Almost every Asian person has encountered racial mockery by someone aping an Asian language. I first experienced it on an elementary school playground. Never did I imagine that I would witness it by a prominent university leader during a commencement ceremony. Yet Purdue Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon did exactly that when he opened his remarks to his university’s commencement ceremony last week with incoherent “Asian” gibberish.
Chancellor Keon serves as the public face of Purdue Northwest. He knowingly made a racist provocation in his capacity as Chancellor while convening a university-sponsored public event. He did so while dressed in his university’s academic regalia, formalwear that symbolizes the honor and prestige bestowed upon the individual wearing it.
Dr. Stephanie K. Kim
The response to Chancellor Keon’s provocation is also revealing. Some individuals seated behind the podium appeared uncomfortable or surprised. Others—including James E. Dedelow, the commencement speaker and a recent alum of Purdue Northwest whose speech Chancellor Keon was responding to—let out visible chuckles. The audience erupted in open laughter.
Chancellor Keon performed his racial mockery in full display, and others followed his lead. I can only imagine how the Asian graduates and their parents very likely in attendance must have felt during what should have been a celebratory moment of academic achievement. Instead, it was a shameful moment for Purdue Northwest.
What makes this moment particularly jarring is that Purdue Northwest and similar campuses have gone to great lengths to recruit international students, primarily from Asian countries, in their bid to become world-class institutions of higher learning. Across the Purdue University System of which Purdue Northwest is a part, the number of international students from Asia has increased substantially over the last decade. At the flagship campus in West Lafayette, for example, international students are the largest demographic after White domestic students. Purdue University also has a sizable Asian American student population who come from within the United States. Together, Asian international students and Asian American students constitute a notable proportion of the student body across the Purdue campuses.
