Initiated by a recent opinion column in the Daily Cardinal, and reinforced by others in The Badger Herald, hundreds of University of Wisconsin students gathered in Smith Hall Monday with an eye fixed on the future of diversity on campus.
Originally expecting a handful of students to attend, event organizer and Smith Hall House Fellow Ashley Saffold said they ordered food for 20 people. After a last-minute room change, the event was staged for the several hundred students, faculty and staff who ended up attending.
While organizers made it a point to clarify the event was not a protest or rebellion in response to Daily Cardinal columnist Andrew Carpenter’s editorial piece or any others, Carpenter’s piece was a main point of discussion and served as stimulus to address the problem they said the article represents.
“I think that what motivated a lot of people to come here was something that maybe wasn’t so positive at first, but it really turned out amazing,” Saffold said.
Clintel Hasan, founder and chair of Students for the Oneness of Humankind — the group that helped organize the event — said she was enthused by not only the number of people but also by the diversity of the group in attendance.
“Usually when it’s something about diversity, you get all black students or all Hispanic students,” Hasan said. “To see that the crowd was actually diverse in race was really significant to me because I thought it showed it was a true effort on campus.”
Many recent diversity initiatives, such as Plan 2008, have admittedly fallen short of expectations, creating impetus to initiate new and effective plans, Vice Provost of Diversity Damon Williams said in a past interview with The Badger Herald.
At the event, Williams said in his 15 months on campus, he has been perpetually shocked at how much effort goes into diversity initiatives and how rarely the outcomes are indicative of the efforts.
“I think, going forward, it’s not a matter of try harder, it’s a matter of do better,” Williams said.
A large part of the success of the event, in Saffold’s eyes, was its student-based genesis. Having been on campus for four years and seen many similar attempts at initiating dialogue, Saffold said the fact the event was student-lead was a main draw.
“I think that’s how it should be,” Saffold said. “That’s when the solutions come. Since the problem is really within our student body, that’s where the solutions are most effective.”
As those in attendance split into small groups to discuss not only the article which sparked the event but also the possible solutions to overarching issues of diversity on campus, Williams said he heard dialogue affirming several ideas.
“(Discussion was) confirmatory of the need to be able to change the philosophy of how we approach our diversity efforts, confirmatory of the fact that we have to engage faculty and students seriously in conversations, … confirmatory of the fact that students don’t want to be dismissed in silence, in who they are and the complexities of who they are,” Williams said.
Saffold said Williams had already asked a few students to sit on a panel in the near future, adding she hopes to continue these efforts throughout the year and into next.
