UW-Madison faculty got an email update from Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer Patrick Sims regarding the things we can do in response to the hate and bias incidents on campus.
Here are the things he had mentioned yesterday at the Faculty Senate meeting:
- Address hate/bias incidents in your curriculum to ameliorate unacceptable occurrences in our campus community.
- Look at “bullying” language as a way to address possible hate/bias incidents in the classroom.
- Commit to engaging in ongoing cultural competency training. Learning Communities for Institutional Change & Excellence (LCICE) as an infrastructure already provides these services campus-wide.
- Commit to experiencing the leadership institute and become a facilitator, carving out 10-15% of your time towards these efforts.
- Support the request for additional staff.
- Visit the Campus Climate website
An attached letter from the Hate & Bias incident team added:
- Your school/college/department can host a bystander intervention workshop on hate and bias. This workshop will provide tools for UW-Madison community members on when and how to intervene. If you would like to host a workshop, please contact Joshua Moon Johnson.
- Many incidents go unreported for a variety of reasons. We encourage students and campus community members to report incidents of hate and bias to ensure that campus can best support the victim and work to prevent future incidents. We encourage you to post the link to report on your school/college/department websites.
- Oftentimes students do not report incidents because they are unaware of the reporting process. To increase awareness of the reporting process, we encourage you to share brochures and posters with information on how and why it is important to report. These will be distributed across campus in the next few weeks.
- Students who are victims of hate and bias incidents may need immediate support. Please be sure to refer/provide students with appropriate resources such as mental health/counseling services through University Health Services (UHS). The Multicultural Student Center also has drop-in hours with UHS counselors as well as support and discussions groups for students of color.
- Many students who are victims of hate and bias incidents identify with an underrepresented racial group, gender identity or sexual orientation, or religious group. We encourage you to specifically reach out to marginalized student groups to raise awareness of the bystander intervention workshop and reporting process.
I got a reasonably positive response to my email to my faculty colleagues suggesting that we all commit to cultural competency training. But the training from the LCICE mentioned above looks to be semester-long, Tuesdays 4:30-7:30pm. I think I’ll have a difficult time convincing my colleagues of that. We need something in between nothing and 45 hours.
Tags: UW
The stupidest thing... 