What the Interviews Demonstrate

In the interviews with students, and their transcriptions, there is much to be learned about student life.

It appears that students who are here for their first quarter really enjoy campus and feel that Eastern Washington University is a pretty good institution when they are asked how they have enjoyed their time attending Eastern. Most Freshman gave the campus and the institution anywhere from a 7/10 to a 9/10. When the question came up about the recent November 2019 protests, most freshmen felt unsafe which does not go well with enjoyment or being a good institution. Students stated that these feelings of being unsafe or uncomfortable are still affecting them when I took the interviews at the end of November and the beginning of December.

As I interviewed students that had been at Eastern for more than a year (or even more than a quarter), their comfortability and enjoyment ratings started dropping significantly as they got further into college, I interviewed one senior who gave Eastern a 1/10.

What I believe these interviews are telling us is that as students spend more time at Eastern, get more politically active, and have been more exposed to the life and culture on campus, that the marketing they were sold on to come to EWU, wears away and the real narratives start to appear. The things that sold students of minority groups to come to Eastern are very appealing because it sells a lifestyle of diversity and inclusiveness for those groups. It has the facade of inclusitivity along with its relatively high diversity numbers compared to other colleges in Washington. This facade holds up during the first few weeks, maybe even quarters, and seems to disappear sometime during or after that first year at Eastern Washington University.

There is a common theme amongst the students of people of color and/or the LGBTQ+ communities. The theme is that the institution promotes its diversity and inclusiveness, but doesn't uphold those ideologies fully. By allowing the recent November 2019 protests to happen and not condemning the illegal actions that happened or the hate speech that goes against the institutions ideologies (as described in "How Eastern Failed to Handle the November 2019 Anti-Abortion Protests"), it exemplifies of the smaller issues that students have with the university administration and its predominately white faculty.

To read more about what these interviews amount to, check out the other articles posted on this website and the transcript page.