Rejection letters from Navarro College have sparked outrage because they denied admission to Nigerian students on the basis of being from a country with confirmed Ebola cases. Copies of the letters have circulated on social media, and the college has released a statement which seems to offer an alternative explanation of why the students were rejected — that the college’s current focus for international recruiting is not in Africa, but rather in China and Indonesia. The statement does not explicitly say the presence of Ebola should not have been used as grounds for rejection, but does say “We apologize for any misinformation that may have been shared with students.”
It should go without saying that the letters demonstrate a profound ignorance about the Ebola epidemic and about African countries. Cases of Ebola have been confirmed in the United States, and the college would not logically reject all US students. If the college’s logic is to prohibit only students from countries where the Ebola epidemic has been rampant, it still fails because Nigeria has been able to contain the few cases of Ebola confirmed there. Additionally, the Center for Disease Control’s precautionary guidelines do not recommend colleges prohibit all students from entering solely based on country of origin.
The college’s statement claimed some students unfortunately “received incorrect information regarding their applications to the institution.” Even if this is meant to insinuate the letters came from a rogue employee in the admissions office who was not following instructions or protocol, the college still ought to take responsibility for the failures of its employees.
Beyond the unjust rejection of individual students, these letters from Navarro indicate how people in western cultures still facilitate the “othering” of the East. Countries in Africa are conflated, lumped into one category that is assumed not to have the technology necessary to cope with epidemics. Utilizing these stereotypes demonstrates a kind of insensitivity to people who are from various African countries.
The college’s statement is presumably an effort to repair their reputation by highlighting their international recruitment efforts. But the fact that Navarro is recruiting in non-western countries does not erase their administration’s discrimination against some non-western students. The Ebola outbreak has provoked a lot of panic and fear which in this case has led to a decision not based on any semblance of logic or reason, and such a decision is also a prejudicial act against a group of people, which strips them of their individual identity.
The flaws in the way the media has covered the Ebola epidemic are captured in illustrator André Carrilho’s drawing of a white Ebola patient in a room full of black Ebola patients, and a camera and a microphone are pointed toward the white person. The black bodies are indistinguishable from each other, and they are given no platform and no voice, indicating how cases of Ebola in Africa are reported as sweeping statistics, giving westerners even more reason to generalize African nations and view this epidemic as a dark cloud over the continent which could threaten the industrialized world.
The college’s decision was obviously uninformed and insensitive, but perhaps we ought to be thinking about how these prejudices might manifest in cases where there is not an epidemic. Panicking about the Ebola epidemic is the latest way westerners have perpetuated the “othering” of the East. Whether or not the Ebola outbreak occurred, westerners — including institutions of higher education — ought to look critically at the way we generalize foreign populations. Particularly in a college applicant, admissions officials must see an individual, not a stereotype. African identity, or in these cases Nigerian identity, may be critically important to the student and could add valuable perspective to a college’s class. But application readers must examine that identity as the applicant presents it to them — not as the reader wants to see it.
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