Healing and moving on
By Jonathan Gramling
Part 2 of 2
Since the incident, UW officials have been holding discussions below the radar with representatives of the Hmong community to put some measures in place that may lessen the chances of a similar incident occurring again on the Madison campus. On July 28, UW Chancellor John Wiley formally met with members of the Hmong community at United Asian Services of Wisconsin to talk about the new initiatives that the UW-Madison was considering or had implemented to make the Madison campus more relevant to the needs of the Hmong community. However, while the event sought to look to the future, the Kaplan incident still loomed large in the minds of the over 50 members of the Hmong community in attendance.
After giving opening remarks about the university and himself to create a context for the answers that he would provide to the questions from the audience, Wiley then fielded questions from the audience, many of them focused on the Kaplan incident.
In the second part of a two-part question, Johnny Lee compared the firing of CBS's Don Imus to the Professor Kaplan situation and asked if the university shouldn't be held to a higher standard than CBS.
Wiley replied that the university is governed by a special set of rules than a workplace like CBS. "The university is supposed to be a place where all ideas are explored, even offensive ideas," Wiley said. ''Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that we encourage people to try and be disrespectful or hurtful in their comments. But we do try to teach that when things like that happen, the best remedy to bad speech is more speech, not sanctions such as firing. That would discourage other people from speaking out freely on other controversial topics and areas. We cannot afford to do that as a university. We have to be open to all ideas, even obnoxious ideas and then talk about them and refute them and defeat them."
Chong Tou Yang asked the Chancellor to refer him to a university that is more culturally understanding of the Hmong community.
Wiley replied that it is the different people interacting on campus that give the university its vitality. "I'm equally sure that we have students -- and probably all universities do -- who came from very small communities in rural parts of the state where they have had no exposure to anyone at all who is very different from themselves," Wiley replied. "And they are in a learning process too. They're learning how to get along in a much more diverse world than the one they grew up in. I hope what you will decide to do is come to UW-Madison. I know this sounds like putting some of the burden on you; I'm sorry about that; but come and help us to educate the White students from rural Wisconsin or inner city Chicago who have never seen any other students other than Black students or from New York who have never been outside the northeast or from Hong Kong or Africa. We have a very large diverse community. And learning to get along together is part of the job of education."
"From my personal experience, I told you that I grew up in southern Indiana," Wiley continued. "That was a long time ago before most of you were born. And the U.S. at that time, segregation was legal. I went to an all White school. No students in any school I attended as a child were anything but White. There was an all Black school in my city as well. The very first time I encountered African Americans, Latinos and students from other parts of the world including Indonesia and Thailand where I made some very good friends on the badminton team, the first time that happened for me was when I went to college. That was a very valuable part of my education. I am hoping that you will decide to come to UW-Madison and be an important part of someone else's education."
Chuck Yang compared the Professor Kaplan incident to what happened with Dr. Paul Barrows and asked why Kaplan wasn't demoted like Barrows was.
Wiley replied by saying that Barrows and Kaplan's positions are different. While Kaplan is a tenured professor with certain contractual rights, Barrows was in a discretionary administrative position where Wiley could remove Barrows without explanation. Wiley emphasized that Barrows was removed from the position and not demoted.
Kabzuag Vaj, the director of Freedom, Inc., asked whether or not the university was going to apologize for the incident. "Sometimes we look upon you as the father figure and the parent in this situation," Vaj said. "And if you see two children playing and one accidentally harms the other, you make the other one apologize. It's just the right thing to do. We feel as a community it is only the right thing to do, which is respectful. We would like a public apology from the university if not from Professor Kaplan. We haven't heard or seen an apology. So tonight, I want to say we want one and we would like it to be public."
Wiley began his response by saying that as the Chancellor of the university, he is often under many legal constraints on what he can say in public. "I am often constrained in what I am allowed to say for legal reasons," Wiley said. "Do I regret that an incident occurred that caused great hurt in the Hmong community? Absolutely yes, I regret that. In that sense, I apologize to you that this happened. I could apologize in advance for any similar thing that may ever happen in the future. I hope it doesn't. But of course, we regret that. I can't promise that nothing like this will ever happen again with Professor Kaplan or with anyone else. I would say the same thing to any community including religious communities, White communities from a different part of the country including people of different European ancestry and including every visibly identifiable racial minority. There is something in human nature that recognizes differences and uses them to cause divisions. What the university is trying to be all about is recognizing differences and treating them as strengths and learning from them."
Jouakao Vang wanted to know if the Chancellor was planning to put a Hmong in his office as a liaison to the Hmong community.
"I do have a Hmong community liaison person in my office now who happens not to be Hmong," Wiley replied. "There's no possible way that I could have a representative of every identifiable cultural or ethnic and racial group in my office. You may have noticed over the past six years, the state of Wisconsin has cut our budget every single year. And every single one of those cuts, I was told to take it out of administration. I'm now told that I have to cut even more out of my administration. There is no way in this environment that I can add staff in the Chancellor's office. Now having said that, we are, as I said in my prepared remarks, in the planning stages of a Hmong Cultural Center on campus and we are actively seeking to hire additional advisors, some of whom I hope will be Hmong. The problem you identify is one we are very much aware of and very actively seeking to solve as resources allow."
After the meeting Fuechou Thao, who had introduced the session with the Chancellor, reflected on the outcome of the evening. "My overall impression is that this is a slow process to heal," Thao said. "But we will continue to work with the Chancellor's office to see if some of the outcomes that the community is asking for will happen on the university level. For instance, the faculty and the community have been working together to propose to the university for the Hmong studies program. I am very pleased that he has mentioned it and that he supports it. I think we will work together to make it happen in the near future."
MaiZong Vue, who interpreted Wiley's remarks, felt it was a good first step. "I think this is a good beginning to a beginning," Vue said. "We hope this is not the end of the beginning. We hope it is a beginning that will prosper and be fruitful for the Hmong community. This is a mini step towards many other projects and many more things to come in the future."
For perhaps the first time in its history, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is engaging the Hmong community as a whole. While a lot of hurt and turmoil was caused by the Kaplan incident, on a positive note, the incident has led the university to take measures to interface with the Hmong community, to release the private anger that many Hmong felt about the Kaplan incident and to improve the campus climate for Hmong students. Sometimes, positive does come out of negative.
September 5, 2007 Archives