The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  With pressure from teachers and students mounting, Noe canceled D’Souza’s speech. (The school, which still had to pay D’Souza’s fee, ended up substituting William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative.) The cancellation incensed many parents and alumni, who saw it as censorship. The local press soon got wind of the whole mess, followed shortly by right-wing blogs and the national media. When D’Souza appeared on FOX News’s Hannity & Colmes, Lakeside issued a statement: “We realized Mr. D’Souza’s presence could cause emotional pain to many at our school including our increasingly diverse student body.” D’Souza chatted amicably with the sympathetically outraged hosts—Susan Estrich was subbing for Colmes—for a few minutes, blaming his cancellation on Lakeside’s “Kabbalah” faculty before the show cut to Greta Van Susteren, who had an update on a young, white American woman gone missing in Aruba.

  The situation at Lakeside continued to worsen. A few weeks after the D’Souza uproar broke out, Pollock taught in her American Cultural Literacy class, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” as well as the response of the city’s white clergy to King’s calls for desegregation. She asked the students to look at how the clergymen called blacks in Birmingham “our negroes” and labeled King an “outside agitator.”

  Pollock tells me that a few boys in the class began to question her. “They not only denied the possessiveness of the language, this one person and two of his friends, every word I said they argued back, every word that I said they questioned,” Pollock says. “So I started talking about the concept of possessiveness, of whites possessing blacks, about how the first laws instituting slavery were laws against women, so that a white man could create his own workforce by buying a woman and raping her, and raping all of his children, raping his daughter and raping his granddaughter, and I said that directly that way, I said that’s how black people came to look like me.”

  The boys questioned how Pollock, who is light-skinned with reddish hair and freckles, knew it was rape. Couldn’t a slave love her master? they asked. Sensing that the discussion was getting out of hand, Pollock tells me, she cut it off. One of the students then told her, “By stopping this conversation, you are intellectually raping us.” Pollock says she ended the class, had the students leave, and wrote up what had happened. Later that day, she says, she walked into the lunchroom and overheard the boy who accused her of “intellectual rape” bashing her to a group of students. Pollock walked up and told him, “You’re not the first little white boy to challenge me, and you won’t be the last.”

  In response, Noe placed Pollock on probation. The school’s academic director arranged a meeting between Pollock and the boys. Pollock says the boys accused her of “exploiting” her students. Pollock, at that point, felt that the administration was not going to give her any support, so she resigned.

  After Pollock disappeared from the school—the administration said she left for “health reasons”—Chance Sims, on February 14, sent an e-mail to the school’s staff titled “A Valentine for Kim Pollock.” It read, in part, “Some will say that [Pollock] was uncompromising, antagonistic, difficult and selfish but those who knew her knew that she was a rare individual with a heart and mind that was unmatched. I have heard administrators say that her departure was inevitable. After learning that the administration is spending hundreds of hours dealing with the D’Souza debacle, I’m left to wonder how this school might look if the administration spent hundreds of hours supporting retention efforts.” Sims closed the e-mail by quoting Pollock’s favorite passage from the Audre Lorde essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” which reads, in part: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

  Noe responded by placing Sims on a two-month probation and postponed offering him a contract for the next year. “Chance, no one has a problem with points you raise or the messages you promote at Lakeside, but rather the way in which you raise them,” Noe wrote in his letter informing Sims of the probation. “It is at a point where your method of delivery is unacceptable: it undermines the sense of community we are trying to build at the school.”

  During all this, many alums and parents weren’t feeling any sense of community at all. One parent wrote to the Seattle Weekly, “As for the lofty goals of Lakeside, it’s getting downright creepy. Not only do kids only hear from left-leaning speakers, the constant mantra about diversity and saving the world has made many of them tune out. The lecturing about privilege, materialism, poverty, diversity and class is starting to feel like a religious crusade. And with Bill Gates’ donation of $40 million to further this campaign, it only becomes more fervent.” At the end of February, Noe sent a letter to parents and alumni to explain the D’Souza cancellation. “I am sorry that this proved so controversial a decision,” he wrote. “I had to weigh the relative values of going ahead with the lecture—possibly bringing about a disruptive, no-holds-barred debate—and of risking setbacks to our ability to build the inclusive community we seek to be.”

  By the end of the academic year, five of the six newly hired minority teachers had left the school: Coleman, Pollock, the two Latina teachers, and the East Indian. Sims, who had been accepted to a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, stayed on in a part-time position. Pollock returned to teach at Bellevue Community College.

  In October 2006, Sims and Coleman filed a lawsuit accusing Lakeside of creating a racially hostile work environment. Lakeside hired one of Seattle’s most prominent law firms to fight the case. It produced thousands of pages of documents, including copies of meeting notes, e-mails, and depositions. In January 2008, a federal judge dismissed Coleman’s suit, writing that she offered only “subjective evidence to support her claims.” Sims’s case continued, though. In September 2008, one week before it was set to go to trial, Sims and Lakeside agreed on a confidential settlement. The school’s problems weren’t over, though. In June 2009, Regina Higgins, an African American who taught at the school for a decade, filed another discrimination lawsuit against the school. In it, she claims that she was fired after she raised concerns about the treatment of black students and teachers at Lakeside. Her case has not yet gone to court.

  The D’Souza controversy hit at the core weakness of Lakeside’s diversity mission. While nearly everyone agrees that “diversity,” in a broad sense, is a desirable thing, what exactly that means in the real world is hard to define. Is it simply letting in more students and teachers of color and then assuming they will assimilate to the “Lakeside Way”? Or does it mean that the majority of students should somehow change to be more accommodating of students who come from different racial, ethnic, or financial backgrounds? Isn’t one of the main functions of institutions such as Lakeside preparing and shaping students to assume positions of power in society? If so, how exactly does “diversity”—letting in more people of different economic and racial backgrounds—fit in with that?

  One day, Chris Dickinson, who is active in the Lakeside alumni network, brings up the D’Souza cancellation. He tells me that scuttling the speech angered him. He thought the whole thing had been mishandled. A better approach, he says, would have been to do what Princeton did when he was a student there and it had invited the political scientist Charles Murray to speak. Murray had just published the book The Bell Curve, an extremely controversial work that includes the claim that African Americans haven’t done as well because they have genetically lower IQs. In response to an uproar on campus, Princeton had an open forum after Murray’s talk in which students and faculty could debate the claims in his book.

  This tendency toward putting out things for “debate” is one of the defining features of an elite education. It’s a great preparation for careers in law, business, or politics, in which people are expected to make decisions that affect the lives of others. To do that, you have to feel somehow that you ar
e entitled to be in that position. The training at a school like Lakeside teaches students to talk about ideas in the abstract, at the policy level, to make the “hard choices” necessary to keep the wheels of society moving. As a result, classroom discussions at Lakeside can be brutal, with little mercy for other students’ feelings. In this type of environment, it might be acceptable to ask if a slave might love her master—it’s all just part of the debate. The onus is on the other person to come back with a stronger argument.

  When I left Lakeside to go back to public school, one of the primary things I noticed was that as far as “intelligence,” there were really no differences between my friends in public school and the people I had known at Lakeside. This surprised me, because one of the consistent messages at Lakeside was that we were the best and brightest.

  The difference came as we went on to higher education. Students I had known from Lakeside tended toward law and business. Most of my friends at public school went into various fields of engineering, a career that no one I knew from Lakeside pursued. I don’t think it was because everyone at public school was more inclined toward math, but that the institutions offered distinct types of training. Public school was structured around a series of exams that gauged your ability to memorize and recall facts and figures. Lakeside—which, as a private school, has been able to opt out of giving state-mandated standardized tests—structures its curriculum around the critical interpretation of theories. While a civil or aeronautical engineer works from mathematical formulas that leave little room for dispute, the career of a lawyer or a CEO depends on being able to convince other people that your version of reality is the right one.

  Until you learn how to function in this world, elite institutions like Lakeside can be vicious. It was predicable that there would be a ferocious push back against teachers such as Kim Pollock, who were presenting versions of American history and society that many people at Lakeside ardently disagreed with. The school administration should have expected that at least some students and teachers would respond in the way they’d been trained.

  Months later, Lakeside administrators still couldn’t explain what exactly had gone wrong. “The adult community here, now that we’re diverse, we don’t know how to talk to one another,” Noe tells me. “People kind of have retreated into these politically correct shells and they don’t say anything, so we’re working on that. The workshop in January is: ‘How do you have a difficult conversation with a person that’s different from you?’ ”

  When I ask Noe if the school can serve its traditional elite constituency and also accommodate an influx of students from minority or poor backgrounds, he insists that the goals are compatible. “I’ve said over and over to the community that this is not a school that is just to preserve privilege,” he tells me. “We’re not here just so already privileged kids can accrue more privilege. We’re here to be a great school for this area and to produce some great local leaders, national leaders, global leaders.”

  T. J. Vassar, the director of diversity, calls the problem one of implementation. He tells me that the school was not used to having several African-American faculty members, and the black teachers were not accustomed to the culture of private schools, so they “bumped heads.”

  As one of Lakeside’s first black graduates, Vassar occupies a revered place in the school’s mythology. He tells me about enrolling in 1965 and remembers some uncomfortable times, such as reading the books Huckleberry Finn and Native Son in English class. Vassar points out that the word “nigger” is used often in Huckleberry Finn, and Bigger Thomas, the main character in Richard Wright’s Native Son, strangles the daughter of the white family that has employed him. “So the first book is about a slave, Nigger Jim, and the second book was about a black dude choking the hell out of a white girl. OK?” Vassar says, laughing heartily.

  In the end, Vassar says, he found his niche playing sports—“I figured if I could kick people’s ass on the sports field that was my equalizer, because I didn’t realize until I got out of Lakeside that I was as smart as anybody else”—and was eventually popular enough to get elected school president as a senior. “You have to remember, why did T. J. get chosen to come to Lakeside to be one of the first black students to come here? And I know why. It was the Jackie Robinson effect. It wasn’t because I was the smartest dude in the world—hell no! It was because I think they saw that I could get along with people pretty well.”

  Vassar went on to Harvard, came back to Seattle, and later served on the board of the Seattle Public Schools from 1981 to 1989, a period of intense friction over the city’s mandatory busing program. When he returned to Lakeside in 1992 to run LEEP, part of his reasoning was that he thought maybe he could accomplish in the private-school setting what had failed in public schools.

  “You know what I like about Lakeside now?” he asks. “Lakeside defined excellence and said, ‘We can’t have an excellent school without having a diverse school.’ Lakeside said having a diverse school is a necessary part of excellence. Now, we start talking like that, even though we may catch some hell getting everything into practice, getting the job done like we want, we’re going to have some failures and some things like that, but when you say that, when you commit that to paper and start spreading it around, you get a very different mind-set about what it is that we’re supposed to be doing.”

  Vassar says that with public-school desegregation a thing of the past, private schools such as Lakeside are the only educational institutions in Seattle still making an active effort to achieve some kind of racial mix. “You know what’s a travesty?” he asks, when speaking about his time on the school board. “Then I was working for a quality integrated education in the public schools, and the private schools were the way that people were opting out of integrated education. And now, if you want a good-quality integrated education, you gotta go to the private schools instead of the public schools. It’s just a huge irony.”

  Terrance Blakely and David Changa-Moon, unsurprisingly, have the most pragmatic assessments of Lakeside and its diversity efforts.

  Blakely says he felt grateful for the opportunities the school afforded, but he also realized that the institution was getting something out of him and other minority students in return. When I tell Blakely that I saw him featured in several issues of the school’s magazine, he laughs and tells me that a group of minority students began to call themselves the “poster children.”

  “We had a little tally going among the kids,” he says. “How many newsletters are you going to make this year? It got to the point where the same four kids who were a little more social with the rest of Lakeside got put in every magazine, every sports page. I mean there’s a directory picture of eighty percent of the minority students in the school, but the school shows it as, ‘Oh, we’re a nice colorful mix of kids across the entire school.’ ”

  Blakely says he tried to find a balance, agreeing to have his picture taken and do interviews with school publications, but also trying to get across viewpoints that he thought were not always heard at the school. “There’s comes a point where I don’t want to be your spokesman, because I don’t agree with a lot of the things you do,” he says. “But it’s hard for me, and I think it’s hard for a lot of kids, to sit there and say I don’t agree with some of the practices you’re doing, but it would also make me a hypocrite because I’m taking your education, and I know what your education is going to do for me.”

  Both Changa-Moon and Blakely credit Sims and Pollock for taking on issues that would not otherwise have been raised at the school and engaging in battles that students could not realistically fight. Blakely says he intentionally tried not to speak out too much in order to avoid being stigmatized. “I think that is the one fear that every conscious minority has is, ‘Am I going to be that guy or that girl that is talking civil rights movement all over again and is everyone going to just go, OK?’ ” he says. “Because that’s what they’ll do. When you say something it’s just like, ‘Oh, you reall
y should settle down. It’s not that bad.’ But these are people that don’t live the same life that you do, that aren’t walking in that same path. But then, it’s just like, ‘Do I want to be that person where it’s them versus me?’ So then you just get along to go along.”

  Changa-Moon, though involved with groups such as the Black Student Union, says he was more of a “spectator” by the end of his time at the school. He tells me that it’s a big responsibility to feel you need to educate your wealthy high school classmates about life in the South End. “It’s not like we’re just there and going to school,” he says. “It’s this cultural education we’re supposed to bring and provide all these students, and I’m just not that into it. At fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, when I’m confused, and then you’re tasking me with this?”

  Changa-Moon says that Lakeside faces a core incongruity with its diversity program. “If Lakeside was ever to really pursue its rhetoric of democracy and all these ideas of the ‘equal chance,’ of everyone having an equal say in the direction of our country, then Lakeside School and other private institutions like it would not exist, fundamentally they just wouldn’t be there,” he says. “Because they exist to provide students a leg up and to have more influence in society.… It’s really hard because the rhetoric that you’re spewing, it’s in contradiction with the actual institution that you have.”