As a Black woman from Atlanta, GA, Aniyah Johnson was accustomed to always being around people who looked and thought like her. So she was nervous about attending Rice University in Houston, especially in light of the state of Texas’ attack on diversity and inclusion (DEI). However, Rice is a private university and therefore, doesn’t need to comply with the recent state mandates that universities get rid of DEI offices and efforts. For that reason, Johnson is able to continue to take part in programs at Rice like the RISE (Responsibility, Inclusion, and Student Empowerment), a course that explores racial justice, equity, and life in Houston. Programs that Johnson says help her feel at ease.
Johnson looks forward to her weekly RISE meetings, where she discusses her experiences at the university and how the week has impacted her in a safe space and with a group that also discusses the collective experience of being a person of color at a predominantly white university. She says there is no fear of judgment or the urgency of being politically correct here.
“You’re wholeheartedly yourself and just get to express your opinions with like-minded individuals,” she said. “We would have that place for being ourselves and not trying to conform to what other people think we should be. Here, you get to let loose. It was very positive and welcoming, and I felt heard.”
The program includes seminars that discuss books on race and justice. Johnson recently attended a seminar that talked about Heather McGhee’s book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” a story on the cost of racism in society.
This year, the students are reading Julia Arce’s collection of essays “You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation” and Cathy Park Hong’s collection of essays “Minor Feelings.”
“They’re [students] building community and shared experience, but also digging deeply into work that explores issues of diversity across the United States and beyond,” said Alexander X. Byrd, the vice provost of the university’s DEI office.
Byrd, a historian whose studies focus on the history of Black America and the Jim Crow South, is deeply involved in the university’s DEI-centric initiatives like the Analyzing Diversity course and re-examines standard stories of American history in the first decades of the 20th century, how it shaped the discipline and how it has changed “since we began paying attention to those blind spots.”
Despite her nervousness at not being familiar with other cultures or races, owing to her “coming from a marginalized community” and studying at an all-Black high school, Johnson was excited at the prospect of meeting new people at Rice who “weren’t necessarily of the same culture.”
Once she started attending classes at Rice, Johnson was struck by the different cultures and the experiences of other students. While introducing themselves, most students discussed prior internships or entrepreneurial pursuits, which sounded alien to her.
“I’m really just like, ‘I just went to high school and joined a couple of clubs.’ I felt that contrast and nuances between experiences,” she said. “It was hard not to compare myself.”
Johnson says the RISE program helped her own up to her experiences, devoid of comparisons. She was quick to realize the differences in opportunities. Even though she attended a high school that had some resources, other students had access to internships through their teachers’ connections.
“It’s just demographics and where people are from,” she said. “I was doing really good for what I was brought into, and the realm of public schooling that I had, but it was different compared to the amount that other people had.”
Attack on DEI
At a time when DEI offices are being eliminated in Texas, this could be seen as a close alternative to these initiatives.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s law, Senate Bill 17, which bans DEI offices in public colleges and universities starting this year, aims to limit “preferential consideration” toward students of certain races, ethnicities, and sexes.
Most recently, the University of Texas at Austin fired around 60 employees who worked in DEI programs. According to a joint letter from the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Texas NAACP, some of these offices are expected to close by the end of May.
The statement further states that the staffers were given a three-month notice period. Those affected did not work in “DEI-related jobs” when they were fired. To comply with SB 17, they were all given new responsibilities and some were moved to other offices.
AAUP, Texas NAACP, and other affiliated organizations vowed to “continue to gather information on these precipitous terminations,” which they believed were “potential attacks on First Amendment freedoms.”
“…these terminations clearly are intended to retaliate against employees because of their previous association with DEI and speech that they exercised prior to their current assignments.”
Despite the attacks on the federal and state level, Rice University president Reginald DeRoaches cited an observation from a Supreme Court Justice that “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life” as to why his institution will remain resolute in its commitment to diversity.
“We will continue our efforts to create a class of students that is multifaceted in race, gender, ideology, ability, geography and special talents. Such diversity is critical in solving the most perplexing, challenging problems already known, and those we have not yet encountered,” DeRoaches said. “Truly creative, innovative and transformative thinking and research does not happen in a vacuum or in monolithic environments. It happens when we invite, include, hear and challenge all voices, backgrounds and perspectives.”
DEI-centered academic endeavors
Provost Amy Dittmar, who is also the executive vice president for Academic Affairs and professor of Finance and Economics at Rice, says the university hosts students from myriad backgrounds. A number of programs and orientations are implemented to further the university’s DEI efforts, which include:
The Rice Emerging Scholars Program (RESP), a six-week program catered to first-year students interested in STEM to gain mentorship and form a cohort,
Owl Access, a pre-orientation program for Rice’s “FLI” population – first-generation and limited-income students and those belonging to under-represented communities, which also introduces their families to Rice,
Pathways program, a cross-disciplinary community-based program for graduate students to gain mentorship in academics,
Critical Dialogues on Diversity (CDOD), a compulsory five-week set of workshops exploring culture and identity in the second half of the semester, which Byrd describes as an exercise for communication “in an environment that is full of people who come from different places, think differently, hold different opinions, are of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds,” and
Analyzing Diversity, a compulsory course that explores social and cultural analysis, system inequities and their redress, and equity, knowledge, and the university.
The university also recently added two positions within the Office of Multicultural Affairs that focus on residential colleges to develop programming and advising for “cultural awareness and inclusivity.”
“If CDOD is meant to help people and make the most out of an education in an extraordinarily diverse setting, Analyzing Diversity is meant to call students’ attention to the ways that their disciplines – English, Math, Sociology, etc. speak to how ideas around diversity help us understand the world better, bringing intellectual, academic, and disciplinary attention to these questions. It helps us better understand the world better,” Byrd said.
While students of color like Johnson welcome courses like CDOD, she is skeptical about mandatory classes and the idea that students attend those classes out of necessity and do not imbibe their tenets.
“Once that class is finished, what happens after that?” she said.
Moreover, she feels Rice’s cultural events, hosted by student communities, help other students understand multiculturalism. But in reality, “usually only that group goes to those events.”
Diversity in Rice’s faculty
According to Byrd, Rice’s faculty diversity is a partnership between the faculty, department, chairs, deans, and the office of the provost. Search chairs and members of search committees undergo anti-bias training “so that they can approach searches with their eyes wide open.”
“If they hadn’t been taught about implicit bias, for example, it might affect the way that they approach searches,” he added.
The DEI office, in conjunction with faculty members, develops plans to attract a diverse pool of candidates. The office reviews search plans and analyzes the ways they were executed before inviting candidates to the RICE campus.
“If we don’t have a diverse pool, we don’t have a chance for getting a diverse faculty,” Byrd said. “If you’re unable to attract a diverse pool, that might be some information for you, and if you’re able to attract a diverse pool, that’s information as well. It really is a campus-wide work.”
Rice launches Afrochemistry class to better understand Black life
Rice’s living quarters: a hub for discussions
Rice has 11 colleges, each offering residential spaces for its students, where faculty and the Magister, or the senior academic administrator, live alongside them and is run by an elected student leader. Rice’s living spaces have institutionalized this exercise in CDOD and Analyzing Diversity classes, Dittmar said.
“They have this kind of a community that goes beyond just the students,” she added. “They also dine together. It creates a community at a scale that you don’t always have in a college this size. It’s so important that they can talk across differences because they live, eat, and work together in a way that allows them to have daily conversations.”
Are these programs enough?
“Rice tries to do a good job at trying to diversify the classrooms. But for me personally, each classroom I go into is predominantly white, which makes sense for the university demographics,” Johnson said.
The conversations are “pretty open,” too, but the fear of voicing her opinions remains deep-seated. She is often fearful that she might be misinterpreted or opposed while speaking and always has to evaluate her political correctness multiple times before speaking up in classrooms.
“But it’s not as hostile as I thought it was gonna be,” she added.
Her major is undecided, but she is leaning more toward the humanities and social sciences.
At first, she tried to dress in a “conservative manner” at Rice but eventually chose to express herself in her “own fashion,” showcasing her tattoos, piercings, hair color, and nails. “I like to make myself feel comfortable instead of trying to make other people feel comfortable with myself.”
She attributes her creativity and extroverted nature to her community.
“In my previous community growing up, everybody wore what they wanted to wear, just not caring what other people thought about how you dress, you dress the way you want to be dressed, what feels comfortable to you,” she said. “That does come from my community, but getting piercings and stuff, it came from myself.”
Johnson advises students to branch out and find their community within Rice, all the while staying true to who they are, “without trying to accommodate to different pressures that the university brings.”
She has observed that the university has several events for students, where they can meet new people and make new friends. She acknowledges that it is not one person’s obligation to tell other people about their community.
“Really, just make life yours,” she summarized. “Try to start off small and then whenever you feel comfortable, start to gradually expand your circle or try new things within the circle of people that you trust and really like, build the community. Everybody’s college experience is not the same, so make your own college experience.”
Evading a history of exclusion
Rice University’s history is steeped in racial inequity, endowed in 1891 by a man who was a merchant and an investor but, more importantly, a slaveowner from Massachusetts. William Marsh Rice established the university for “the white inhabitants of the city of Houston, and state of Texas.”
Where did the endowment come from? The labor of enslaved Black people. The school had its doors shut for Black students until 1965.
Rice’s bronze memorial statue, where he is seated holding the plans of the campus, found a place in the central academic quad, facing Lovett Hall. In 2020, students of Rice petitioned to remove the statue, and in 2022, the Board of Trustees planned to relocate it, and replace it with other monuments of historic significance.
It was later discovered that the statue was a weak attempt at blurring the source of Marsh Rice’s fortune and repainting him as a bridge between white Americans in the North and South.
In 2019, Rice organized a task force to address the university’s “past in relation to slave history and racial injustice,” and the segregation and racial disparities that resulted from it.
Byrd, who is the co-chair of the task force and the university’s vice provost Rice’s DEI office, acknowledges the history of exclusion at Rice but, at the same time, highlights the steps the university has taken toward inclusion as well.
“I keep that history, before me as a way to think about this work and its importance and why it’s necessary,” Byrd said. “Our history isn’t just exclusion, but exclusion is there and really important. I think it’s important for us to hold both of them together.”
He says the university was originally founded as a whites-only institution but later accommodated “students of slender means and high-performing students in need of a first-rate education that Rice was able to provide for them at very little cost.”
This October, the task force completed the project and released a report that concluded, “Slavery, segregation, and racial injustice were not incidental to the histories of William Marsh Rice and the university he endowed, but part of their very foundations. The process of desegregation, which began half a century after the Rice Institute opened, required changes so fundamental that they amounted to a re-founding of the university.”
The university admitted the transformation and progress were slow, leading to the “second founding” in the 1960s aimed at desegregation, a task Rice is “yet to finish.”
Among other discoveries was the story of Rice’s history in Houston’s Fourth Ward, which was intended to be the campus grounds for the university. In 1923, a Ku Klux Klan event took place on Rice’s Louisiana Street property, close to the home of a Black woman who, in 1909, had earlier joined her neighbors in a lawsuit against the university.
Those who came to work at Rice, like athletic trainer and groundskeeper Jack Shelton, had to encounter racism, “blackface shows,” and even a yearbook photograph of the Ku Klux Klan.
Trustees tried to delay the integration until after the completion of a lawsuit aimed at changing Rice’s charter and the way it impacted Black students, while white students remained divided on the question of integration.
The last few chapters of the report discuss the first Black undergraduate students at Rice in the latter half of the 1960s, the slow progress of integration on campus, the organization of Black students and allied faculty and other student groups to bring about change, and the incompleteness of desegregation even today.
