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A Board of Trustees committee recommended significant changes to student housing, faculty hiring and curriculum in a report published Thursday.

The Board of Trustees Special Committee on University Climate, Diversity and Inclusion — which first met in December 2019, off the heels of #NotAgainSU’s occupation of the Barnes Center at The Arch — was commissioned to address issues of diversity, inclusion and accessibility at Syracuse University.

The committee, which is composed of seven members of the board’s Executive Committee, visited campus multiple times and spoke with 17 groups of students, faculty and staff. It also assembled an Independent Advisory Panel of diversity and inclusion experts who also visited campus.

The committee initially planned to release its report in August but delayed its rollout until March because of the coronavirus pandemic. After more than a year, it released its findings and recommendations in a 19-page report.

Here’s a breakdown of what the committee heard from students, faculty and staff and how members of the committee plan to implement their recommendations:

Hiring, retention and career development

During its visits to campus in February 2020, the special committee heard from students and faculty that faculty diversity is inadequate. Members of the campus community reported a lack of effort on SU’s part to recruit and retain female faculty and faculty from underrepresented groups.

In response, the committee recommended an expansion of an existing faculty diversity hiring initiative that proposes SU commit up to $50 million over the next 10 years to build programs that diversify its full-time faculty. It also recommended further investment in recruitment and retention efforts to change university culture at the department level, which instructors have indicated is often not welcoming.

The push for more resources related to hiring was largely driven by deans, said Jeff Scruggs, one of the special committee’s co-chairs, in an interview with The Daily Orange.

“They were really banging on the table for a methodology by which they would have more carte blanche to diversify their hires,” Scruggs said. “With the financial commitment, this gives them the resources and the weapons, if you will, to get it done.”

If fully implemented, the faculty hiring program could bring up to 70 new faculty members from underrepresented groups and approximately 100 new postdoctoral fellows, according to the committee’s report.

Training, curriculum and facilities

The committee recommended expanding diversity training for all SU employees, students and stakeholders — including tenured faculty. Contrary to SU’s previous diversity training methods, the new training programs would be ongoing and include metrics to assess their effectiveness, the report said.

Multiple students told the committee that faculty and instructors didn’t understand diverse cultures and exhibited problematic behavior in the classroom.

“We heard things that were, quite frankly, very painful to Jeff and me and to the other members of the committee,” said Richard Alexander, the committee’s other co-chair.

The committee will support efforts to replace the zero-credit SEM 100 freshman seminar, which many students have called ineffective, with a one-credit First Year Seminar.

It expressed support for a requirement, previously passed by the University Senate, to mandate all upper-level undergraduate students take a three-credit course related to diversity, equity and inclusion. It stopped short, though, of explicitly endorsing the university-wide diversity curriculum several faculty members proposed in 2019, saying such a curriculum would be challenging for SU’s professional schools to implement.

The committee also recommended a mandatory course on civics and citizenship.

“This is an inflection point, and the work will change, and inevitably, we will face new challenges, but we think if we can create the infrastructure and the oversight, we will be in a better place to deal with those issues going forward,” Alexander said.

The committee also recommended additional training and infrastructure updates related to accessibility. While there is “admiration” for the academic research and programming on accessibility at SU, people the committee spoke to said that level of excellence isn’t matched in the commitment to services and access for people with disabilities at the university.

Campus commitments

The report also recommends SU fully implement its commitments to student groups that protested in the 2019-20 academic year, including #NotAgainSU demonstrators, as well as Jewish, Indigenous and international students.

SU has agreed to and completed progress on several demands and is still working to address others.

When asked about nine demands from #NotAgainSU the university hasn’t agreed to — which include calls for university officials to resign, for the Department of Public Safety to be disarmed and for SU to state that the university is complicit in white supremacy — Alexander said the committee couldn’t comment.

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More stories on SU’s Board of Trustees:

• Board of Trustees special committee on diversity releases final review
• #NotAgainSU discusses demands with Board of Trustees
• SA proposes student vote on Board of Trustees

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“To the extent that the administration entered into commitments with various student organizations, our recommendation or expectation is that those commitments are going to be met, and that they’re going to be appropriately met, and that they’re going to be appropriately resourced,” Alexander said. “And if you’re talking to things beyond that, I don’t think Jeff and I are really in a position to comment on them.”

Housing and residence life

The committee proposed moving all student residences to Main Campus to “better integrate” SU’s student population. This would mean eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, South Campus housing.

A disproportionate number of students of color relocate to South Campus during their sophomore year, and those students have reported feeling higher levels of DPS surveillance than their white peers, the report says. The report doesn’t acknowledge that such a disparity exists, referring instead to students’ “perceived” marginalization.

Students who spoke with the committee said they were more heavily policed than white students living in Greek life chapter houses on Comstock and Walnut avenues. The committee attributed this issue to the chapter houses falling under the Syracuse Police Department’s jurisdiction, where “there is seldom enforcement of underage drinking, open alcohol containers and noise violations.”

The committee also made recommendations that expand training for resident advisers and other staff in university housing.

“The experience that someone has in their dorm, walking down the hall and feeling belonging, in that moment can be so much more powerful and impactful than whether we have a committee,” Alexander said.

The board’s role

In its final recommendation, the committee expressed support for increasing diversity in SU’s predominantly white and wealthy Board of Trustees.

When asked about the board’s lack of diversity, Scruggs and Alexander denied that the committee’s makeup had any impact on its findings or recommendations.

“I understand the question. It’s not the question I would ask,” Alexander said. “I think we actually had a very diverse group of people who listened very, very carefully. So I don’t think our work was in any way, shape or form impacted by the composition of the committee.”

Going forward, the special committee will continue working with university officials, as well as students, faculty and staff, to allocate resources that improve diversity and inclusion efforts at SU, Alexander said.

“Our job is really one of oversight,” Alexander said. “And our job is to make sure that the university is putting its resources, to the extent that we have control of those resources, to support the recommendations and initiatives.”

Scruggs said the committee intends to continue its work and will use future surveys and discussions to assess the effectiveness of its recommendations.

“Now that we’re in this, we can’t, don’t want to and shouldn’t remove ourselves at this board from this oversight function,” Scruggs said. “This is going to be evolutionary, and it’s not ever going to stop.”

Published on March 7, 2021 at 11:31 pm

Contact Michael: msessa@syr.edu | @MichaelSessa3