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About a year ago, Stephen Kuusisto said “hello” to a professor in an elevator in a Syracuse University building. The professor didn’t acknowledge Kuusisto’s greeting.

Kuusisto, who is blind, said “hello” a second time, and the professor still didn’t respond. But when some students stepped onto the elevator, the professor went on to talk to them. Kuusisto confronted the professor outside the elevator, where the professor said they didn’t have to talk to people they didn’t want to.

“From my perspective, that was outright ableism,” said Kuusisto, director of interdisciplinary programs and outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute.

When Kuusisto shared his experience with some SU administrators, he said they were dismissive.

“If I’m a woman of color, if I’m a queer faculty member, if I’m Indigenous, I’m going to bet you that these things happen to them also,” Kuusisto said.

The university released a survey in April in which faculty and staff reported facing discrimination at SU. A similar report released in January from the university ombuds also listed racism, sexism and retaliation as concerns among SU staff. The office provides a confidential and neutral space for SU employees to discuss conflicts.

Neal Powless, who serves as university ombuds, said the January report points to places where the campus can improve, although progress may be slow.

“Does a train that moves at 100 miles an hour move fast enough for everyone on the train? Sometimes, it doesn’t,” Powless said. “But it’s moving, and that’s the key. It’s progress. It’s movement forward.”

Biko Gray, an assistant professor of religion, said he has been called derogatory terms while walking on the street past Bird Library.

“This happens,” Gray said. “These kinds of things constantly occur. It’s part of the game.”

Gray acknowledged that some discrimination on campus may be unintentional, but implicit bias within the community and the faculty is an issue. The university has a “profound problem” of neglecting to address the root causes of racist and sexist violence on campus, he said.

Some curriculums at SU don’t provide students with the critical lens they need to understand social issues, Gray said. Students across SU’s schools and colleges should be required to take the same core classes, such as those in women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, African American studies and religion, he said.

“Because (students) aren’t taking these courses, they aren’t exposed to the critical lenses that they need to have in order to make sense of their own political positions, whether that be conservative, liberal or otherwise,” Gray said.

In December 2019, nearly 150 faculty signed a statement calling on the university to integrate more university-wide diversity courses into its core curriculum. No faculty from the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the School of Information Studies or the College of Engineering and Computer Science signed the letter.

SU will implement a new first-year seminar course this fall, FYS 101, in place of SEM 100, which faced criticism for not adequately equipping students to talk about issues of race and identity. Incoming first-year students will also be required to choose from a list of courses related to identity, diversity, equity and accessibility sometime during their four years at SU.

Gray also said that faculty face challenges in SU’s tenure process, which requires professors to conduct a significant amount of research. Faculty of marginalized backgrounds often spend a substantial amount of time helping other marginalized students in addition to conducting their own research, Gray said.

Students will come to Gray with incidents such as being singled out in class because of their race or identity. He’s more than happy to console those students, but the university should be responsible for responding to and preventing these incidents.

“I am happy to do that work, but that does not contribute at all to my promotion or to my tenure case,” Gray said. “There is no institutional mechanism to recognize that kind of service, so I have to do double-duty when I am on campus.”

In the ombuds’ report, marginalized faculty listed fear of retaliation as one of their concerns when reporting incidents of discrimination or harrassment. Both Kuusisto and Gray said that SU officials have sometimes been dismissive of their concerns.

The university’s Orange SUccess software, which faculty use to report student’s grades, is inaccessible to people who are blind. But when Kuusisito told some administrators this, they assured him that the software was fine.

“The way in which I was patronized for telling them they had made a terrible accessibility mistake, that builds into an implicit bias — that you, the person from a historically marginalized position, can’t possibly know what you’re talking about,” Kuusisto said.

The university should be doing more to address the root causes of discrimination, but many of the issues faculty face are integral to the higher education system, which can make them difficult to fix, Kuusisto said.

For Powless, this could mean tearing down existing, problematic structures to make way for new ideas.

“You don’t go from seed to flower,” Powless said. “There’s a whole lot of growth in transition that happens. And sometimes it’s uncomfortable.”

Bigotry is an issue that’s persistent across the country and is deep-rooted in American culture, especially in higher education, Kuusisto said. SU’s administration didn’t create this culture, but it can do the work to fix it, he said.

“It’s a very old, structural meritocracy, white-bred system,” Kuusisto said. “And that system has to change, and we’re starting to do the hard work in this generation of making those changes. But we have to acknowledge that these things do exist. We have to say, ‘enough.’”

Published on May 5, 2021 at 11:12 pm

Contact Sarah: scalessa@syr.edu | @sarahalessan