LBCC: Interview with President Greg Hamann

Mike Smith worked for two weeks before he was terminated. How long after the incident with Jamaal McGinty were you aware of it?

"I knew about it pretty quickly because a faculty member chose to bring it to my attention and I became concerned about the issue."

Do you believe that employees should not confront students about their choice of dress?

"I don't think the institution should be in the role of defining what's socially acceptable. When an employee chooses to impose their standards on a student, it's a problem. I don't care if it's personally offensive, I don't want to exclude people from campus."

Do you recall a situation a few years ago involving Diane Hunsaker approaching a student wearing a shirt she was unconformable with?

"I do know about the incident. I think it's similar but maybe we concluded we didn't do that one right. The difference was Jamaal wasn't putting up with it. We love to come out of these situations learning something, always being redemptive, and saying, 'I see what we did wrong.'"

So you didn't think that this situation with Mike could have been resolved with counseling as it was with Diane?

"When you deal with people who persist in their sense of being right, that's where we have a problem. We can't be a community that includes a bias of super imposing our bias on someone else, specifically an employee. A world cannot survive if we can't learn to be tolerant of our differences. If we can come to a common understanding, termination is seldom the resolution. To the extent I understood it, I don't think there was a possibility of redemption."

Are you saying that you didn't believe Mike agreed with LBCC's opinion about the incident?

"I like to think of reality as the image of a hologram. Every one of us has a two-sided reality, which if we bring them together, we see reality more wholly. That's what we're trying to teach, and it comes down to a conversation about someone's pants. I can only speak personally, and I don't care if Jamaal is white, black or green, I wouldn't confront someone about their pants."

Was this incident handled differently than Diane's because one person was white and the other black?

"The worst possible situation is thinking we were careful because he was black. It's disrespectful to everyone. I think people want to focus on the issue and it obscures things. I think all issues stem from a larger issue. I don't think we were trying to take sides."

Did you have problems with Mike in the past?

"We have no record of students complaining about him before."

Do you think this situation was racially motivated?

"I think understanding our own motives is hard enough without understanding someone else's. There's unconscious racism, even when we don't know, we do it. Racism is still there but it's often expressed in ways we don't recognize, like cultural bias. My son is black and there are circumstances he had that I had no awareness to. It opened me up to a healthy view about reality."

I understand that Chareane Wimbley-Gouveia, who is also black, seemed very concerned about addressing the incident with Jamaal. Do you think their shared race had anything to do with it?

"Jamaal and Chareane's reality doesn't mean it's the same just because they're both black. She didn't make it out to be a prominently racial issue, rather, a sensitivity to differences and our institution's role."

It's been nine months since this occurred. Looking back are you satisfied with the outcome?

"I think for those who believe there was a racial component, conscious or not, they believe that we took a big step in affirming our cultural differences."