AU faculty and students may be required to participate in a diversity training program similar to Safe Space as early as February 2012.
The newly formed Student Government Ethnic and Cultural Coalition presented its plans for the program at “AUSG’s Forum on Race and Ethnicity at AU” Nov. 16.
The coalition wants to establish a method to educate AU students and faculty about how to make AU a more welcoming place for racial and cultural minorities.
“This program would help raise awareness of diversity issues within campus and educate the community on how to address these issues,” ECC Director Lauren Babb said at the coalition’s first public event in Anderson Hall.
The program should be ready for implementation by February 2012, she said.
The coalition held the forum to boost awareness of the department’s goals and increase acceptance of diversity of minorities within the AU community.
Babb began the forum with a short presentation on ECC’s mission and its major policy and advocacy goals.
Babb then broke the audience of about 25 into randomly assigned groups to discuss several questions regarding diversity at AU.
From these group discussions, students came up with suggestions about how AU could be more accepting of cultural or ethnic minorities.
Some recommendations included a lounge designated as a space for discussions on race and ethnicity, as well as having a Welcome Week event allowing cultural minorities to meet and network with each other.
ECC chose “rudeness” as the theme for the evening, asking the groups to discuss if students at AU are impolite to each other. However, students agreed that their peers are often ignorant rather than intentionally offensive.
The groups also mentioned that students in general, not necessarily ethnic or cultural minorities, don’t tend to reach out specifically to interact with people from different ethnic or cultural groups. Often students said they didn’t think a different group would accept them.
Babb’s proposed training program would address this issue, she said.
“Right now, we’re trying to identify some of the major problems regarding diversity relations, and then as a group, we plan on having more discussion to identify solutions to those issues,” she said.
The ECC also anticipates the training program will help combat issues within the classroom.
Some minority students said they feel uncomfortable when their peers expect them to “represent” their respective minority during classroom discussions on racial or cultural topics.
Making this training program mandatory for faculty and students should help facilitate a more comfortable atmosphere in and out of the classroom, Babb said.
SG President Tim McBride said at the forum that the development of the ECC will help supplement SG legislation to further promote diversity in SG as early as spring elections.
“We’d like to see more women and ethnic minorities feel free to apply or run for positions in Student Government,” he said. “We certainly plan on working with ECC to reach that goal.”
