We’ve come to expect it: something tragic happens—a shooting, a natural disaster—and an email pops up in the inboxes of students and faculty all across Washington University “on behalf of Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.”

On Aug. 26, Wrighton sent an email to the Washington University community contextualizing issues from the summer with some upcoming events and goals for the fall semester.

But as several current and former students soon noticed, Wrighton incorrectly named a police shooting victim from this summer, identifying Cameron, rather than Alton Sterling, as the deceased.

Senior Chelsea Birchmier posted a screenshot of the email on the “Overheard at WashU” Facebook group, a group dedicated to aggregating sayings heard around campus, which garnered nearly 100 reactions and several dozen comments by press time.

“It was funny, because when I opened it, I was thinking, ‘hmm, when’s the chancellor going to do his typical pandering diversity spiel thing?’ so I scrolled down and I was reading and I saw ‘Cameron Sterling,’ and so I quickly googled Cameron Sterling and found out that he was Alton Sterling’s son, and so I was like, okay, that’s pretty suspicious, he clearly just wasn’t following it at all,” Birchmier said.

In a follow-up email, Wrighton wrote to correct his initial error.

“In the message I shared this morning, I incorrectly referred to Cameron Sterling as the individual killed in a police shooting in Louisiana. He is, of course, the son of the victim—Alton Sterling. Like so many others, I was incredibly moved by Cameron’s emotional response to the loss of his father. He has been on my mind and in my heart, along with the rest of the Sterling family. I regret that I confused the two names in my note,” Wrighton wrote.

Birchmier spoke with several friends about the problem before posting, and noted that one friend pointed out that the language of the email did not come across as an apology—instead it seemed that he was making excuses and explanations.

“It was sort of like his apology wasn’t actually an apology, but beyond that, even if he had apologized, it’s not really enough just to send an email because it’s symptomatic of a much larger problem of the University not caring about black lives basically, or acting like they do, putting on events like Day of Diversity and Dialogue but continuously implementing policies that are detrimental to black people, so working to actually change those,” Birchmier said.

2016 graduate Anagha Narayanan sent Wrighton an email to inform him of his error—she said that she told him that the error was proof of “a lack of empathy” rather than carelessness.

“It’s everything about him. My favorite example is from two years ago when after the death of Mike Brown he sent out an email that was like, ‘you know, I’m glad the unrest is not on campus. I’m so sorry that was happening in the rest of St. Louis, but at least it’s not here!’ It was just so tone deaf—he’s tone deaf,” Narayanan said.

She also said that the problem was a greater issue than mere email typos.

“Maybe if his administration wasn’t so white, these kinds of things wouldn’t happen so often,” Narayanan said.

Senior Christian Ralph felt similarly, calling on past incidents—including one from 2013 when a fraternity’s pledges recited the words to “B—-es Ain’t S—,” a rap song that includes racial slurs, in the vicinity of a group of black students in Bear’s Den—as part of a series of past problems that has shown that bigotry on campus is not relegated to isolated incidents.

Other incidents he referenced included a photo that went viral in Halloween of 2013 featuring three students who posed in military garb while pointing guns at another student wearing a beanie and gray beard, as well as the racist comments on Yik Yak in 2015 following the annual performance of Black Anthology, a yearly production spotlighting the lives of African-American students on campus.

“[The email] really represents the problem with Wash. U., the fact that not putting the time to make sure you have the right person’s name when going into these issues about black people being killed by the police, it just shows how Wash. U. feels, the experience of Wash. U., and how it feels to be black at Wash. U. and how black people feel about the institution,” Ralph said.

Ralph felt that the systemic issue was more important to consider rather than the specific incident of Wrighton’s email.

“I don’t think anyone who is upset at this is upset literally because of the name, that just signifies a much larger problem…it still reminds people of the more significant ways that Wash. U. just doesn’t have the interests of especially their minority students at heart,” Ralph said. “It’s not about the apology.”

He felt that to remedy the situation, the University’s administration would need to make concrete steps towards accepting the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that the two sides of the argument either completely support or reject the idea of human dignity.

“You can’t be in the middle, there is no middle ground: you have to be for the right, for the side of human dignity in a more than just a cavalier or cliche way,” Ralph said.

Will Ralls, a graduate from the class of 2015 who now works as a software engineer, said that he was surprised and offended after seeing the post in the “Overheard” group.

“If he is going to make such an easy and careless mistake in his email, I think he really undercuts his own point. We don’t ask for the chancellor to send an all-school blast email every time it happens,” Ralls said.

Some of the commenters dismissed the call to arms, saying that Wrighton’s mistake was just that—a mistake. Ralls agreed that this might be true, but pointed to the fact that people are discussing the chancellor’s emails because he very rarely makes himself available beyond them.

“If this wasn’t like the most visible sign of the chancellor’s action, I think people would have been a lot more willing to give him a pass. But because he purports this as his answer, then I think that’s why people are very hard on it,” Ralls said. “He made this conversation about his emails by not doing more, therefore I think the people who took him to task for it were completely justified.”

Aarthi Arunachalam, who spent more than a decade as an undergraduate and graduate student at Washington University, defended the chancellor’s error.

“It is evidence of a larger issue, but that issue is that a lot of well-meaning people (like the chancellor) don’t actually follow through with their feelings, not that the chancellor is insincere with his feelings,” Arunachalam said.