Personal and Institutional Shame: Spellman or CMC?

Within Lebron’s account of systemic racial inequality, he points to both the shame on a personal and institutional level. He claims that institutions and people can both have bad character, and there seems to be a tension between who or what can be held accountable. Lebron notes both that institutions are not “merely an emergent property of a collectivity of individuals’ decisions” but are also “created by people and susceptible to being shaped by human agency” (56). When he discusses racial inequality as something systemic, he looks to the history of institutions to point out how the racial inequities were enshrined into institutions. When an institution realizes it is straying from its most important commitments, such as slavery in discordance with constitutionally protected human equality, they should feel shame. Lebron holds that this institutional shame can be used as a “political vehicle” for change. Yet, in his last sentences, he holds that people, on a personal level, “in the quiet of the night, alone with [their reflections]” can “make significant gains” towards a more equal society (153). It seems that Lebron himself is confused on if institutional or personal shame can really create change.

When loosely applying this to the rupture of campus climate last semester, I felt a similar tension, especially regarding Dean Spellman’s resignation. When the flyers inundated every inch of campus, each grievance towards the college read on the bottom of it “this is not an acute incident”. This echoes Lebron’s understanding that the problem is systemic, not “merely a collection of discrete instances of inequality” (34). This seemed reasonable to many students on campus, as reflected by a lack of institutional support of marginalized groups, lack of African-American professors, lack of student ethnic diversity, and the historic creation of CMC, mostly originally populated by the GI-Bill era of many privileged white men. Although CMC has come a long way from that standard, it was—and still is—visible that there is a long way to go in terms of inclusion on campus.

However, when two students did not eat until Mary Spellman stepped down, the pair seemed to put acute pressure on an individual to take responsibility—and forfeit her career—for an institution wide, systemic issue. Taylor Lemmons published on her blog that Spellman’s infamous email was not an acute incident, either, that Spellman had a history of failing to support marginalized groups on campus. The obvious response to that would be: Did Dean Spellman have any resources to point these students towards? Or was she simply failing to do her job on the basis of being a supportive figure to all students at CMC? In her resignation email, Spellman nodded to this systemic issue “Most important, I hope this will help enable a truly thoughtful, civil and productive discussion about the very real issues of diversity and inclusion facing Claremont McKenna, higher education and other institutions across our society”. When alluding to this notion within her resignation entitled “Difficult Decision” it seems that Spellman herself was under a similar tension that I see within Lebron. Was Spellman’s resignation a necessary personal step, a product of personal shame, integral to taking more substantive institutional steps? Or was her resignation not warranted, since Spellman, too, was rooted in a system of implicit bias and racial inequality, an institution that has systemic problems for which she, herself, could not be held accountable? I am not sure, and wondering if we can reflect a bit on this using the framework of Lebron, with a little bit of space from the tumult of last semester.