On the doors at the entrance of Clark College, posters proclaiming the school’s inclusive community welcome visitors, describing a place free of discrimination and harassment. But inside the campus walls, teachers, staff and students tell a different story.
“It’s not a climate that feels safe for you to really thrive,” said Summer Brown, Clark College’s only black counselor, who quit her tenure-track position in March. She’s one of seven prominent women of color who has left the Vancouver community college in the past year alone.
School records and dozens of interviews with staff and students conducted by OPB show a culture at Clark College that alienates people of color, even as top school officials say the campus is becoming more inclusive.
During an interview at her private practice for marriage and family therapy in Hazel Dell, Brown described a work environment at Clark College that was particularly harmful to women of color.
In the months before she decided to leave, she said she felt like she was constantly being monitored by her supervisors. Brown described her bosses scrutinizing everything, from the number of students she saw per day to the time spent during her lunch break.
Brown said there was a lot she was proud of during the two years she worked at Clark College. She helped set up the school’s first sex education fair and organized events around LGBTQ identity. As a self-described queer, black woman, Brown’s passion was to create safe spaces on campus for underrepresented voices.
“I was really jazzed about some of the projects I was working on at Clark,” she said, but added that she quickly felt “burnt out because of the climate.”
Brown recounted passive aggressive emails from her mostly white coworkers and how she had to fight to get a person of color on her tenure committee. The incidents never felt like a smoking gun. They were subtle, which sometimes made them easier to brush off.She remembers on numerous occasions, Clark College President Bob Knight would call her and other employees of color troublemakers. Knight said he regrets using the term.
He said in the 12 years he’s worked at Clark, he never thought about how the phrase might sound to employees of color coming from a white man. “You gotta be careful with your audience,” he said. “And again, it’s part of that power and privilege that I carry. Sometimes the things I say can be taken differently than I intended, so I have to be aware of that.”
Over time, these incidents piled up and began to spill into Brown’s personal life. She started having regular panic attacks and was losing sleep.
“It stopped being a safe space for me,” she said. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if that was other people’s experience as well.”
As it turns out, Brown wasn’t alone.
Mixed messages
Six other women of color also left the school last year, including three employees from the college’s diversity center. One of the first to leave in the wave of departures was Felisciana Peralta, the former director of student inclusion and equitable services. She resigned from her position last September.
“It became a hostile work environment, and I felt like it was no longer in line with my values and my integrity,” said Peralta, who was instrumental in creating a campus diversity center. “It was hard to walk away from a place I helped build.”
Peralta has remained on campus as an adjunct professor at Clark but has stepped away from diversity work there. After nearly a decade at the college, she was twice passed over for a leadership position to run the department. She’s now the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Mt. Hood Community College.
“I believe that there is a problem at Clark or there wouldn’t be so many leaving,” she said.
Peralta said a lot of her frustrations stemmed from new leadership at the office of diversity and equity. Last fall, Loretta Capeheart became the college’s first associate vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion, a job that Peralta was also a finalist for. Peralta described a shift once Capeheart stepped into the role. She introduced policy changes and rules that Peralta and others told OPB they felt were unnecessary and disrupted the culture at the center.
“When Loretta got there, everything changed,” said Roslyn Leon Guerrero, an employee at the diversity center who quit shortly after Peralta.
Rules banning food in the center were enforced and students were encouraged to stop using the kitchen area, a place that had previously been a source of community building and potluck events. Student peer mentors who worked at the diversity center were moved into a different building across campus.
“Before, it was a safe place where students could really express themselves, meet up for a meal, get help tutoring,” Guerrero said. “But, it soon became very restricted and the morale really went down.”
Peralta said there was also a significant change in how the Office of Diversity and Equity implemented the school’s social equity plan. Peralta and her coworkers had always been very engaged in the community, showing up at student events, promoting the college at job fairs, and organizing multicultural events on campus. Now, Peralta said, Capeheart told her to stay behind her desk.
“I felt like leadership was aggressively trying to block me from doing my work,” Peralta said. “A lot of people have left because they feel unheard and undervalued.”
‘Who can I run to?’
Students of color at Clark make up nearly 40 percent of the student body, and they said they noticed the resignations.
“Who can I run to and talk about my day now? The whole thing just makes me feel sad,” said Kenon McCollins, a 27-year-old student who enrolled at Clark College in 2016 after finishing a contract with the U.S. Marine Corps. At Clark, he wanted to find direction in his life after the military, a club or a student group that centered on his identity as an African-American.
“I went to the diversity center and I spoke with Dolly. She was a black woman, and I just said, ‘Hey, I need to build community,'” McCollins said, referring to Dolly England, the college’s former diversity outreach program manager.
England took McCollins under her wing during his first week and brought him to a job fair centered on hiring African-Americans. She also told him about the Black Student Union and encouraged him to get involved. Soon after, he became their vice president.
Seeing the recent departures of faculty of color has left McCollins feeling deflated and concerned that students like him will have a harder time getting support at the college.
“Once you see a strong leader like Dolly leave, and then you look around and see all these women of color left,” he said, “it makes you feel depressed.”
McCollins graduated from Clark College in June with an associate’s degree in communication. He said he has mixed feelings about his time at Clark. Protesting helped him find his voice. But, he said, it was also exhausting.
“I shouldn’t have been fighting racism and all those oppressions at Clark. I should have been focusing on schoolwork,” he said.
A history of problems
While the recent departures have had a significant effect on Clark students like McCollins, they are only the latest turn in an extended struggle with inclusion at the school.
In 2010, a student at Clark distributed a series of flyers proclaiming white pride. One of them was handed to Lexi Peterson-Burge, who was a 16-year-old high school student at the time taking college courses through a program called Running Start. It was her third week of classes when a man she didn’t know approached her.
“He had swastika tattoos all over him: on the tops of his hands, on the back of his head, his head was shaved,” Peterson-Burge recalled recently. She’s now back at Clark to finish her associate’s degree.
The flyer was a one-page handout with “White and Proud” scrawled across the top. On the bottom was a contact for the local National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The man smirked at Peterson-Burge, who is black and Native American, when he handed her the flyer.
She said the harassment didn’t stop with the flyer.
“What ended up happening in the weeks after that was that brown people on campus were being targeted,” she said.
Clark College serves around 13,000 students across Clark, Skamania and Klickitat counties.
