When religion professors Biko Gray and Virginia Burrus published their letter, they wanted to form a collective voice and be a catalyst for change.

As a series of racist and anti-Semitic incidents rattled Syracuse University’s campus in November, Gray and Burrus published a statement on behalf of SU faculty proposing a university-wide liberal arts core curriculum to improve campus climate and educate on issues of diversity.

The statement received 148 faculty signatures. While the signatories represented several SU schools and colleges — mostly the College of Arts and Sciences — no faculty from the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the School of Information Studies or the College of Engineering and Computer Science signed the document.

Of all the signatures from the College of Arts and Sciences, only one represented a STEM-related field.

Burrus and Gray said that rifts over liberal arts course requirements between faculty based in the arts, humanities and social sciences and faculty based in professional development schools or STEM may shape how SU implements university-wide curriculum change moving forward.

A faculty divide

Burrus said she was disappointed that faculty from certain fields were almost “completely silent” about signing the document.

“What seems likely to me is that those are schools that are very focused on professional training, often in ways that don’t overlap with the agenda of a liberal arts curriculum,” Burrus said.

A university-wide liberal arts curriculum would better educate students about issues of diversity and could help deter individuals from committing similar hate crimes at SU, said Virginia Burrus, director of graduate studies in the Department of Religion and co-author of the statement, in an interview.

Faculty Statement by The Daily Orange on Scribd

The hard sciences in particular show a reluctance to tackle questions of diversity, said George Langford, dean emeritus of the College of Arts and Sciences. Langford, a professor of biology and neuroscience, was the statement’s only signatory from a STEM-related field.

“My colleagues in the sciences tend not to think about issues of race, ethnicity, gender and class,” said Langford. “I don’t think it’s at the top of mind for most of them.”

Langford signed the document because he supports student protesters and wants to make the university culture more inclusive, he said. #NotAgainSU, a black-led student movement, held a sit-in at the Barnes Center at The Arch for eight days in response to the racist incidents.

A liberal arts curriculum is critical for exposing STEM students to liberal arts coursework, Langford said.

These disagreements are not new, Burrus said. An earlier proposal to transform SU’s mandatory first-year diversity course SEM 100 into a full three-credit course received similar pushback, she said.

“I think it comes down to things like, do they [non-signing faculty] want their professional degree almost diluted by these general requirements,” Burrus said. “This is just what I imagine, that they’re going to want to operate more autonomously in crafting their professional curriculum.”

Falling behind

In their statement, Gray and Burrus identified two university practices they said detract from a liberal arts core curriculum or disproportionately benefit the hard sciences.

The first was the Responsibility-Centered Management funding model, which determines the funding of each school at SU through factors like enrollment and instruction. The second practice, the Cluster Hires Initiative, emphasizes the hiring of faculty into different schools and departments to promote interdisciplinary research.

The university approved 53 hires across seven interdisciplinary academic and research areas, or “clusters,” as part of the initiative in Nov. 2018. A second round of cluster hires is currently underway.

“The initiative is designed to increase interdisciplinary research and training opportunities for students,” said Janet Wilmoth, professor of sociology at SU and co-leader of the Aging, Behavioral Health and Neuroscience cluster. Wilmoth did not sign the faculty statement.

Cluster hiring serves to connect departments and bring together faculty from across the university, Wilmoth said.

But Burrus and Gray said the initiative redirects resources from the arts and humanities to the hard sciences.

“There is a suspicion that in order to fund the cluster hires, which are going to the sciences, we’re constricting other disciplines,” Burrus said. “We’re certainly not getting the boost that others are. Relatively speaking, we’re falling behind.”

After Burrus and Gray published their statement, SU announced the creation of its Diversity Opportunity Hires initiative, which will provide financial incentives for the hiring of diverse faculty. Emily Steinberger | Design Editor

Burrus pointed to the cost difference between research in the hard sciences and in the humanities as a potential cause of the disparity. Recruiting faculty and funding research in the hard sciences costs more than in the arts or humanities, she said. As a result, the university is more likely to spend its limited funds on the hard sciences.

Of the seven clusters included in the first round of cluster hires, only one –– Social Differences, Social Justice –– focuses primarily on the humanities, Gray said.

Burrus and Gray also said the Cluster Hires Initiative does not prioritize the hiring of diverse faculty, a cornerstone of their proposed liberal arts core curriculum.

“While cluster hiring has the possibility of increasing diversity, it only does so if you build that into the model,” Burrus said. “Part of the question is ‘What is our university doing to leverage cluster hiring for diversity’?”

After Burrus and Gray published their statement, SU announced the creation of its Diversity Opportunity Hires initiative, which will provide financial incentives for the hiring of faculty from underrepresented backgrounds through the cluster hires process.

While the hiring of diverse faculty is a step in the right direction, it’s not enough to change the campus climate at SU, Gray said. More important is altering the university’s curriculum to make students confront questions of human difference in their studies, he said.

“We have to think about intellectual and ethical diversity as well,” Gray said. “You can hire these people, but what are we doing structurally and institutionally and curricularly to ensure that the diversity you want is foregrounded in the lives of the students?”

University-wide change

Despite the large, albeit divided, faculty response, Gray and Burrus said their statement should not be considered a blueprint moving forward. The purpose of the document was to begin a conversation rather than prescribe a solution, Burrus said.

The reforms SU implements should be university-wide, Gray said.

“The big part for us is how do we get to the point where every SU student has access to, and has to engage in, questions of difference,” he said. “That’s what the emphasis for this statement is on.”

Burrus and Gray said they will continue working to organize faculty. But for now, Gray said, the decision to move forward with curricular change at SU lies with the administration.

“I think that’s really what’s most important,” he said. “They’ve gotten two calls from two different constituencies that are incredibly important to this university. I want to see what they do. I want to hear what they have to say.”

Published on January 21, 2020 at 11:47 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu