Reported for my News Writing & Reporting II Class, JOUR320.
Senior journalism major Brandie Bland’s class was discussing how to cover situations without mentioning a person’s race about two months ago. She pointed out that communities of color are often written about in a dehumanizing way. Then her classmate chimed in.
“There are people in this country,” her classmate said, “that like to pretend like they are still affected by slavery, like they are slaves themselves.”
Bland said her experience at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism has been filled with such racism, whether overt or not.
“It’s like, pick what kind of racism do you want today? Do you want it in your face? Do you want microaggressions?” Bland said. “Every day is different.”
Her classmate’s comment was unusual in how direct it was. But Bland isn’t unique in feeling like a fish out of water – out of 12 undergraduate students of color interviewed for this article, 10 said they’ve felt out of place in Merrill.
71% of undergraduate students at Merrill are white – making it the whitest department on campus in terms of undergraduates.
“You come here and everybody’s white,” said junior journalism major Julian Basena, who grew up in Howard County, Md.
The percentage of white students has barely shifted over the years, university data shows. In 1992 – the earliest year the university portal registers – white students made up 79% of undergraduates. This year, they make up 71%. In that time, the College of Computer, Math & Natural Sciences completely flipped its demographics from majority white to majority-minority.
Madison Wells-James said being in a white space like Merrill means she has to flip a switch inside her brain and consciously not present herself like the stereotypical Black woman. She’s not loud, she doesn’t snip her fingers, she doesn’t nod her head and she doesn’t curse, she said.
“I don’t give people a reason to call me ghetto or call me names. I don’t give people a reason to think that I’m trying to antagonize them. Because then you get labeled the angry black woman,” the junior journalism and cinema and media studies double major said. “I just try to come in and do my work. And I don’t cause any problems.”
Alexa Figueroa, a freshman journalism major, feels out of place at Merrill as well. She’s not only Hispanic, but she’s a first-generation college student. Many of her peers have parents who worked in the journalism industry already — or at least went to college.
“I don’t come from a background like that,” said Figueroa, whose dad does construction work and mom cleans houses. “It’s always kind of an uphill battle trying to catch up to everyone.”
Figueroa said she works overtime to try to catch up — writing articles, trying to publish them in the Diamondback, making videos, working on her website and looking for internships, all “squeeze” herself into a space she wasn’t meant to be in.
Christoph Mergerson, a visiting assistant professor of race and media at Merrill College, said he’s not surprised by those experiences. But there’s a bigger problem at stake, he said – if newsrooms aren’t diverse, stereotypes about certain communities could be embedded in stories as a fact because no one in the newsroom has the perspective or power to correct it.
“It creates conditions where journalists think they’re being objective but they’re not,” he wrote. “And nothing’s worse than when journalists think they know something about certain communities but it’s evident that they don’t. That’s how you destroy trust in journalism.”
Merrill College Dean Lucy Dalglish said she’s “completely aware” that students of color feel marginalized in the college and she’s working to change it.
“Am I the best person in the world to handle all this? I don’t know,” she said. “All I can tell you is I try very, very hard.”
Why aren’t there more students of color in Merrill?
Terrence Britt, the program director of undergraduate recruitment at Merrill, said there are several hurdles to getting more students of color into Knight Hall’s doors.
One of the biggest is the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, which handles admissions at the undergraduate level. He said it isn’t using the latest customer relationship management technology to keep in constant contact with prospective students and track them. It also doesn’t release the data he needs, he said.
“They don’t want to collaborate with us,” the former Boston University recruiter said. “Can’t do much without any data.”
Britt said that he does everything possible to avoid working with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. It hands him a list of students interested in Merrill, but he makes sure to reach out to teachers at “feeder schools” – high schools from which three or more students applied to Merrill – and teachers at competitive schools in Prince George’s and Baltimore counties as well.
One other hurdle is psychological: Many students of color think they can’t get into the university, so they don’t even bother applying, Britt said.
Their hesitation is understandable. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions lists 26 factors, including SAT scores, grades, race, ethnicity, gender, and students’ life experiences. But Britt said the university only considers students with high SAT or ACT scores and a high GPA.
“They say they have 26 factors, but in my honest opinion, they don’t. They look at the upper echelon of the students,” Britt said.
Plus, he said, students in Maryland often want to go out of state for college.
Outside of Maryland, it’s ever harder to recruit students of color, Britt said. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions doesn’t give him racial data for applicants so it’s hard to target students of color, he said. It doesn’t help that those students of color are scattered between different high schools, he said.
Shannon Gundy, the program director of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, did not respond to two emails and one phone call to her assistant requesting comment.
Another obstacle to more diversity at the college is money, Britt said. Competing journalism schools, especially private ones, can offer huge sums of money in scholarships to out-of-state students – and the University of Missouri even offers out-of-state students in-state tuition, he said.
Merrill, meanwhile, has limited resources to help out-of-state students cover the $36,683 tuition – it can compete with other schools up to about $20,000 in tuition but not much more, he said.
On top of that, Dalglish said, the university doesn’t give those out-of-state students need-based aid to cover tuition so out-of-state students are typically wealthier – and whiter.
This year, 70% of Merrill applicants are out-of-state, she said.
“We’re a really hot journalism school,” Dalglish said. “We are really, really good at what we do.”
At Merrill’s much smaller graduate school, the demographics are completely reversed. Only about 47% of graduate students are white. Dalglish said that’s because the college controls the admissions process from start to finish. The college can offer financial aid packages and offer them graduate assistant positions, which make out-of-state students eligible for financial aid.
Still, there’s an overwhelming number of white undergraduate students. It’s not that students of color aren’t getting into Merrill, Britt said – the demographics of applicants are about the same as those of admitted students.
The diversity coordinator
Enter Aaron Guillermo Vogel. The journalism school hired him as the diversity and inclusion coordinator about a month ago, in charge of problem spotting in the recruitment process, running workshops for students, supporting students and training faculty and staff.
“He is going to be my eyes and ears on issues of diversity,” Dalglish said. “So far I’ve been very impressed with the issue spotting he’s been able to do just in a very short time he’s been here.”
Right now, Guillermo Vogel said he wants to have discussions with students to understand what the college needs. He estimated that he’s talked to 10 graduate and undergraduate students – in a college of 535 students.
“Honestly, that’s what’s really missing for me right now, where a lot of students are coming from,” he said. “To some extent, student [are] gonna have to seek me out a little bit.”
Next semester, Guillermo Vogel is piloting a transfer student orientation where he wants to integrate discussions about race, power and privilege — topics for which there aren’t spaces right now, he said.
Rosa Pyo, a senior journalism major, is graduating this winter. She said she loves what she does, but is often frustrated by her institution, like all other journalists of color.
“To be a journalist of color at Merrill is a joy, is an honor, and is a heartbreak,” she said.
Leave a Reply