Last fall, 1.6% of Cal Poly's freshman applicants were Black; by comparison, about 4% of California's public high school graduates were Black and college-ready in 2021.
space regularly filled with 15 students who squeeze in to study, nap, plan their course schedules and socialize. The stories of overt racism some students shared with CalMatters were familiar to those relayed by other Black students in the room.
Tshishimbi, who identifies as African American, expressed his struggles with befriending white students. Unlike with his Black friends on campus, he hides the full dynamism of his personality around white students, in part because he fears that being Black and male is viewed as a threat — “more aggressive and more dangerous,” he said.
If other Black students were in the room with her that day, being called the N-word “would have never happened,” Corey said. “‘Hey, look, there’s a Black kid,’” he remembers them saying. “‘Let’s scare him.’” Betwos said the two men, who appeared to be in their 50s, crossed the road to his side of the street. He was nervous, he said, but joked with them. Eventually they peeled off at an intersection and left Betwos alone.
Cal Poly administrators also turned down CalMatters’ request for a separate interview to discuss the campus response to racist acts on campus. Lazier, the campus spokesperson,to specifically address the campus climate, which CalMatters is sharing. In the 600-word email, Lazier wrote that students should report any racist incident to campus officials. However, “it is important to note the limitations the university faces in disciplining any campus community member for racist speech.” As a public institution, Cal Poly is “bound by law to uphold the First Amendment rights of those who study, work, visit, or live on our campus,” Lazier wrote —in 2018 after the outcry over a student wearing Blackface.
One scholar thinks Cal Poly’s low number of enrolled Black students alone paints a picture of a racist climate that can dissuade other Black students from applying. “Racism, especially at an institutional level, doesn’t require any form of intent and doesn’t even require individual actors,” said Whitney N. L. Pirtle, a sociologist at UC Merced who studies race and ethnicity. “I think the numbers are evidence enough.
In his first email, Lazier, the Cal Poly spokesperson, didn’t attribute the campus’s struggles to attract Black students to campus climate, but rather to its cost. He noted that Cal Poly ends up being more expensive because the UCs “have been able to offer more financial aid to students with lower incomes,” he wrote, which he argues attracts a larger share of Black and other students of color.than the Cal State system average.
But other public universities such as UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt have similar local diversity constraints and still manage to attract a greater share of Black students — as applicants and as students. And unlike other Cal State campuses that enroll students who typically grew up near campus, Cal Poly attracts interest statewide and beyond.
Third-year student Mikayla Santiago, who’s African American and Puerto Rican, counts four times she’s been in a class with another Black student — and never in any of her major classes tied to animal science or psychology. Without a Black person in class with her, she feels a dual burden. Such swings are common at Cal Poly: Because the campus has so few Black students, graduating a few more students in one year dramatically increases its six-year graduation rate for those students. Last year it graduated 28 Black students. This year it graduated 24. That pales in comparison to the roughly 4,000 students the school graduates annually.An obvious solution to ending the isolation Black students experience on campus is to attract more Black students. But it’s not that easy.
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