UPDATED: April 25, 2019 at 12:55 p.m.

At the start of the fall 2018 semester, Syracuse University held a welcome reception for faculty of color on campus “as a way to show our attention and respect for affinity groups,” said Keith Alford, interim chief diversity officer. The goal was to affirm the multiple identities that exist on campus, he said.

Tula Goenka, a professor of television, radio and film, remembers the reception. It involved a display of faculty profiles taken from their web pages, accompanied by a slideshow. Goenka was one of the 10 to 15 faculty members there, she said — the rest were administrators.

“It was pathetic,” Goenka said. “I know colleagues, dear friends of mine who refused to go.”

Faculty of color are expected to be present at any event or service related to diversity and inclusion, and it can get exhausting, she said. Still, Goenka went to the reception to show the university that while she didn’t feel their efforts, in this case, were adequate, she acknowledges that administrators did make an attempt to celebrate SU’s faculty of color.

In more than a dozen interviews with The Daily Orange, professors from racially and ethnically underrepresented backgrounds had mixed feelings about the university’s approach to diversity and inclusion roughly one year after Theta Tau’s expulsion rocked SU’s campus. While some commended the administration’s efforts, others said the university could be more tenacious moving forward with its programming, initiatives and faculty hiring processes.

Tula Goenka said faculty of color are expected to be present at any event relating to diversity and inclusion, which she said can be exhausting. Laura Oliverio | Staff Photographer

In April 2018, videos surfaced showing students in Theta Tau’s house engaging in behavior Chancellor Kent Syverud called “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.” Since then, Alford said SU has become more conscious of diversity, inclusion and accessibility on campus.

About two weeks remained in the spring 2018 semester when the Theta Tau videos surfaced. One year later, Alford said he believes “we have moved the pendulum forward.”

Almost every school and college across campus has formed its own diversity and inclusion workgroup in the last year, Alford said. Those workgroups are tasked with addressing issues related to the treatment of community members from underrepresented backgrounds.

These committees meet on a monthly basis as part of the Inclusive Leadership Assembly. The assembly, chaired by Alford, is composed of faculty and staff from each committee. At their monthly meetings, they discuss best practices and exchange ideas, he said.

Jill Hurst-Wahl, a professor in the School of Information Studies, said she understood why the university acted so quickly to try and mitigate the tensions on campus, but this wasn’t entirely a good thing.

“In some ways, since April, I think the university has moved too fast,” she said. “There wasn’t an opportunity for the conversation and the actions to happen naturally and to ensure that all voices were heard.”

It takes time to develop trust so people can be open in spaces like first-year forums or diversity trainings, Hurst-Wahl said. With the university acting so quickly, the campus community didn’t have much time to reflect, she said.

Seyeon Lee, a professor at the School of Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, also questioned the swiftness of SU’s response. Lee has been teaching at SU for three years and has only recently noticed “extreme emphasis” on diversity and inclusion programs, she said.

“Since that happened, everybody is talking about (diversity and inclusion),” she said of Theta Tau’s expulsion. “It definitely has been a highlighted conversation, so that makes you wonder if it didn’t happen, would we be having this conversation today?”

Angela Ramnarine-Rieks, another iSchool professor serving on the school’s diversity and inclusion committee, said that the group meets once a month and has worked on issues such as gauging students’ sense of belonging in the school and providing faculty training.

Ramnarine-Rieks’ work on the committee has helped her “passively observe” campus climate and has provided room to be experimental in figuring out what students want, she said. Understanding people’s identities and what may resonate poorly with them is a learning process for everyone, she added.

“There are so many things you’ve got to think about with diversity, and I think Syracuse has done a good job with that,” she said.

Herbert Ruffin, associate professor and chair of the African American studies department, said the hiring of faculty members as diversity officers will be minimally effective at this stage of the university’s diversity, inclusivity and equity academic strategic goals because they’ve all been hired recently. The hiring of the deans is only a start in embracing institutional inclusivity, he said.

Several professors said the university’s post-Theta Tau response does not properly address problems with SU’s campus culture.

Since 2014, the university has become “extremely corporatized” and top-heavy in the sense that whenever a problem arises, an official is the one tasked with solving the problem, Goenka said. But the problem needs to be solved from the bottom up in SU’s culture, she said.

“People are completely disconnected from what’s really going on among the students and the staff and the faculty, and they have completely alienated us,” Goenka said. “We as a university have to really ask ourselves the difficult questions and find some solutions, and it is not going to happen at the administrative level.”

SU should have used the Theta Tau videos to help determine what’s working and what’s not in terms of race relations on campus, said Silvio Torres-Saillant, a professor and former director of the Latino-Latin American studies program.

“We need to do more with intellectual courage and to be less easily seduced by the possibilities to show justice in those moments in which you get the student expelled (or) the faculty member fired,” he said.

Silvio Torres said SU should have used the Theta Tau videos to help determine what’s working and what’s not for race relations on campus. Katie Reahl | Staff photographer

Any efforts after Theta Tau to approach issues of diversity and inclusion haven’t tackled larger issues or questions involving the elimination of structures that exclude people, said Christopher Eng, an assistant professor of English. Conversations about diversity in recruitment often use a language of statistics and quantity that reduces people to numbers, he said.

Eng said he wants to see more support for ethnic studies departments at SU and more dedicated programming for faculty of color to express any feelings about microaggressions committed at their expense.

“(University officials) need to be much more imaginative in their approach to diversity,” Eng said. “What became very evident is that their approach is quite reactive … their understanding of diversity is actually, to use their word, not very ‘innovative.’”

Ravi Dharwadkar, chair of the management department and professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, was one of several faculty members who served on the committee for the 2017 Faculty Salary Report. In doing this work, he noticed that Asian Americans have few positions of leadership at SU.

“Given that the student composition is changing, the leadership has to reflect that changing composition,” he said. “That’s the issue that SU and other universities have.”

More than half of SU’s undergraduate student population is white, at 56.9%, according to a fall 2018 census. Asian students comprised nearly 7% of the undergraduate student body, black or African American students made up 6.5% and Hispanic or Latino students were 9.1% of undergraduates, according to the census.

SU’s bias and inclusivity trainings and online portals are an attempt to create spaces for faculty to support each other, Alford said. The trainings are also aimed at retaining faculty of color in leadership positions and enabling them to have productive conversations, he said.

Anna Henderson | Digital Design Editor — 30 —

More than 700 faculty have participated in training so far, Alford said. They were created to teach how to address issues of bias— conscious or unconscious — in the classroom, and they are meant to be applicable to every discipline.

“The core piece is being covered in terms of what bias could look like, and the intersectionality that’s so critically important when we think about the multiple identities that are here at Syracuse University,” he said.

James Leng, a faculty fellow in the School of Architecture, has attended some of the diversity and inclusion programming for faculty since he’s been at SU. One was an off-campus training at the beginning of the fall 2018 semester. The training resulted in some good conversations, but still felt ineffective and reductive, Leng said.

“They have some work to do on that end,” he said. “It was like trying to teach 10 year olds this stuff.”

SU has a certain “institutional inertia” that both protects it and makes it so that change comes about slowly, Leng said.

Sekou Cooke, a professor in the School of Architecture, said there is a “necessary but intentional” vagueness to revealing candidate ethnicity. He has previously served on search committees for new architecture professors at SU. The committee doesn’t see that information, so the same sorts of people end up rising to the top of every list, he said.

One potential step forward in ensuring more diverse hires would be to reveal the ethnicities of candidates, he said.

“It would take real political will for us to maybe even take that one step and unveil the racial makeup of our search candidates when they come in,” he said.

SU does a better job with diverse hires than other institutions, he said, and the demographic differences are evident when looking at SU’s faculty pages, said Texu Kim, a professor in the Setnor School of Music in VPA.

Several other professors said they’ve been selected to serve on numerous search committees.It is crucial for these committees to reassemble every couple of yearsto hold the university accountable and ensure that recommendations are being acted upon, Dharwadkar said. Checks and balances need to be put into place on a regular basis to ensure that a small issue doesn’t grow over time, he added.

Goenka said she’s seen a significant decrease in the number of social events for faculty on campus since she started teaching in her tenure-track position in 2000. She suggested a happy hour for faculty and staff at SU’s alumni and faculty center, or opening it more often to give people a space to meet.

Leng said he’s had mostly positive experiences related to diversity during his time teaching at SU. When he first came to central New York, he took part in a series of events hosted by Chancellor Kent Syverud for new faculty to meet each other.

One of these events was meant for “minority faculty,” he recalled, and he said attending this event helped him to build a sense of community with his fellow professors — even if the event itself was contrived. The School of Architecture also hosted a Lunar New Year celebration in February, where Leng and other faculty of Asian ethnicity had a space to speak about their experiences related to East Asian culture.

Goenka pointed to SU’s vibrant South Asian Center at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs as an example of how programming like visitors and speakers can help her feel encouraged and give her a place of belonging at SU. She was the center’s co-director from 2012 to 2014.

“You have to provide space for people to find their people,” Goenka said. “Community is built by hanging out.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, Herbert Ruffin was misquoted. The hiring of diversity deans would be minimally effective, not ineffective. Also, the year Tula Goenka began teaching was misstated. She began teaching in 1996 and started on her tenure track in 2000. The Daily Orange regrets these errors.

Published on April 25, 2019 at 12:32 am