Confronting Ignorance and Prejudice in Public Forums

The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 28, 2011, 3:07 pm

By Marybeth Gasman

This post is co-authored with Mayra Olivares-Urueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Texas. Mayra is pursuing research related to the involvement of Latino families in all aspects of the college process as well as increasing the number of underrepresented students who complete allied-health degrees.
I met Mayra at a national conference a few weeks ago. Because she is a graduate student, it was one of her first academic conferences. She was excited, eager, and thrilled to meet people who cared about similar issues. Unfortunately, during one of the conference sessions, which focused on the impact that family has on minority students and their college aspiration and attainment goals, Mayra came face to face with prejudice against students just like her. The discussant commenting on papers in the session told the audience that (paraphrasing) ‘when we work with those students, we can’t make them want to go to college even if we really want them to.’ She then added, ‘If they want to go out and get pregnant after high-school graduation then we should just let them.’ Along with Mayra, many of the young students of color and assistant professors in the room were deeply offended by the speaker’s comments. They were “those” students the speaker’s remarks.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/confronting-ignorance-and-prejudice-in-public-forums/30961?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en