Karen Leung

DRAWING: JERONE HSU

f the campus journalism community is the student body politic, it has a white beating heart. Josie Swindler made this point in the February 2006 Blue & White article "The White Pages," which took the Spectator to task for its lack of diversity. What's happened since? Earlier this year, Respecting Ourselves and Others Through Education (ROOTEd) hosted the three-day Allied series on power and representation in campus institutions, attended by Spectator and others. Some publications have also undergone anti-oppression training with the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

Why the relentless whiteitude on publications? One tempting answer: their editors simply lack racial consciousness. Student campaigners for Ethnic Studies were disappointed when they read an April 12 Spectator piece covering the Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge (SPEaK) Ethnic Studies teach-in, which declared, "Professors Criticize Ethnic Center." The article missed the point of the event, failed even to describe the basic premise of Ethnic Studies, and misconstrued the teach-in as faculty-driven. In other words, the reporter didn't capture why it was newsworthy. Without this awareness, the reason the event was covered at all seemed like an unimpressive effort to cover student of color issues - the most misguided attempt at diversity, a cursory concession to identity politics. But this conclusion is also the wrong one.

's editors have seriously considered the issue of diversity. According to Spectator Editor-in-chief John Davisson, "Diversity means both improving diversity of staff - we want a wide range of people in the same way that any institution of higher learning does - and taking advantage of reporting to improve… quality and depth." Representation is a genuine concern in the editorial staff of other publications as well. For Blue & White Editor-in-chief Taylor Walsh, "It would be ideal if our staff reflected Columbia University." She wants "not diversity for diversity's sake, but diversity of ideas." They know the dangers of sameness: Lydia DePillis, BW managing editor and Bwog editor, is afraid that a too-homogeneous staff could mean "we're missing [events] entirely or we interpret them as isolated incidents when they're systemic" - a possibility for a staff Walsh describes as "mostly Columbia College kids, but not exclusively; mostly white, but not exclusively; mostly liberal, but not exclusively." And Davisson says the state of coverage of student of color issues at the Spectator is "lacking, but improving."

These editors generally want diversity of thought, more students of color on staff to better represent the University, better coverage of students of color issues, and to avoid unfairly tokenizing contributors. But for all that he may be the face of the paper, John Davisson is not the Spectator; and publications are not their editors' admirable intentions. As institutions, these publications move more slowly. And their pace has a price.

Activism and the consequences of the diversity problem

Bryan Mercer trails acronyms impressively: he is a member of SPEaK, the Black Students Organization (BSO), and the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification (SCEG). Too often, Mercer says, activist groups will reach out to publications to make coverage possible, only to find that their event has been misconstrued "by misquoting, or focusing on one aspect of it without covering its full breadth, or only casting it in a humorous light." Poor reporting has serious consequences: it pulls student of color issues to the margins of campus discourse, and if news coverage fails to show why those issues are actually important, encourages students to think of them as an exercise in political correctness. And, Mercer says, "They’re not misunderstood because we're not articulating well, but because of more structural issues."

Where student turnover is quick, and ambitious contributors may soon become editors, those structural issues are very much a part of the nature of institutions like the Spectator. Mercer expressed concerns that the paper's bureaucratic ladder puts experienced journalists out of the field. Several of the pieces he's found lacking have come from inexperienced reporters who haven't done the necessary research or follow-ups to write well on events. And when the journalism fails, student groups mitigate what harm they can: they may get an apology or an offer to write an opinion piece, and a correction may run, but the damage is done. He sighs, "The problem is not the graciousness of the apology, but the persistence of the mistakes."

Bad reporting also, unfortunately, shapes campus discourse, which disappoints Mercer especially when the Spectator fumbles: "For the very institution that shapes what we think about Columbia to have no institutional memory is for Columbia to have no institutional memory." He finds this particularly cutting with the Ethnic Studies campaign, because the background needed to make an article well-researched (information on the 1996 hunger strikes, for instance) could be culled from the Spectator's very own archives. And as Tina Musa - a SPEaK member, co-founder of Filasteen and a Comparative Ethnic Studies major - argues, bad reporting can subvert the mission of activist groups. Of the Spectator's recent headline for a story on the first New York City Asian American Student Conference ("Asian Studies Dominates Conference"), Musa said, "Asian studies is a colonial project" that Asian American studies replies to and counters. The headline both botched its emphasis because the conference wasn't dominated by any discussion of academic studies, Asian, Asian American or otherwise, and seemed to present students as agitators for a project they would never endorse. The activists' message wasn't just muddied. It was defied.

is probably the most crucial of all the publications - and it has the most difficult job. Its conversation with readers in the news section is always hectic, reactionary, and weighted with the responsibility of breadth. Other publications cover what they see as widely important as well as what seems interesting to them, which may be less (or at least less obviously) significant. We might call the ability to be fixated on some issues, but not others, the luxury of idiosyncrasy - one that a daily newspaper largely cannot afford. Almost every publication on campus, including this one, accepts pitches for potential story ideas. Magazines tend not to be a survey of the important issues of the day, but anthologies of particular obsessions, having the freedom to cover both the "mainstream" and the more offbeat. Even if editors see an important gap in coverage - as many do - and propose a story to staff, it may not get picked up. To say that publications have failed to cover student of color issues, and that they should, is to say that they may have to heave themselves out of their idiosyncratic groove. Although it gives publications their character and, wonderfully, brings us articles on fat presidents and bathhouses, this idiosyncrasy also has a material effect on the politics of inequality: it changes who and what is considered important and fundamental to campus discourse. As the whiteness of staff and coverage on publications show, that effect has not served students of color well. The challenge is to develop idiosyncrasies which are somehow more equitable, and coverage that does not treat diversity issues as foreign.

The tension between idiosyncrasy and the need for diversity plays out in an interesting way on The Columns, the newly launched blog of the Columbia Political Union. The site's creators designed a two-pillar system of non-partisan CPU features and multi-partisan posts that aim to generate diverse political discussion. Editor-in-chief Jason Bello wrote via email, "we want to make sure that we treat everyone as an equal member of the community who represents their own views only," and that the blog avoids tokenizing its writers because it "[does] not expect an individual to write about racial politics simply because that he or she belongs to a given racial or ethnic group." Yet the admirable vision can be undermined in practice. Some writers will claim to be more representative of groups than others, and some may act like representative caricatures. So The Columns' ambition for equality will probably never quite be translated into the real thing. It's one example of the disjunction between intent and product that can stand in the way of diversity.

What to do, what to do

Musa calls the diversity problem in coverage "an expression of what kind of education people are receiving." The editors are obviously not deliberately discriminatory: quite the opposite. But student of color issues, by their very position of marginality, can demand analysis from a somewhat unfamiliar place (it's not common knowledge that area studies were created as a "colonial project," for instance). The double illiteracy of interpretation - the misreading of activist group events, the organizers of whom then misread the writers' and editors' intentions - begins, as Musa says, with education. But also long before it. Caroline Kao, this semester's diversity beat chief for the Spectator, says that solutions will have to consider that "Racialization doesn't just happen at Columbia. It starts way before that." The diversity problem is an acquiescence to the undertow of whiteness. It's less overt racism (and here we see how inadequate that word can be) than an entire architecture of inequality.

Trying to counter that architecture is hard work. The life of many regularly published magazines is a life of almost-extinction: the frantic schedules, the short deadlines, the financial challenges, can make projects like minority recruiting fall to the wayside. Recruiting in general has slowed down for the Blue & White since the beginning of the year, in part because the staff has had to redirect energy to the magazine's financial troubles, which almost prevented its final issue from coming out at all.

Publications have been trying to work through the problem in their own ways, with varying degrees of success. Walsh and DePillis discussed a prospective project where BW staff would approach University Writing instructors to canvass for contributors. This strategy would help mitigate disadvantages students may face during recruiting, and the effects of student self-selection. The Spectator recently arranged for a recruiter from the newspaper company McClatchy to speak to staff about improving diversity, and Davisson is considering the institutionalization of diversity training. He also assigned a particularly trusted reporter to be in charge of outreach efforts to student of color and activist group. But the strategy has had its hiccups - the writer was the author of the piece on the Ethnic Studies teach-in.

Right now, students of color may be best represented on staff and in coverage in Columbia's alternative media - places like (re), SPEaK's annual magazine, the Proxy, the African diaspora magazine, and yes, AdHoc. But many of these publications were vexed into existence after students gave up on the larger forums, and they still speak from the margins. Students of color shouldn't be consigned to the student body politic's sagging extremities. We need a blow to the heart.