There was barely a single open seat remaining in the screening room of Columbia College Chicago's downtown campus. On Feb. 26, college president Kwang-Wu Kim and film/video department chair Dr. Bruce Sheridan were part of an audience for one of two screenings of Black Sheep—a documentary the school's Black Film Society made that aimed to send a clear message to Sheridan, Kim and Columbia's administration: When it comes to the Black and minority students who dream of becoming the next generation of filmmakers, the school's film department needs to do better.
The 30-minute documentary seemed to stun the audience with its powerful mix of a roundtable discussion and interviews with current and former Black students and faculty members—including Vaun Monroe, one of the only two Black teachers in the film program. It challenged the department's diversity in both its curriculum and faculty.
"Students of color are saying that they are not seeing their experiences and themselves represented on the screen," said Columbia College Cinema Arts and Science Professor Jennifer Peepas in the documentary. "And I think that's absolutely true, when you look at the films that we screen."
"There are certain filmmakers they [the film department] just don't want to talk about," Columbia Alum Jessica Estelle Huggins asserted. "If a Black filmmaker comes up, it's like Tyler Perry or Spike Lee."
The other students featured in the documentary all agreed. When it came to Columbia's film department's demonstration of the heights a Black filmmaker could reach, it was Spike Lee or nothing.
"They didn't expose us to anything except Spike Lee," one current sophomore shrugged. "And I missed the day that they screened that."
"Columbia College, there are more Black directors than Spike Lee!" echoed another.
Even more disturbing, the students asserted that they weren't allowed to present their own ideas during classroom projects. "I had pitched a documentary about gang violence in Chicago," senior Jade Ivy said. "I was told that my idea had not gotten picked. I got partnered with a guy that was doing a documentary about ferrets."
Linda Garcia Merchant was a first-year MFA student in film and video at Columbia. She holds a B.S. with honors from Western Illinois University and has served as a member of numerous groups in Chicago, including the Lesbian Leadership Council of the Chicago Foundation for Women. In 2006, she formed her own company that, by 2011, had produced five documentaries.
Merchant—who was given a fellowship to attend Columbia—was inexplicably asked to leave the program. "It made no sense to me," she remembered. "My only response was, 'but I want to teach.' I really don't want to believe, but I always wonder, that if I had come in here in a different skin, in a different gender, I think that talent would have been cultivated and would have been supported."
In summing up Black Sheep, Black Film Society President Raina McKinley said, "I wanted to be sure that the voices of Black film students are given a chance to be heard. All too often, the voices of Black film students at Columbia are overlooked and they get lost in the crowd."
"Columbia's reputation as a diverse school is at stake here. It does not practice what it preaches," Black Film Society Vice President Don Whisler stated.
During a talk-back session after the film's screening, Kim said he appreciated the educational imperative presented in the film: "This is not just about students or brown students or yellow students or purple students. It's about asking the question 'why in a school like Columbia College Chicago is this more than the standard quota conversation that exists in higher education all across the country?' We're talking about a merging culture in a world that is changing. "
Kim pledged that he would activate a more diverse model of education that would begin with the hiring of new Provost Dr. Stanley T. Wearden, Ph.D.
Kim announced the decision on the same day as the screening of the film. Wearden is currently a dean at Kent State University, "a school that is predominantly white," Kim acknowledged. "[He's] working very hard to bring in faculty of color, to expand definitions of diversity. I think there's a lot of opportunity for him here."
Kim told Windy City Times that he was not surprised by the film, saying, "It's always different though to see something that's really thought through and well put together as this was." He added that he wants to respond to the Black Film Society in a constructive way: "I want them to meet with our incoming Provost so that he understands how we're thinking about the issues of diversity here."
Meanwhile, Sheridan claimed that while he was pleased to see Black Sheep, he didn't believe it to be a film about the department or the college: "It was 25 minutes of people speaking. It's a film about what people think. These are things that any student would be concerned about. "
He asserted that the department always had an open curriculum, saying, "There's never been a rule in this college that students couldn't ask for a curriculum. They just didn't ask. So now they will. So that's good."
Responding to the film's assertions of a lack of diversity in a curriculum, Sheridan said that he always tried to run classes that students wanted, but ultimately blamed enrollment figures: "More often than not, the classes don't run because students don't enroll."
He insisted that the department showcased a lot more films than those of Spike Lee. "I did a Q&A with Richard Roundtree," he said. "In the classroom, we're showing Van Peebles, Gordon Parks—but my point is that it's easy to fall back on Spike Lee. All we do is look at the learning outcomes. Will they learn from it?"
Sheridan also insisted that Columbia always sponsors the Black Perspectives program of the Chicago International Film Festival: "We asked for the Africa emphasis and we give out tickets to our students to get engaged in this festival and a lot of students just don't go."
"That's just not true," said Marcus Martin, the co-founder of the Black Film Society and a recent graduate of Columbia. "We've all attended the Black Perspectives annually without any notification from Bruce Sheridan. He invited us once, last year, after we had told him we wanted more diversity in the faculty.
As an example, Martin cited a time when Black students in the department wanted to attend the American Black Film Festival. "We sent [Sheridan] a proposal and didn't hear anything," Martin said. "It wasn't until I had a conversation with the former President Carter that I get an email the next day from Sheridan."
He said that Sheridan gave the money to send three students to attend the festival: "I'm thinking the school is supporting us now, but when we came back, the rules had been changed. They said that students could no longer attend festivals because they have social content and not just educational perspectives."
Martin said he believes that Columbia's administration is just playing a waiting game: "They're hoping that once Black History Month passes, they're not going to have hear any more about this."
Related coverage at the link: www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Black-film-students-at-Columbia-aim-to-have-work-recognized/46291.html .
