Three signs adorn the walls of the big meeting room in the Tuttleman Learning Center’s 100 suite, home of Temple’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership. A large board at the back of the room chronicles the personalities who fought against apartheid, South’s Africa’s brutal system of racial separation: Bishop Desmond Tutu. Winnie Mandela. Steve Biko.
At the front hang the other two displays. They tell of the former colony’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of those who spent the years after apartheid’s end trying to stitch together a free, unified nation in its wake.
Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., the images of South Africa’s liberators kept watch as IDEAL convened the office’s first public event since it came under threat. Roughly four dozen students gathered in Tuttleman 100 to hear brief comments from a trio of panelists and ask Prad a series of questions via text-based chat.
Prad, the Ed.D. serving as the Office’s director of student engagement, referred to the signs multiple times as he addressed the news of the day in the United States. He believes each frame offers hope, testifying to the power of people from disparate backgrounds to make positive change. And he’ll keep referencing them at IDEAL events, he said.
Assuming the government still allows colleges and universities to talk about apartheid, anyway.
President Donald Trump’s administration last Friday issued yet another sweeping policy change, assailing a range of programs known as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or DEI, as illegal and “morally reprehensible”. The Department of Education-authored memo gives schools until Feb. 28 to ax programs Washington now deems “woke.”
Programs centering the history and activism of once-disenfranchised groups, the letter argued, commit a form of racial discrimination. So do the institutions that offer them, it read.
If DOE policymakers find their demands unmet at month’s end, they could try to cancel the funding it sends to the offending institutions, including billions of dollars in federal student aid.
Temple President John Fry promptly announced that the university had placed its programs under review — “to ensure that our policies and practices align with all legal requirements,” he wrote in a statement on the university website.
It bears repeating that the U.S. Constitution didn’t magically rearrange its lettering when the clock struck noon on Jan. 20: Executive branch agencies can’t simply pocket cash Congress already promised. In theory.
But America’s laws aren’t Formula One, a rigid set of regulations with guaranteed punishments for violators. They’re more like tennis — formal rules atop a scaffold of informal norms, empowered only by participants’ goodwill.
Wednesday’s town hall had been set several weeks in advance. Its scheduled theme: Students’ experiences of Being Black at Temple. Three panelists joined Prad at the front of the room: Global Studies Society vice president Daniela James, Aaron A. Stanford of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and Delta Sigma Theta chapter president Leah Harvey.
They stuck to the theme, recounting what it was like to be a Black student at a majority-white school smack dab in the middle of a historic African American neighborhood.
On a different night, the crowd might have focused on the matter at hand, too. The Q&A Prad led afterwards may well have featured students wondering about day-to-day issues.
But several dozen people packed into the room and stretched its seating capacity close to the limit. TV equipment lay in camera bags between the aisles, at the feet of restive student-journalists. And students spent the event’s interactive portion sending nervous anonymous messages that appeared, like early-aughts texts, behind Prad on a large projector screen.
Attendees mostly asked about the Trump administration’s orders; whether IDEAL and programs like it would continue to exist; and what to do if the Office suddenly disappeared. True to form, Prad projected calm. He didn’t plan to go anywhere, he said. He also intimated peace: IDEAL, he said, doesn’t violate the law — or force white people to do things that make them uncomfortable, as Trump officials often claim.
“I have faith in our senior administration and our general counsel,” Prad said after the event. “I know that they are definitely making decisions that are grounded in legal principles. So, I think we’re going to be fine regardless.”
Still, he acknowledged that the current White House could seemingly decide to do anything at any time.
Scholars of authoritarianism often repeat the line that tyranny doesn’t just arrive in the form of legal punishment. Liberties often die of civic hypothermia, thanks to a chill longer-lasting than any winter weather.
Fear of Trump and his ukase blitzkrieg is the zeitgeist driving institutions across public life: Teachers and preachers daily guess the odds that ICE agents will turn their sanctums into human hunting grounds. Those living beyond dominant concepts of gender wake every morning, wondering if the government that takes their taxes still tolerates their existence — and whether anyone in power will care if it doesn’t. And everyone from pregnant women to polio survivors increasingly find their most basic healthcare safeguards hanging by a thread.
America had its election. The consequences arrived hard and fast.
“It’s just shell shock,” said Amir Fripp. The junior health sciences major had begun to worry about America’s fate in high school, when a flood of sexual misconduct allegations failed to sink Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But even as Trump himself re-ascended to power, Fripp believed some institutions sat beyond the MAGA legions’ reach.
“You think, ‘No, the schools can’t be affected,’” Fripp said. “And then here we are now.”
The sheer volume of Trump’s edicts from the Oval office left many of his usual opponents overextended, panicked and cowed. That’s the point.
But it might get harder to implement his vision from here: Trump and his agencies are reaching far enough, fast enough and deep enough into American life to rouse opposition forces from a winter in hibernation.
“As long as the clubs and the student body are active, and want to see a change, and want to push for continuous change — whether that’s at the university or within our community — we’re still always going to be fighting,” said senior international business major Camryn Taliaferro.
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