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Student Forum Allows Students to Address Climate Concerns

By Andy Elder, Student Affairs Writer

A familiar slogan often affiliated with Penn State has been: Making Life Better. New evidence comes forward every day to confirm that simple statement.

But like every great university, Penn State is constantly striving to improve, to make life even better.

Perhaps guided by that principle, several top university administrators met with more than 20 key student leaders (including presidents of several multicultural student groups) during the first week of the fall semester. The purpose was to brief the student leaders on upcoming and ongoing initiatives surrounding diversity and to solicit their feedback.

One of those initiatives was the Student Affairs-sponsored open student forum titled, "Creating a Community of Difference," which was held in late September in the HUB-Robeson Auditorium.

Coordinated by Dr. Philip Burlingame, associate vice president for student affairs, and facilitated by Dr. Felicia McGinty, associate vice president for student engagement, and Sue Rankin, a senior diversity analyst in the Office of Educational Equity, the forum welcomed students to a frank, open discussion of campus climate issues.

The more than 100 who attended were greeted by a projected quote from the book "Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics" by Bell Hooks that read: "Resistance begins with people confronting pain, whether it's theirs or somebody else's, and wanting to do something to change it."

For more than an hour after that, students shared negative and positive anecdotes, observations and concerns about about how the university can move forward on educating students about diversity and how to make the community stronger. Several themes developed. Among them were:

Complacency

• All community members must take responsibility for creating and maintaining a better climate
• PSU "talks the talk", but does not always "walk the walk"
• Tolerant of intolerance (examples of racism, heterosexism, ableism, U.S. centrism, etc.)
• Silence = Indifference

"Preaching to the Choir"

• Mandatory dialogues on difference focused on power and privilege for all students...graduate and undergraduate
• Diversity, tolerance, acceptance - we need shared language (e.g., WE ARE campaign)
• Create safe places for dialogue/discourse (e.g. Race Relations Project)
• Expand this forum... who is NOT here and why?
• Empower students

Safety

• Interaction across difference - create safe spaces for "border-crossings"
• Feeling of Isolation - due to small communities of difference
• Scary Place! - Not accepted for who you are... expectation is assimilation into "norm?"

Education! Education! EDUCATION!!!

• Reach out to "majority" students
• Recognize various levels of knowledge - not all coming to the table with same "baggage"
• Integrate social justice throughout the curriculum
• Promote transformative education

Response to critical incidents

• Professionally facilitated forums when "bubble bursts" (e.g. when critical incidents occur)
• How do "we" learn to really TALK about "it"?

"I think this was very helpful. It was a good environment for people to feel open and share their experiences," said Vicky Triponey, vice president for student affairs. "The only way we're going to make our community better is to understand where we have problems and where we're doing it well, so we can become better."

Rankin, as one of the facilitators, said part of what made the forum a success was helping to create an environment in which students could feel comfortable sharing troubling experiences.

"Part of it is to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, for me to prepare a place for students to do that," she said. "I'm not judgmental. I want them to say what they feel. It's very hard in a place where they're all coming together kind of cold."

McGinty shared Rankin's sentiments.

"I wasn't uncomfortable with the subject matter. My challenge is sometimes hearing students' experiences and their pain is painful for you. It's painful to know that you work in a place that is good but could be much better," McGinty said.

"Hearing some of the students' pain and challenges and issues in some ways invigorates me to get back out there and say, 'hey, we need to push the envelope. We need to keep this on our agenda. We need to continue the dialogue about it and figure out collectively with students how we solve the problem. Or at least create a different environment."

One of the goals of the forum was to gather anecdotes and themes from students and to carry those voices to the Campus Climate Summit, which was held in early October.

"It was also to allow more student voices to be heard as we plan for next week's [Summit]," Burlingame said. "That idea is to really focus and spend a lot of time talking about these same kinds of questions. What's not going well at Penn State? What has been going well? What can we all do as members of the community to start to be more proactive and really to lead everyone into more conversations like this."

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