Administrators should donate to Black Lives Matter

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Although USC has taken steps to express solidarity with its Black student community and the national Black Lives Matter movement, the administration must take its advocacy a step further and contribute proactively in the form of public and personal monetary donations. 

Considering that President Carol Folt will be offered a similar salary as that of her predecessor, C. L. Nikias — who “earned an annual base pay of more than $1 million” according to the Los Angeles Times and was the eighth-highest paid university chief executive in his final year according to The Chronicle of Higher Education — her lack of a personal public contribution is jarring. It is no far stretch to assume that Folt would not be worse off if she donated. 

USC’s steps to demonstrate solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that ensued have ranged from the welcomed (after years of student advocacy, the University finally removed known eugenicist Rufus von KleinSmid’s name from the formerly known Von KleinSmid Center) to the performative (although the University called attention to the USC Black Lives Matter March, administrators were visibly absent from the protest). Most notable among the missing administrators was Folt herself: While a University spokesperson expressed she did not attend for health reasons but “was very supportive of the march,” her lack of direct support was called out by those who commented on USC’s Instagram post about the protests.

That is not to say that Folt has remained completely silent on the issue. On May 31, she addressed the necessity of dealing with racism on campus in a communitywide email, stating that “we need to rely on each other and help each other and our neighbors through these times.” However, without the follow-through required to validate these comments, these statements begin to assume a form of performativity that renders the initial message, no matter how sincere, counterproductive. For an administrator who did not even show up to the single campuswide Black Lives Matter protest, her actions (or lack thereof) only confirm the distance that Folt has from those protesting.

This begs the question of what Folt can feasibly do to cement her allyship and elevate the University’s Black community. Personally donating to organizations in the Los Angeles area, along with larger California-based organizations, would be a fantastic start. Organizations such as Community Coalition, which works to develop a “community institution that involves thousands in creating, influencing and changing public policy,” and JusticeLA, which is based around “reclaiming, reimagining and reinvesting dollars away from incarceration and into community-based systems of care,” would certainly benefit from large financial contributions. No one loses in this scenario: Folt can establish that she is willing to put money where her mouth is, local organizations can rake in large amounts of funding and USC students can feel confident that their president did not settle for performative activism.

In addition, Folt would have the rare opportunity to set a national standard; university chief executives across the United States are failing to support their Black students beyond half-baked messages of solidarity and the occasional renaming of a building with a racist namesake. If Folt were to come forth with a sizable donation to a local organization, especially if it were a personal donation directly from her own funds, she could potentially pave the way for other university presidents to step forward with financial donations of their own.

It is not only Folt who should feel the pressure of this financial obligation; other elite administrators, most of whom are paid exorbitant amounts, ought to fulfill this duty as well. According to the L.A. Times, football head coach Clay Helton was paid roughly $3.2 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year. Andy Enfield, the current men’s basketball head coach at USC, was paid almost $2.8 million in the same year. Sure, Helton was quoted on June 9 telling the Hotline that “If a young man wants to take a knee, [Helton’s] job is to support them” — but words are nowhere near enough. Considering that top sports executives such as Helton and Enfield profit off of the hard work put in by Black student-athletes, it is insulting that these executives do not publicly donate to the Black Lives Matter movement as a show of solidarity with their students.

If Folt stepped forward with a personal financial donation, it would send the powerful message that administrators and university chief executives ought to directly incite tangible change rather than just encourage it. There is no better time for a statement like this to be made — it’s up to Folt to follow through.