Syracuse University should work harder to address the root of problems on campus, instead of just suspending students found guilty of racist or biased graffiti. At the end of January, Vice President for the Student Experience Rob Hradsky issued a statement acknowledging the recurring acts of biased graffiti and vandalism on campus, announcing that going forward, “any student who commits, engages in, assists, or coordinates an act of bias vandalism or graffiti will be immediately suspended and removed from the University.” Hradsky extended that all students that witness and protect an individual responsible for these acts will additionally be held accountable.

While this new policy serves as an immediate, indisputable response to the hateful acts that have devastated the SU community, a suspension policy is not an end-all solution. Furthermore, while administrators have labeled this approach as a zero-tolerance policy, is this classification valid if the culprits are ultimately able to return to SU following their suspension period?

With each emerging incident of racist, anti-Semitic and bigoted graffiti, many are quick to label any specific case as a problem on SU campus. This perception places blame on the individuals responsible for each biased act rather than searching for the larger problem at hand.

The SU administration’s new suspension policy similarly views these episodes with this same regard in that the response to vandalism is to temporarily eliminate the individual culprit. Yet, this does not necessarily eliminate the driving source of these unfortunate events. Each isolated occurrence of biased vandalism represents a symptom of an underlying problem — the discriminatory attitudes that exist among the SU student body.

Arthur Paris, an associate professor of sociology at SU and an expert in urban settings and race, said the administration’s response to biased incidents addresses the symptom rather than the cause.

Treating the spread of racism on campus, he said, would require administration to operate beyond each individual case of bias, and instead tend to the embedded discriminatory behavior that has recently broken out. Paris said the suspensions don’t address the root of the problem. He said though SU needs to look after its reputation, it needs to figure out how to address what the protests are about.

Paris also focused on transparency as an essential element of future SU administration policy, especially after November’s events.

“There needed to be a much more open discourse in which the officials of the university took part about what had happened, what had been discovered, what they knew and what they were prepared or not prepared to do,” he said. “It seemed to me that the response on the part of the university was very late to the party and after the fact.”

Going forward, then, the university should aim to address the root of the problem. This means that simply suspending the students behind each individual case is not by any means an end-all solution.

“There is an ignorance (from the administration) on how to deal with folk who have serious issues. Despite the Chancellor being a lawyer, they’re not spending most of their time in court, most lawyering is about negotiation… and I don’t see the administration doing that here,” he said.

Expulsion isn’t even enough. It is not a matter of how harsh each individual responsible is punished, but rather a matter of how administration treats the issue at large — this issue being the ingrained discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that have persisted amongst the SU student body.

This problem is not impossible to solve, but it will require significant changes to institutional and social frameworks that cannot be fixed with a simple suspension.

 

Amelia Fischer is a sophomore public relations major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at alfische@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter at @ameliafischer11.

Published on February 26, 2020 at 9:27 pm