The dean of LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication told faculty Monday evening that a video series on racism removed from the college’s website and YouTube would not be “permanently” offline.
Kimberly Bissell, who became dean of the Manship School in July, also told faculty the school “has not been mandated to remove any content from our sites,” according to a copy of the email obtained by the Reveille. She said the same in an interview Tuesday.
“At the end of the day, any decision about content was my decision,” Bissell told the Reveille. “I was not given a directive, an order was not asked to remove anything regarding that series or any other content.”
The series, titled “Racism: Dismantling the System,” which was staged at the Manship School from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2023, drew criticism from a conservative lawmaker in 2021 over a panel on “white rage.” Videos of the events had remained on YouTube and on the school’s website until removed in December.
Bissell said that a redesign of the Manship School’s website began recently and that the racism series content was temporarily removed as a result.
Though Bissell said she has had conversations with the university administration about the school’s website redesign, she said those conversations have not included this series specifically. She also said the university administration did not approach the Manship School about how it discussed topics of diversity or racism on its website.
She said that the series would “absolutely” make a return online, but that she was not sure when. It came down in December, Bissell said, because she felt the presentation of the material on the website didn’t have an “organizing thought to it.”
“What I said was, ‘If we’re going to have discussions about these issues, we should be leading the discussions and not have content kind of haphazardly put up there,” she said.
She also said a reason the videos came down on the school’s YouTube was to ensure they were compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and to create transcriptions for them. She said this would be done not just with this series, but with all the videos on the Manship YouTube page.
Asked if other videos had been removed from the YouTube page, Bissell said, “I don’t honestly know the answer.” She said she has “given people a little bit of autonomy” to pull material down.
The webpage that once housed the 20 episodes of panels on racism described them as “an ongoing series of conversations about structural racism and solution-oriented action toward equal opportunity and justice in our communities.” The deleted webpage can be viewed using the Internet Archive.
The panels were a collaboration among the Manship School’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs and Southern University’s Nelson Mandela College of Government and Social Sciences, the Louisiana Budget Project, the Louisiana Conference of the NAACP and what was then the LSU Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
It covered topics such as racial health disparities, educational inequities, voter suppression, Black journalists and racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The removal of the series came around the time LSU removed its diversity statement and other diversity language from its website. News of the series being taken down broke Friday, the same day LSU President William F. Tate IV announced “inclusion” would be replaced with “engagement” in what is now the Division of Engagement, Civil Rights and Title IX.
Bissell said the courses the school offered and the main pages about diversity on the website would remain the same. The college’s diversity committee would also stay as it is, she said.
The dean said she doesn’t feel that the university moving away from diversity, equity and inclusion language impacts its ability to discuss those topics.
“I think sometimes what happens is that we get hung up on language, and we get hung up on words, and I don’t think that it means that the conversations aren’t happening,” Bissell said.
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