Dr. Nicole Bedera

But as the research went on, there were more and more meetings that I think I would have been invited to in September that I was not invited to by May.

I think schools are one of our most beloved social institutions.

That even people who had a complicated relationship with the school they attended or some of the educators, it's so much of your life when you are young that it's hard for you to get all the way through your education without being a little grateful that it introduced you to your best friend, to a mentor who you loved.

It's the places where most of us learn to read and write and connect with others in the world.

To be able to do all of that learning in a school, you do have to trust it on some level or at least be dependent on it to the point that you can't really imagine what your life would be like without it.

I think that the way we rely on schools, not just to educate us as people, but also educate all of broader society that lets us know things like if our food is safe, you know, if there are new medical advancements, all of these different things.

We look to schools to bring us that expertise.

And I think that's part of why it's so shocking and upsetting when those schools become sources of violence and discrimination.

Because ironically, the very people who are experts on those things, like me, when I conducted this project, I was working for a university as a doctoral student.

That was who was paying my salary.

Universities can leverage those experts, leverage that legitimacy, leverage our good experiences with them to convince us that they're safe when they're not.

It's a relatively low lift for the institution, but they do still put a lot of effort into convincing us that they're safe.

And I'm thinking of this research by a sociologist named Laurel Edelman.

who was interested originally in why there's so much race discrimination on college campuses, even though it's illegal, in the same way that sex discrimination is illegal under Title IX.

And what she found is that schools engage in something called symbolic compliance.

which is where they put a lot of effort into convincing the general public, government regulators, anyone who's providing oversight over the institution.

They put a lot of effort into convincing us that they are compliant with civil rights law, whether that's around race, sex, gender, sexuality, disability status, immigration status, whatever it might be.

But the researchers have found that that's all it ever was, was symbols.

And that's part of why it's so jarring when you go to report, this is a school that has told me over and over again that this is a safe place.

They've put together this entire system.