last but certainly not least, I wanna send a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all of the work behind the scenes to make us look and sound good.

We love the support for these important conversations from our community. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to our podcast, our YouTube channel, and our weekly newsletter. And our weekly newsletter announces each e new episode and more. And if you’re so inclined, you can also leave us a five star review.

Folks, you have had something very special today. You’ve had some amazing, panelists, come in here and talk to us about their research and give us some future directions. So please I hope this was really helpful for you all and please let others know about it. I’m Raechele Pope.

Thanks again to these fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and listening, let’s make it a great week.

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