​Unite students and University for solutions

Last Friday, President Brodhead held a community forum in Page Auditorium with Provost Sally Kornbluth and Trinity Dean Valerie Ashby. The forum was announced against the backdrop of student protests of racism across the nation and the resignation of the University of Missouri’s president after pressure from student activists for mishandling racial issues. It concerned itself with institutional responses that would improve the campus environment along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and mental health. The forum also highlighted an increasingly awkward miscommunication between administration and students over what demands and projects have been accomplished, which are ongoing and which have been passed on.

The forum was a rare opportunity for students to air grievances directly to top University leadership and for administrators to freshly understand the, often raw, emotional toll that these issues have on individual, peer-to-peer and community levels. Moreover, administrators in attendance likely began to better understand the labor, both emotional and administrative, that student leaders who try to improve campus have performed on top of their academic obligations.

Many ideas, some new and many rehashed, came out of the forum, an outcome which we applaud for setting many proposals into the public eye and putting many on the same page, for once. These ideas included the creation of a dedicated form to report bias incidents but most importantly revealed the fundamental need for top administrators to communicate more about what policy or initiatives can be expected. Dean Ashby shared that she is working on addressing bias in faculty and that search committees will now go through bias training before choosing new faculty. Administrators also listened very well and should be applauded for maintaining their composure.

From students at the event, there at times tended to be an unfortunate lack of awareness from the student end about what work is currently being done in addition to a brief miscommunication about The Chronicle’s opinion section, clarified in Friday’s Editor’s note. From the administration’s end there was an unmistakably sympathetic response to the breadth of issues that affected students in personal anecdotes and the emotion behind some questions. If those sympathies are to acted on, the administration ought to put energy into making students aware of safety improvements, substantial initiative progress and further opportunities for dialogue. No doubt, the administration has the power and means to communicate easily with students, and we recommend that they do so. A supplement or hyperlink in Dean Steve Nowicki’s Short List emails or a monthly email would suffice, without becoming ignored by students for being too frequent. It may be that such channels of communication are necessary to be in touch about progress in the problem areas of race, gender, sexuality, etc.

Due to a student demonstration at the beginning of the event which called, in part, for Friday’s forum to not be a one-off event scheduled at a time inconvenient for students, Provost Kornbluth stated publicly her intent to attend next Friday’s forum. In order to make these conversations with administration sustained to hold leaders accountable as well as show good faith from all parties through an open flow of sentiments and information, we encourage all members of the Duke community to attend. We can all contribute to our campus’s active conversation with or without forums and should do so whenever possible. Students who involve themselves productively and in good faith should be encouraged to do so, and the administration should balance the fact that the job of students is primarily to be students with the role students necessarily have in providing feedback on the community and University broadly.