Universities have a role in reducing racism by altering curricula

Executive director of the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center Dr. Shaun Harper spoke at UC Davis about his research on Feb. 22. The seminar, titled “How Universities Sustain Racism in America”, was part of the UC Davis Forums on the Public University and the Social Good.

Harper and his team have visited 50 colleges and universities across the United States and collected data from 10,000 interviews with students, staff and faculty to better understand racial climates in institutions of higher education. At each institution, 300-700 interviews were conducted and were compiled along with local news articles and questionnaires to create an image of the racial climate at each site. The findings are then compiled in a report delivered to the institution and include lengthy recommendations each institution can take to improve their racial climate.

Universally, minority students reported feeling isolated, overwhelmed and singled out at colleges and universities. Being the only minority person in their departments, faculty members, such as professors and advisors, reported a feeling of “onlyness”, as well as fatigue in dealing with daily grievances. All but one university out of the 50 surveyed had reports of racial slurs being said to minority students and staff.

Despite the great diversity in America, 87 percent of college presidents are white, and so are 79 percent of full-time university faculty members. Such grave imbalances have inspired Harper since he was a child to push for changes.

“Black people in my town were disproportionately very poor and not in positions of leadership and authority,” Harper said. “It’s not because my people don’t want to be in positions of leadership, or that we want to be poor. I knew it wasn’t that. I also knew that it wasn’t because we don’t work hard or we don’t put forth the effort. My mom cleaned white people’s toilets in their homes, doing backbreaking work. I knew there had to be larger explanations. I’ve been on a quest for this my entire life and career. Not just to better understand them, but to address them and correct them.”

UCD Provost Ralph Hexter, the director and series sponsor of the UCD Forums, said he was only slightly surprised by Harper’s results.

“Yes and no,” Hexter said. “When I say, yes, this was so powerful and cogent an argument. But when I say no, it’s because — though I wouldn’t be able to put it so forcefully, much less with the kind of research and experience behind it — I understand and have for some time understood that, to quote the titles of the first two chapters in [Harper’s] forthcoming book, ‘the university was born racist and still is racist.’”

Harper included in his lecture a clip from CNN where young children looked at images of people of different skin tones while being asked questions about which color corresponded to being “dumb” or “beautiful”. The children, black and white alike, pointed to images of black and brown children as embodying negative attributes and white children as exemplifying positive attributes. Even at five years old, these children were equipped with damaging stereotypes that are often not adequately challenged in a school curriculum. Children do not seem to be born racist, but rather become racist through teaching and learning.

“We need to change the curricula in our schools of education and our schools and be very, very intentional in doing the work to disassemble racism,” Hexter said.

By the time most students graduate from a university setting, they are unlikely to have had any formal curricula regarding race. Dr. Maisha Winn, a professor in the UCD School of Education and the co-director of Transformative Justice in Education, said educational researchers in many age groups can work together to create better curricula regarding race.

“Higher education researchers help us think about what we should be doing in that P-12 age range,” Winn said.

After noticing schools had sometimes done little to change their institutional practices when delivered a racial climate report, Harper now revisits the site with his team to publicly announce the results of the studies. Harper’s work indicates a disconnect from the values of diversity championed by universities and the painful experiences many students and staff still encounter.

“When you seek the truth from oppressed people, marginalized people, people of color on college campuses, they will give it to you,” Harper said. “But you have to be in pursuit of how they experience this place so differently than their white counterparts.”

Written by: George Ugartemendia — science@theaggie.org

Core facilities help faculty members, students share resources across campus

Scientists across UC Davis have become part of a co-op where they collectively share laboratory equipment. A relatively new program is helping researchers reduce the cost of experiments as well as employ experts on the technologies that people from any discipline can use.

“It’s called the Research Core Facilities Program, and it was created in 2015 […] it was developed to do a better job of coordinating the shared scientific resources that we have,” said Julie Auger, the executive director of the RCFP. “So those are laboratories that have very expensive technologies or highly expert personnel, that are generally too expensive or too hard to find for individual faculty members to get access to.”

Instead of creating a lab and buying equipment for every scientist wanting to do research, the core facilities house a few expensive technologies that nearly anyone can use for their projects. There is also a listserv for individuals to find specific tools.

“They [the facilities] often start out when somebody wants to buy a very expensive piece of equipment… these things cost 200, 300, $400,000,” Auger said.

After the initial purchase price, service contracts can be bought to insure the machines will be fixed if anything goes wrong. The contracts usually cost 10 percent of the purchase price every year.

“So after the first year of warranty is up, if you have a $400,000 electron microscope that you’ve purchased, you have to put out $40,000 that next year,” Auger said. “So if you have something where only one person has access to it, and they only use it 20 percent of the time, because it’s unlikely that all of their research is dedicated to that one piece of equipment, it sits idle 80% of the time, yet that one person is responsible for all of the cost of maintaining it.”

Core facilities have a recharge for using the resources. The price varies due to the type of equipment needed, how much the facility staff needs to be involved in running the experiment and other factors. A recharge is leveled on researchers to cover the costs of running the facilities, as the core program does not make a financial profit.

The RCFP just launched a program that offsets the cost of core facilities to scientists who are trying a type of technology they have not used before in their research. This Pilot and Feasibility Program may award money to researchers up to four times this year.

Instead of purchasing expensive lab equipment for new employees at UC Davis, the school offers them the opportunity to use core facilities for a negotiated period of time free of charge. According to Auger, it is more cost-effective for departments to cover the costs of using equipment at a core facility rather than buy new machines.

Garry Pearson is the Greenhouse Manager and oversees part of the 170 greenhouses and related facilities UC Davis has. As a core facility, Pearson and his team not only work with scientists to help set up their experiments, but they also design and create about 25% of the equipment used.

“We service about 100 faculty in their research projects, so I like to say that we grow everything from artichoke to zucchini and everything else the researchers can think of in between,” Pearson said. “We have approximately 170-180 projects, they are spread across all of the disciplines within the college.”

Even though most research is done by faculty and postdoctoral students, graduate or undergraduate students working with them can have access to the projects done in partnership  with core facilities.

“Initially, what a faculty researcher will do is they would either have a master’s student or a PhD student that they would develop project protocol,” Pearson said. “If it’s a greenhouse related activity then they would present us with a space request. So then we would provide them with our perspective on where this could fit into the game plan,”

For microscopic experiments, a core facility with a flow cytometer and related equipment are available elsewhere on campus. These machines examine cells and how they react to fluorescent dyes.

“I’d say predominately graduate students [are using the equipment],” said Bridget McLaughlin, co-director of UC Davis Flow Cytometry Shared Resource. “Sometimes, undergraduate students [use the equipment], and I think it’s a wonderful technique for an undergraduate to learn, to introduce to all aspects of cell biology and fluorescent detection.”

To examine elements at parts per billion or parts per trillion, the inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy technology can be used at the Interdisciplinary Center for Plasma Mass Spectrometry. This technique has been used to date artifacts, determine the life history of fish based off their ear stones, or otolithes and see if there is a correlation between toxic metals and autism.

“It’s a pretty diverse range of things, there’s never a dull moment, there’s always a new method to tackle. We seem to be going international, we’re getting clients from all over the world that specifically want to do the fish-otolithe method, because we’re kind of known for that now,” said Justin Glessner, a spectroscopist in the facility.  “We’re an all-inclusive facility, we feel like we are a public resource, we’re publicly funded, and we want to just have open access for this type of capability for whoever needs to use it.”

A common sentiment that is expressed about the core facilities is the idea of saving money, and that in the long run it will lead to further investment in new technology for UC Davis. However, the advantages of consolidating expensive equipment to a few spaces extend beyond financial reasons.

“I think the chief benefit to having equipment that is available to investigators centrally located in a core facility is that those investigators have the access to the expert staff who have years of experience with the pitfalls and also the successful strategies for obtaining good quality data,” McLaughlin said.

Written by: Rachel Paul — science@theaggie.org

The story behind the the common game piece

Small objects are a reflection of human history, so it’s no surprise that we can learn a lot about changing worldviews through the evolution of dice. Cubic dice have been found in small numbers at various archaeological sites and date to the last 2,000 years. A recent paper analyzes the design of dice to understand social changes in history.

“We have an increasing understanding of board games found in archaeological contexts,” said Alex de Voogt, a co-author of the paper and the assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History. “Game pieces and dice are usually found separately or in isolation. We started studying dice to answer some basic questions about their design and then [the paper] came as a follow-up when we started looking at them in more detail.”

The design of the dice isn’t the only thing that can tell us about human history. It turns out the materials used to make the dice could carry a story of their own.

“I would be interested in knowing exactly what materials these bone dice [were] made out of,” said Christyann Darwent, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the chair of the Anthropology Museum. “Because they [were] probably made out of antler, they could be made out of limb bones of animals, but they could also be made out of ivory.”

Ivory at the time was a driver of the economy. When Vikings made their way to Iceland, they wiped out the entire walrus population to attain the ivory found in their tusks. The impact on the walrus population back then, which made people move toward Greenland, is seen on elephants today.

When studying objects, archaeologists look at both style and functionality of the object. In the case of dice, style would be how the numbers are put on the cube and functionality would be the shape of the cube. Normally, it can be hard to tell if an object is designed for better functionality or style. The way numbers are put on the dice doesn’t affect the function of the dice; dice provide a convenient way to separate style and function, making it easier to analyze how style and functional attributes change over the years in ways that relate to peoples’ worldviews at the time.

“So what we think is that it didn’t matter so much in Roman times that a die was not exactly a cube because the way that the die rolled and the number that came up didn’t matter,” said Jelmer Eerkens, a co-author of the paper and a professor in the Department of Anthropology.

In Roman and early Medieval times, it was thought that the world was controlled by supernatural beings or gods. Nothing was random. Everything was dictated by a supernatural entity.

“The outcome of the games were thought to be predetermined by other things, not things like chance,” Eerkens said. “As peoples’ worldviews changed and concepts like probability and chance started to enter people’s’ minds, [it] affected the way the dice appeared and they became true cubes and they also eventually came to be essentially balanced in the way that the numbers were put on the dice.”

Written by: Kriti Varghese — science@theaggie.org