Miss Spelman scoring error was a mistake. Lack of transparency is a choice.

A week before newly elected campus queens and kings from historically Black colleges and universities were set to visit New Orleans for an annual conference, Kinsley Wilson, co-Miss Spelman, announced that she’d had enough.

She was done with the bullying, the speculation and the unbridled hate on social media that had been aimed at her since April, when a scoring error resulted in two students serving as Miss Spelman College — an unprecedented occurrence since the competition began in 1983.

Citing concern for her mental health, Wilson decided to step down.

“To spend my senior year sharing a title born out of unresolved conflict, navigating an arrangement with no clear footing, representing an institution under a cloud that has not yet lifted, that is not service. That is survival. And I did not come to Spelman to merely survive,” Wilson said in an interview with BallerAlert.com.

The online hate is real — Wilson was accused of many things, including not caring about her fellow Spelmanites — but the reaction is about more than evil social media chatter.

This is what happens when a fiercely competitive event comes with a selection process that is inherently subjective. The resulting controversy raises important questions about what an institution owes its students when it makes a mistake. And Spelman officials owe more transparency than they have delivered.

Wilson was crowned Miss Spelman on April 11, but three days later, when she met with advisers, they told her she had only won the popular vote, which accounts for 20% of a contestant’s score.

Judges are responsible for the remaining 80% based on a student’s performance in other categories. The advisers told Wilson that her popular vote was incorrectly weighted, leading to a scoring discrepancy.

Her true score landed her in fifth place, they said, before giving her two options: become a fourth attendant of the court (also unprecedented) or step down and say the decision was hers alone. She had one day to decide.

With her parents along for support, Wilson met with one adviser and the vice president of student affairs. She said school representatives never revealed her actual scores or shared any protocols for scoring errors. They did, however, give her a new option, she could still step down, or she could serve as co-Miss Spelman. Wilson chose to share the crown.

By April 23, the outcry surrounding that decision had grown so ugly, school officials posted a statement that the university was stepping away from social media to focus on student wellness and encouraged students to move forward with kindness. But selecting a campus queen is a tradition that has been an integral and vaunted aspect of Black culture for a century. A plea for kindness isn’t enough to fix broken trust.

Campus queens have roots in May Day, a European import celebrating the onset of spring and a season of fertility. The events were popular at women’s colleges in the early 20th century, with American adaptations including dancing around the May Pole and crowning a May Queen. At HBCUs, the earliest queens were crowned in the late 1920s.

Within a decade, many HBCUs had begun to morph May Queen into Homecoming Queen, recognizing that fall football and school rivalries would draw larger crowds to campus than the spring parades led by May Queens. Some schools retained both traditions. At Howard University, for example, in the late 1930s, female students voted for the May Queen, while the full student body voted for the Gridiron Queen. In 1975, Ebony magazine began annually featuring photos of campus queens from almost 100 HBCUs. Around 2010, the publication limited the feature to 10 campus queens with winners determined by popular vote.

Depending on the school, campus queens are generally elected based on some combination of pageant performance and popular vote — but students have long debated the fairness of the selection process.

Some students believe schools should only use popular votes in determining campus queens and kings because it is most democratic. There are national competitions, such as the Miss National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame pageant or Miss HBCU, that use a pageant style scoring.

The primary argument against relying solely on popular vote in school elections is that it reduces the selection to a popularity contest dictated by Greek affiliation or physical appearance rather than personality or leadership skills that represent the spirit of the school. But that reasoning dismisses the fact students can be popular for a range of reasons, and some of those reasons very likely support the mission and values of the institution.

Either process is fine from my perspective, if it is clearly stated and the results are independently verified. What isn’t fair is the lack of a clear and consistent response when the process goes awry. And mistakes happen often enough that schools should have a policy in place.

In 2023, Hampton University made headlines for a scoring error discovered in a post-pageant audit. The rightful winner received an in-person and written apology, public acknowledgment the next evening and a personal introduction to a professional counselor, according to her family’s statement on Facebook.

Spelman has also been in this space before. In 2006, Terricha Phillips was crowned Miss Spelman. But when the popular vote was recalculated within 24 hours, she was demoted to third runner-up.

“The college does have a responsibility to the students to show them how the process is carried out,” Phillips said in a recent interview with UATL reporter Brooke Leigh Howard. “It has to be completely transparent at this time, moving forward.”

A standard policy of certifying results within 24 hours so that any discrepancies are identified and corrected in a timely manner is vital, if it doesn’t exist.

There should also be a clear set of steps to follow in the event of a scoring error, and that should include revealing scores to all contestants. Sharing that information could limit speculation about cheating while also helping contestants process and react accordingly.

And finally, it should be standard practice to offer counseling support to any participant involved in a controversial pageant.