CWU has been facing backlash as staff and students of color have been sharing their stories of incidents with police on campus. Most notably, esteemed English professor Dr. Bobby Cummings was recently questioned by police on campus, sparking over 30 faculty and staff to create a group in response to these incidents occurring at CWU.
In 2011, she was awarded a Distinguished Professor Award, and in 2020 received the Bobby Cummings Lifetime Achievement Award, which was named after her. She is also attributed greatly for her role in establishing the Africana and Black Studies minor.
The Observer was told that Cummings expressed to several colleagues her thoughts about this incident. Her colleagues recounted that on April 1, Cummings was sitting outside of Samuelson Hall when she was stopped by officers after a staff member called campus police, believing she was a homeless person.
As Cummings is a professor who has been working at CWU for decades, she was surprised when the officers present asked her for her ID. Even though she asserted that she is a faculty member, campus police persisted in asking her for her ID until they realized she was telling the truth.
A week later, President Jim Wohlpart sent an email out to address this incident. His retelling of the event goes as follows: “The police were responding to a call from another employee and determined that no police involvement in the incident was necessary.”
In response to this event, Wohlpart mentioned actions that will be taken to resolve incidents on campus.
“I will be asking our Community Policing Task Force, which has staff, faculty, and student representation, to review what occurred and provide recommendations for how we can learn from this incident,” he added. “As a university, we will be placing a strong emphasis on bias training.”
Dr. Griff Tester, a CWU professor in the Department of Sociology and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, is a member of this newly founded group of faculty and staff aimed at creating a more equitable environment on campus.
“One of the things that we have been talking about is if Central is going to be a community of equity and belonging, it really needs to be a community of equity and belonging,” Tester added. “What we’ve seen this group doing is creating our own community.”
Creating a community of equity and belonging comes through action, which is what this group of faculty staff plans to do.
Some of these plans include conducting a teach-in where faculty and staff of color can share their experiences and stories of discrimination.
The group believes it is important to take action to resolve injustice and part of this action is listening to the voices affected and recognizing the trauma people of color face on campus and around the world.
According to Tester, that’s what President Wohlpart’s email lacks.
“You get these emails [such as President Wohlpart’s email] that don’t acknowledge the trauma, and how the trauma reverberates out into the community,” he said. “And there were no resources provided at the end of that email.”
“The trauma experienced because of racism is often overlooked or minimized,” Tester said. “Individuals and groups may respond to the trauma of racism by concealing experiences of abuse, developing deep distrust and skepticism towards believing in change or leadership, and concerns about being retraumatized due to fear of being blamed for their own experiences of discrimination.”
Tester took a critical approach to the statements made in President Wohlpart’s email addressing the issue with Cummings.
“Great, more bias training,” he said. “But what does that training look like? Whose voices get heard in that training? Whose voices are not heard in that training? What’s really the purpose of that training? How do we really get at the heart of what’s going on?”
Tester cited President Wohlpart’s account of the event as inaccurate.
“Well, police were involved,” Tester said. “How do you call an officer asking Dr. Cummings for her ID ‘no police involvement.’ It’s an officer involving with a member of the community. It’s police involvement,” he added. “That statement suggests to people who don’t have more knowledge about this event, that really the police weren’t involved when they were involved.”
Tester offers a different solution for CWU’s response moving forward. “Acknowledge the experiences that people are having on this campus instead of pretending or acting as if we [the institution] have this new vision and mission and everything is better now.”
While other staff and students of color have come out with similar stories to Cummings, those contacted about their experience have declined to comment, preferring to address their experiences on their own terms as incidents like these take time to process.
