Syracuse University students will be able to vote this week on whether they are in favor of the Student Association establishing a position for a student director of diversity affairs.

The option to vote in favor of the position will appear on MySlice on SA’s ballot for various positions, including president and vice president, comptroller and student assembly representatives. Voting will be open from April 11 to 14.

Ideas for what kind of role the director of diversity affairs would serve were thrown around at SA’s April 4 meeting when Vice President Jane Hong introduced the initiative for the position to the assembly. But ideally, Hong said, the person in the position would serve as a student representative to different diversity leadership councils at SU that right now only consist of faculty and staff.

“I think the ideal person for this job would be a leader who is passionate about diversity and inclusion on this campus,” Hong said at the April 4 meeting. “And whether that’s an assembly rep, who has been in this organization for years, or someone outside of it who wants their first year of experience in SA.”

That person, she added, would be the “point person” who is known by the SU administration and other university leaders as the director of diversity affairs. The director of diversity affairs would focus “solely on diversity affairs as it pertains to our student body,” Hong said in an interview with The Daily Orange.

“Syracuse University is very unique in that we have this you know, very real culture of self-segregation, and so when we came into these respective positions I think we thought a lot about how we could better serve that community — the multicultural community — and how we could kind of try to bridge the gap in between all these different pockets we have on campus,” Hong said.

If the resolution for the position passes the student body after this week of elections, Hong said she would like to bring the initiative back to the assembly to start hashing out the details of the position and what it will actually look like.

She said she and SA President Aysha Seedat are going into the initiative with open minds because it’s new territory for them, being that there has never been a position like a director of diversity affairs in SA.

Hong said the idea to create the position is something she and Seedat thought of together, and added that her own participation on the Chancellor’s Workgroup on Diversity and Inclusion motivated the pair even more to set it into motion.

One of the long-term goals Hong said she would like to see with the initiative is the creation of a council or board of sorts that would have representatives from all of SU’s international and cultural organizations.

She compared the proposed council to the Student Affairs Advisory Board led by Senior Vice President and Dean of the Division of Student Affairs Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz. The advisory board consists of about 25 student representatives who meet every other week to discuss different issues relating to students.

That council, she said, would help combat the lack of communication between different cultural groups on campus. She added that the council would also ensure that programming would be stronger and that there would not be duplicate outreach to people the groups want to bring to campus.

Overall, Hong said, the council would help create more unification with those different groups, which she said essentially have the same mission statement but are different in the cultures that they focus on.

“It’s something we’ve been talking about since we were elected last year, so to kind of see it come to fruition is really surreal for us, and we’re really excited hopefully for it to pass,” she said.

Published on April 10, 2016 at 10:03 pm

Contact Alexa: atorrens@syr.edu