Yiwei Sun: Napolitano must listen to undocumented students to earn trust

If the University of California held its national summit on undocumented students last week to improve its public image, the students in attendance made sure that effort did not go unchallenged.

During UC President Janet Napolitano’s opening address at the summit – which convened students and policy experts to craft policy suggestions for undocumented student support at the UC – students stood on their chairs, raised their fists in the air and gave a coordinated speech about their mistrust in Napolitano and her office. They all walked out of the meeting room before Napolitano finished giving her address.

Denea Joseph, an undocumented student and state affairs director in the undergraduate student government’s External Vice President’s office, said undocumented students’ expectations for the summit changed when they received an updated agenda saying Napolitano might be absent from Friday’s discussions with students. She added that students don’t trust Napolitano because of her reputation as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, where Joseph said Napolitano deported more undocumented individuals then any of her predecessors.

To effectively engage in student spaces and restore trust with the undocumented community at the UC, the UC Office of the President should create transparency by communicating consistently with undocumented student groups, actively listening to student voices and following through with the suggestions crafted at the summit by the student attendees.

Administration should also establish a channel for communicating any relevant decisions with student groups across the UC. They can do this via email.

Joseph said programs organized for undocumented students are designed by administrators without students’ input. She added that undocumented students want a voice so that administration will understand their genuine needs as a community, like the need for an undocumented resource center at each of the UC campuses.

The key to keeping up communication is to keep students involved and informed about any decisions that will affect them. The updated undocumented student summit agenda, which pulled Napolitano out of a panel discussion she was originally supposed to be a part of, might have seemed like a minor change. But its significance to students was not minor, and failure to inform students about this change in a timely manner shows UCOP’s lack of willingness to engage in discussion. The sudden change contributed to undocumented students‘ protest on Thursday.

Joseph said the other motive behind Thursday’s protest was mistrust in Napolitano because of her infamous reputation as “deporter-in-chief” at the DHS.

Joseph said that to foster understanding, undocumented students must receive an apology from Napolitano for her actions as the secretary of Homeland Security from 2009-2013.

At the very least, Napolitano should issue a statement acknowledging her past in the DHS, clearly differentiating her history from her role as the UC president and stating her intentions to help undocumented students regardless of her previous career. In this way, students will be able to understand Napolitano’s motives and plans for them and might feel more compelled to hear what she has to say before deciding to protest.

The most important lesson that UCOP can take from this summit is to listen. The administration should listen to students’ needs instead of making assumptions and imposing their plans onto students. This lack of student input wastes resources and creates a barrier of misunderstanding.

Listening to students’ needs should not be a difficult change for UC administrators. There are good examples of administration answering students’ needs. For example, UCLA’s Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars has also been conducting focus group discussions to find out the needs of international students. As a result, it is able to organize workshops to address international students’ needs, such as career information and visa information.

To be fair, undocumented students have also done their part to preclude conversation. Engaging in protest and then walking out of the conference room did not facilitate cooperation. But it’s Napolitano’s unwillingness to engage in true, meaningful conversation with them, and her refusal to publicly acknowledge how her role at the DHS affected the lives of the students she now serves, that pushes students to protest.

Napolitano was able to collect students’ input from the discussion on the last day of the summit. Follow-through is expected from UCOP to make sure the policy suggestions are properly carried out and programs are able to achieve sustainable effects. UCOP should publish the progress of each separate policy concerning undocumented students on its website so they can inspect policies before anything goes wrong. This will also be of great help in winning students’ trust and laying a foundation of cooperation for future interactions.

Administration and student groups’ effective conversation is based on a thin layer of trust. Trust is delicate but reinforceable. Transparency, understanding and responsibility are the cornerstones of trust. To prevent future instances of protest that will stall a two-way conversation, the administration should recognize their roles in student affairs and actively maintain trust with student groups. Otherwise, more instances of protest will be expected in the long term.