Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75, Hon.’15, P’04

When Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75, Hon.’15, P’04, was working as a lecturer and part-time counselor at the University of California Santa Barbara in the early 1980s—newly married, still working on her Ph.D. in psychology through the University of Michigan, and a first-time mother—she was asked to teach a course called group exploration of racism.

She had never taught such a class, but she had experienced racism (including in trying to secure housing in Santa Barbara), her dissertation was on the experiences of African American families who lived in predominantly white communities—which was her own experience as a child growing up in Bridgewater, Massachusetts—and she had taken “quite a lot of African American studies courses” at Wesleyan.

“With the arrogance of youth,” she recalls wryly, she agreed. “I was 26… I thought, ‘How hard can this be?’”

The class turned out to be “transformational,” not just for her, but for her students, who wondered why they hadn’t confronted racism in the classroom sooner. She decided to focus on teaching, rather than clinical work, and went onto faculty positions at other institutions and eventually—thanks in part to advice from Edgar F. Beckham ’58, Wesleyan’s first African-American dean of the college—to serve as president of Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta.

She also continued to tackle race in her work. Years later, one of her books, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, became a New York Times best seller; after President Bill Clinton read it, he invited her to participate in a national dialogue about race. Her willingness to explore uncomfortable conversations in pursuit of shared values and experiences she traces in part to her time as a student at Wesleyan—“One of the things that Wesleyan encourages is the asking of questions,” she says.

She points to the example of her alma mater—and current president Michael S. Roth ’78—in her latest book, Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, which argues that, by creating spaces for what she calls intergroup dialogue, American universities are crucial in addressing the country’s increasing polarization. Wesleyan’s interactions with pro-Palestinian protestors on campus in 2024, she says, are proof that difficult moments can be “learning opportunities.”

“We don’t have to try to shut them down,” she says. “If we create that learning opportunity for students, we can move forward together in a way that is good for all of us.”