The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications will increase mentorship opportunities and expand access to diversity and inclusion resources, school officials said at a forum Thursday.

About 60 students, faculty and staff attended the forum to discuss questions of bias and diversity at the school. The event was held amid at least 23 racist, anti-Semitic or bias-related incidents that have occurred at or near Syracuse University since Nov. 7.

“The thing that we need to be doing is to make sure that more voices are heard, that more voices are comfortable being heard, comfortable being in their own skin, saying the things that they need to say to improve this place,” said Hub Brown, forum moderator and associate dean for research, creativity, international initiatives and diversity.

The school’s faculty and staff will attend anti-bias training in April with a focus on implicit bias, Brown said. Officials will also work to consolidate teaching resources related to diversity to make them more accessible to faculty and staff.

Brown will also work with Wes Whiteside, the Newhouse associate director of recruitment and diversity, to expand mentorship at the school for students of color, he said.

“We want to be able to regularize the kinds of mentorship activities that go on in a way that will aid students that are in groups that are, and have been over time, marginalized,” Brown said.

The school will recruit upperclassmen and graduate students to advise students entering Newhouse, Brown said. The program, which aims to create a supportive culture that improves retention and student success, is still being worked on, he said.

Some students in the audience questioned the purpose of the mentorship and support groups. One student called the efforts “Band-aids” that will not address systemic issues of diversity at the school.

Brown said there is a “critical mass” of people on campus, especially at Newhouse, who are dedicated to genuinely improving the campus culture.

“If all we do is these things around mentorship and those sorts of things, but we don’t do anything to address the culture, the systematic culture, that deals with it, then we are in trouble,” Brown said.

Multiple students also expressed concerns about reporting bias or hate from students and professors in their classes. The lack of a linear protocol for reporting bias in the classroom often burdens students with deciding what they would like to do with a complaint, they said.

Interim Newhouse Dean Amy Falkner said complaints are usually situational and require varied responses.

“They’re little things sometimes, and they’re big things sometimes, so that’s why it’s hard to say what actually will happen,” Falkner said. “I want you all to know that we listen very closely and we try to educate all the way through the process.”

Christal Johnson, an assistant teaching professor in public relations, said the discipline process needs to move beyond education if professors repeat biased behavior. She encouraged students to come forward so bias does not continue in the classroom.

If biased behavior is a problem, professors need to be suspended or removed, Johnson said.

Newhouse is working to develop language in all course syllabuses that would explain the options available to students should they need to report bias or insensitivity from a professor or classmate, Brown said.

Thursday’s forum was not scheduled in response to the recent events on campus, and school officials have been working on the initiatives discussed at the forum since last fall, Brown said. But hate crimes and bias incidents on campus have provoked many at SU to action, he said.

“The university has been really called to do any number of things to try to improve diversity based really on what I consider to be the courageous efforts of students,” Brown said.

#NotAgainSU, a black student-led movement, held an eight day sit-in at the Barnes Center at the Arch to protest the university’s response to the racist incidents.

“There’s not a lot of students in here right now. That tends to happen in times when people are busy, and it tends to happen in times outside of crisis,” Brown said. “But we want to build structures, and we want to build support systems outside of crisis, that work outside of crisis, that we can depend on in crisis.”

Published on January 30, 2020 at 10:43 pm

Contact Michael: msessa@syr.edu | @MichaelSessa3