Michelle Hicks, left, and Ericka Bryan, members of Willamette University’s STEAM Collective, talk at The Bistro on campus. (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
A harassment complaint in the Willamette University theatre department has evolved into spreading concerns from students about on-campus bias and how seriously college administrators take their concerns.
About a dozen students are asking Willamette faculty and administrators to change policies on sexual misconduct and racial bias and do more to support faculty and students of color. They’re calling themselves the Students for Transparency, Equity and Accountability through Mobilization, or STEAM, Collective.
At a crowded town hall meeting in late February, those students presented university administrators with nine demands, and passed a microphone around for others to share their concerns.
“It was really out of a cumulative amount of grievances and pain, and also to see things change,” said senior Asalia Arauz, a member of the collective, who said she’s been frustrated by what she and other student see as a lack of transparency and follow-through on commitments from the administration.
In addition to policy changes, students are asking the university to reinstate the American Ethnic Studies major, which was last offered in the 2014-15 school year, hire a full-time community service director, increase staffing for the university’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and conduct a third-party review of Greek life on campus.
Willamette has about 1,600 undergraduate students.
Video of the town hall shared by Daniel King on Facebook.
Administrators at that meeting said they took the students’ concerns seriously and wanted to work to address them.
“We are here because we all really care about making this place better as well,” said Jade Aguilar, the university’s vice president of equity, diversity and inclusion, addressing students at the town hall.
The university plans to hold a series of forums to talk to involved students, faculty and others about each demand over the coming weeks, said Willamette spokesman Adam Torgerson.
He said the university wants to address student concerns, but said many of their demands require involvement of the faculty and multiple departments.
“Many of them are issues colleges have been grappling with for decades and we’re not going to solve (all of) them by spring break,” he said.
Several incidents led to the demands, student leaders said, including the theatre department’s handling of a sexual harassment complaint filed fall semester.
Dawn-Hunter Strobel, a junior theatre major and the university’s lead student theatre recruiter, said he filed a complaint with the university Nov. 2 after several students in the department told him and other student leaders they’d experienced persistent harassment and unsolicited explicit sexual comments from a classmate in theatre settings.
That complaint, which includes the name of the accused student, is not public.
Strobel said he and classmates wanted to see that student removed from a supervisor position so he couldn’t use that role to inappropriately engage people in sexual conversations.
Instead, students found out in mid-December that he had been cast in a role in “A Servant of Two Masters,” an 18th century Italian comedy, where he would be “making out with lots of tongue” with a classmate on stage, Strobel said.
Student Reilly Blue had been harassed by that student and felt uncomfortable sharing the stage with him, Blue said in an email.
Strobel and other theatre students met with faculty on Dec. 17 and asked them to recast the play in light of those concerns. They declined, Strobel said.
Blue then decided to step down instead. In a Dec. 18 email, theatre chair Bobby Brewer-Wallin emailed Blue.
“We hear you and understand your decision to resign your role in “Servant of Two Masters” and to not support the art of one of the other cast members,” Brewer-Wallin wrote, adding that Blue would be on scholarship probation for declining an assigned role.
Probation means a student continues to receive a scholarship, but could lose that scholarship if they don’t participate in a subsequent production, Torgerson said. He said federal privacy laws bar the university from commenting on individual student situations, but said no theater students lost scholarship money because of the conflict or cancellations.
But Blue, Strobel and their classmates felt a victim of harassment was being punished for taking steps to keep themselves safe.
They later learned from faculty the accused harasser was willing to step down from his role, Strobel said, but theatre faculty urged him not to.
“It seemed that the faculty just didn’t want to deal with it,” Strobel said. Theatre students voted to strike in early February until their concerns were addressed.
Theatre faculty as a group to cancel the show, as well as a scheduled production of “Public Enemy” later in the spring, Torgerson said, because students were unwilling to work unless demands were met.
Revenue from “A Servant of Two Masters” was to fund the second production, Torgerson said.
Ruth Feingold, the university dean of liberal arts, announced the decision in a campus-wide email Feb. 9 citing “an unresolvable conflict.”
The collective is asking that students impacted by the cancellations be paid a wage equal to what they would have earned working on the shows.
STEAM Collective members Asalia Arauz reads a Willamette Collegian article about the collective’s demands. (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
Other collective members said their action was spurred more by experiencing racism on campus.
Arauz and senior Michelle Hicks said a recent luau-themed fraternity recruitment event was among the incidents that started them talking about race at Willamette.
A luau is a traditional native Hawaiian event, and Hicks, who is Korean-American, said she felt uncomfortable seeing a largely white fraternity commodify it to attract new members.
When she, Arauz and other students of color began discussing the party on Twitter, they received pushback “commenting that we needed to be thankful for what we had,” Arauz said.
Hicks and Arauz said that response is common when students of color discuss problems they have on campus. Often, fellow students tell them they’re privileged to attend college, Arauz said, which ignores the fact that she works three jobs every semester to pay bills and still experiences racism.
Sophomore Ericka Bryan, a first-generation Thai-American, said she’s often stared or glared at while walking around campus or questioned when trying to enter buildings after hours.
Bryan said once she and another student of color were sitting in an empty classroom 10 minutes before class started when a faculty member walked in and started interrogating them about whether they went to Willamette.
“I’ve definitely had classes where people ask me if I’m an affirmative action hire or admission,” she said.
University policy prohibits racism that rises to the level of harassment and has a grievance process for students or staff to submit complaints, but has no statement or process for addressing cultural appropriation, something students would like to see change.
Torgerson said the university is clear in its commitment to being a welcoming campus in its handbook and policies, but is legally limited in what it can do to address speech and actions that don’t constitute harassment.
“I don’t know of a standard that we could reasonably apply” without running afoul of people’s rights, he said. “In the context of regulating any speech or anybody’s actions we have to be really cognizant of people’s liberties.”
Beyond the list of demands, Bryan said collective members want to see Willamette do more proactive work to welcome and support marginalized students on campus rather than relying on students will full course schedules and multiple jobs to identify problems.
“The burden of labor shouldn’t fall on students. There are people that get paid to do that,” she said.
Correction: Reilly Blue was cast in A Servant of Two Masters, but not in a role requiring physical intimacy on stage. Dawn-Hunter Strobel is a junior, not a senior.
Reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
