On Sunday, while much of D.C. focused on the Super Bowl or preemptively prepared for the messy Iowa Caucus, the George Washington University community was fixated on comments made by school president Thomas LeBlanc—comments that, as the university approaches its bicentennial, have raised issues of how the administration handles racism on campus.

In a six-minute video posted to Facebook, a student asked LeBlanc whether he would close the school’s Regulatory Studies Center, which receives funding from Charles Koch and ExxonMobil, if a majority of students agreed on it.

“I can’t shut down everything you disagree with,” LeBlanc responds offhand. “What if the majority of the students agreed to shoot all of the black people here? Do I say, ‘Ah, well, the majority voted?’ No.”

LeBlanc apologized in a brief statement on GW Today, the university’s media source: “The point I was making—that majority rule should never suppress the human rights of others—was obscured by the example I used.” (LeBlanc declined a DCist interview request, but a spokesperson for the university says that the president was unaware he was being recorded.)

Some students took to social media to say, in essence: Get over it, it was an analogy; a fitting hypothetical, even. “Quit twisting his words,” one student commented.

But other students have expressed concerns over repeated issues of insensitivity, discrimination, and racial bias on campus—especially as this comparison was made at the beginning of Black History Month. It wasn’t just LeBlanc’s comment these students find offensive, but the more problematic culture it echoed and exposed, they say. As third-year business major Howard Brookins wrote in response to LeBlanc’s comments, “Black students at this university deserve better.”

Reached by phone, Brookins adds that, in his role as an at-large undergraduate senator, he hears from students regularly during his office hours. Once, last semester, a black student complained about a white professor who read the “N-word” aloud in class while discussing a book—the student raised their concerns to the professor, who effectively brushed it off, Brookins says.

Issues like this happen because there are no real repercussions for members of the GW community who make racist comments or insensitive posts on social media, Brookins says, and his work as a student senator has focused on changing the university code of conduct to include harsher punishment.

“[LeBlanc writes] in the apology, ‘I regret my choice of words and any harm I unintentionally inflicted on a community I value greatly,’ but if he really valued community, he wouldn’t have put out this detached statement,” Brookins says. “It’s not really validating our concerns, but kind of writing us off and just putting something out just to put something out. And I think a lot of people are just tired.”

The recent snafu follows a string of other troubling events in recent years. A year ago, the school newspaper, the GW Hatchet, dug up dozens of images depicting students in blackface and KKK hoods in yearbooks that spanned the twentieth century. “It’s important for us to acknowledge our history even when we don’t like what we see. Racism has no place at GW and we will work every single day to create a welcoming, inclusive community for all,” LeBlanc said at the time.

In 2018, a member of the Alpha Phi sorority posted a photo of two fellow sorority sisters, one of which held a banana peel, and featured the caption, “Izzy: ‘I’m 1/16 black.’”

And last September, the president of Phi Sigma Sigma captioned a photo of what appears to be a plantation’s gift shop with, “I wonder if they sell slaves.”

LeBlanc addressed the incidents during an hour-long Q&A during parent’s weekend. “Do I believe that racism at GW is a sorority issue or a Greek life issue? No. It’s an institutional issue, it’s a national issue.”

These incidents rocked the campus and forced the administration to take a deep look at its student life: The Phi Sigma Sigma president resigned; the university added diversity training to its orientation program, and now hosts a website where students can anonymously report incidents of discrimination on campus; and, in August 2018, the school hired a director of diversity and inclusion to more directly combat these issues.

Still, some students say that not enough is being done. These widely-publicized events feel as if they were experienced by the entire black community, says Brandon Hill, a second-year student and chair of GW’s Black Senators Caucus, adding that the administration has a tendency to punish quickly and move on.

“When discriminatory events take place on campus, the university focuses on punishing those who committed the actions rather than consoling the victimized community and making sure events like this don’t happen again,” says Hill. “President LeBlanc needs to lead by example.”

Kayla Lumpkin, who graduated from GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs in May, says LeBlanc’s recent comments bring up memories of her own disturbing brushes with racism on campus, where she says she was the only black student “in 99 percent of my classes.” Last February, when GW lecturer Gary Anderson published an article in the Washington Times entitled “The myth of the value of diversity,” Lumpkin says administrators ignored how it might affect students of color.

“I brought this up with the Dean of the Elliott School,” Lumpkin says. “He just said that he disagreed with the professor, but he really failed to acknowledge how sharing this article and putting it on a platform with the school’s name on it could have made black students or other students of color feel like there was no need for them to be at this institution.”

As the university revamps its strategic plan, students say they want the administration to devise a specific course of action for how to retain and engage with the black community—and even consider how it might better connect with the city as a whole. “[GW] prides itself on being in Washington, D.C., which is one of the blackest cities in the country, but doesn’t really do anything to engage the community that’s here,” Lumpkin says.

These incidents aren’t relegated to just the black students on campus, either. As the community reacted to LeBlanc’s apology, a Jewish student found a swastika on his door—and it’s not the first instance of faith-based discrimination on campus in recent memory. Students have met for town hall discussions, and the student association passed legislation to prevent further anti-Semitism, per the GW Hatchet.

Also, GW isn’t the only local university to undergo a serious reckoning with how it handles racism and discrimination on campus. Students at American University (disclosure: AU holds the license for DCist’s parent company, WAMU), for example, initiated a #blackexodus protest in 2017 when bananas were found hanging from string nooses on campus on the same day that a black woman took office as student president for the first time. Months later, Confederate flags with raw cotton were found across campus on the same night AU announced the opening of its Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In the wake of LeBlanc’s comments, GW’s Black Senators’ Caucus, Students for Native and Indigenous Rights, and Anything But Colonial Coalition—a group that aims to change the university moniker—have circulated an “Interactions with Administration” survey. Among other things, the survey calls for students to anonymously share “incidents of bias or inappropriate commentary” they’ve experienced or heard from administrators, with the goal of passing legislation to end it.

“We can’t just keep having these racist incidents and every time there’s an incident, we just apologize,” says freshman Tino Stephens. “What’s going to fix the issue is when we come together as a community, talk about the issues on both sides, and talk about ways that we’re going to hold each other accountable.”

Faculty have supported students’ efforts to change the campus culture, but the leadership needs to come from the top to put real policies and programs in place, Stephens says. “I think that’s how we’re actually going to become a better university overall.”