Hofstra Students and Faculty of Color Call for University Changes
By: Stephanie Banat
It should be the primary concern of a university to make all of its students and faculty feel equally respected, safe and comfortable. However, this does not seem to be the case when it comes to many of the entities at Hofstra University.
Students and professors of color at Hofstra have consistently expressed their discontent with various aspects of University life. Their main concerns are the lack of diversity in the faculty, negative classroom interactions between students of color and professors, the Public Safety department’s negative and physically rough treatment of minority students, lack of counselors of color within the mental health facility, the symbolically offensive Thomas Jefferson statue on campus, and lack of diversity within greek life.
Representatives from the University, such as the Assistant Vice President of University Relations, Karla Schuster, and the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Cornell Craig, have responded to these complaints by saying that the University is in the process of expanding the office of Craig, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, in order to further advance equity in all areas of the institution. They’ve also expressed that Hofstra’s new president, President Poser, has publicly identified hiring more diverse faculty as a top priority. However, concrete arrangements and specific time frames were not included in these plans.
Faculty
There has been an ongoing conversation at Hofstra about making the faculty more racially diverse. Most recently, in April 2021, a resolution was put forth by the Black Faculty Council to hire more faculty members of color. It passed by 75% in a full faculty meeting, while 11 faculty members abstained, according to Dr. Veronica Lippencott, the associate director of Hofstra’s Center for “Race,” Culture and Social justice. However, Hofstra’s president at the time, President Rabinowitz, and the provost, Ms. Lenaghan, declined to put the resolution into action at this time.
“We drafted this resolution because there’s only 24 full-time and 36 part-time black faculty,” said Lippencott during an interview in May 2021, “which only represents about 8% of all faculty at Hofstra. Our black student population stands at about only 9% of the student body….It’s one thing for the president to make a statement saying black lives matter at Hofstra but if we put forth a resolution like this and they reject it, what does that statement really mean?”
Dr. Lippencott also explained how the Black Faculty Council has asked the university to implement mandatory training on diversity and inclusion for faculty, but they have faced pushback from other faculty.
“A lot of faculty are asking for this not to be mandatory and saying its not necessary,” she said, “there is not a sense of urgency across the board about issues relating to race on campus.”
Nerys Muller, a Hofstra alumna who recently graduated in May 2021, explained that not having professors of color to look up to was discouraging for students of color like herself.
“You want to be able to see yourself in the people who are teaching you,” she said, “so that its like ‘ok, I know if they can do it, I can do it too.’”
These concerns were brought to Officer Cornell Craig’s attention. He responded by saying, “Hofstra has not rejected the hiring more faculty of color. It is still on our agenda. However, The Black Faculty Council’s resolution was presented as the prior president and administrative team was transitioning out and new senior leadership and President Poser was transitioning in, therefore, they were not able to act on it at the time.”
Craig added that the university is in the process of searching for a new Provost, “who will be a key partner in the strategy to increase diversity and representation amongst faculty,” as he put it.
Craig also explained that the University has taken steps to improve diversity among faculty in systemic ways.
“We have introduced an inclusive hiring initiative,” he said, “to decrease the role bias may play in the hiring process and engage innovative best practices to increase accountability and track progress. Each new search for faculty is now commenced only after the search committee has engaged in implicit bias training and identifies a clear and inclusive plan for the search.”
Classroom Experiences
Another major concern of Hofstra’s students of color is the way they are treated within the classroom setting. Many students including senior Victoria Bell, senior Athena Dawson, senior Amudalat Ajasa, junior Kayla Stadeker, 2021 graduates Savannah Miles and Nerys Muller, and 2019 graduate Ja’Loni Owens, reported that during classes, they have often been singled out and asked to explain black issues by non-black professors. They’ve shared that this has made them uncomfortable and that they feel if Hofstra had more faculty of color to teach about these topics, this awkward situation wouldn’t happen as often.
Some students of color have also been offended by discriminatory comments made by professors, and comments that professors have allowed other non-black students to make during class.
“In May 2020 on the same day Dreasjon ‘Sean’ Reed was murdered by police,” Savannah Miles explained, “we were having a discussion in class about the Black Lives Matter movement and the professor allowed a student to go on a 10-minute white supremacist rant about how systematic racism doesn’t exist. But when I responded by listing the names of the various people of color recently killed by police, the professor cut me off by ending the zoom call altogether, stopping class early.“
Ja’Loni Owens, a Hofstra alumna who graduated in 2019, also spoke about negative experiences she’s had with professors during her time at Hofstra.
“In a media ethics class, I was once forced to watch birth of a nation where people were wearing black face,” she said, “I also had a professor who made racist comments in class about immigrants, calling their children ‘anchor babies’ and who was heard using the n-word by other students.”
In April 2018, Owens tweeted about this professor on her personal twitter account in order to warn her peers. She later deleted it at the request of the University.
The professor filed a complaint against Owens for her tweet and Owens was issued a conduct charge for violating “Infringement of Rights” under the student code of conduct outlined in the Guide to Pride.
Owens was then notified by Hofstra’s Office of Community Standards that she would have to go through a student conduct process including a hearing. The office advised her to bring any evidence she may have to the hearing, and Owens gathered statements from other students confirming that they too had witnessed the professor making derogatory, racist comments.
Ultimately, the jury determined that Owens was not guilty of the “infringement of rights” charge. She received a letter from Heather A. DePierro, the Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Community Standards at the time, saying “the board did not find sufficient evidence to hold you accountable.”
Owens contacted the Office of Community Standards asking why the professor would not face any repercussions for his offensive remarks, to which she never received a response.
Representatives from the University, Karla Schuster and Cornell Craig, were recently asked to comment on this situation, to which they replied “We cannot comment on or discuss individual disciplinary proceedings.”
Lastly, although this incident occured in 2018 and the charge was dropped, Owens is still feeling the effects of this professor’s allegation today. Owens is currently in her 5th semester of law school at CUNY School Of Law and she was advised by the school’s Academic Affairs Department that she will have to report this incident in the “character and fitness” component of her application, to be evaluated by the New York Bar examiners, before she can receive her license to practice law.
“All I was trying to do was warn my peers and this situation is still negatively effecting me,” Owens said, “yet the professor walked away with zero consequences for making these offensive remarks.”
Public Safety Department
Both students and professors of color have reported often feeling targeted by Hofstra’s Public Safety officers.
One Hofstra Professor, Dr. Tomeka Robinson, a professor of Rhetoric and Public Advocacy, and two Hofstra Students, Savannah Miles and Nerys Muller, discussed their past experiences with Hofstra’s Public Safety Department in the following video.
Additionally, in March of 2020, Senior Victoria Bell, who writes for the Hofstra Chronicle, witnessed and recorded an incident in which a public safety officer physically assaulted an international Chinese student. Video footage of the altercation shows the student being pushed up against a car and thrown into a van.
The University responded to the situation only by suspending the officer, rather than firing him completely, which students like Bell felt was “not enough.”
Owens also shared her experiences of frequently being stopped by public safety and asked for ID.
“I’ve been targeted by public safety many times while coming to school from my nearby apartment,” she said, “I was once wearing Hofstra sweatpants with a huge back-pack on, and a public safety officer approached me and asked why I was on campus. I said that I was a student and he asked to see my student ID. I showed it to him and he then asked to see my driver’s license as well, which i didnt understand because it was as if he thought I had a fake student identification card.”
Two other students, Athena Dawson and Kayla Stadeker shared similar stories about them and their friends frequently being stopped by public safety and asked for ID, although the many white students walking around next to them were not stopped.
Miles also discussed a time in which she commented on an issue with public safety during a student town hall panel and was yelled at by the director of public safety and former school president, in what she saw as an attempt to silence her.
“At my first student town hall panel,” Miles said, “since these panels designed for us to voice our concerns about things happening on campus.. I commented on a situation where a disabled student was stopped on campus and interrogated by public safety during an episode of mental illness and I said that it sounded like stop and frisk. The director of public safety and the president then started screaming at me, saying that I don’t have my facts right and that there’s no way they engage in discriminatory practices.”
These stories and complaints were shared with the Public Safety Department and the department was asked to comment. Hofstra’s new public safety director, Geraldine Hart, who started in May 2021, did not respond to a request for an interview. However, Karla Schuster provided statements on behalf of the Department.
“The Department of Public Safety is dedicated to ensuring that Hofstra University is a safe, welcoming environment for all members of the campus community,” she said. “The Department requires that officers participate in regular training sessions including programs on diversity and community relations. In addition, by working with the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Cornell Craig, and the University’s public safety advisory committee, the Department is reviewing various policies and procedures”
Schuster added that during May 2021, the new director, Hart, answered all questions at an online webinar for students and faculty where she announced plans for listening sessions with students, faculty and staff this fall to continue the department’s commitment to transparency.
Schuster also mentioned that during the spring of 2020, the University launched a centralized online complaint system that allows students and staff to anonymously report violations of university polices and codes of conducts, including incidents of bias or discrimination.
“This centralized system allows the University to investigate and track complaints more effectively,” she explained.
Officer Cornell Craig also discussed plans of training for the Public Safety Department.
“Director Hart and I have met to discuss a continuation of a plan of training and engagement with the Public Safety Officers,” he said, “to continue to improve the relationship with students and the campus community. The next training by my office with Public Safety is scheduled for January 2022.”
When Schuster and Craig were asked to share the demographic breakdown of the Public Safety Department, they said that they do not have this information readily available.
Mental Health Facility
Another ongoing issue that students and faculty of color discussed is the lack of diversity in Hofstra’s mental health facility. For the past few years, Hofstra has had very few counselors of color and the ones they’ve had have been employed temporarirly, according to students such as Amudalat Ajasa, Ja’Loni Owens, and Athena Dawson.
Amudalat Ajasa, who is the president of Hofstra’s Black Student Union, also mentioned that during spring of 2020, a time of major racial tensions and trauma in our country, there were zero black counselors at Hofstra.
The Black Student Union’s list of demands, spearheaded by Ajasa in August 2020, details students’ concerns about the mental health facility.
“We are calling for the permanent staffing of a Black counselor in the Student Health and Counseling Center,” the Union stated in their list. “Although there have been Black counselors in the past, they have been graduate students who are only employed for one school year. Having to explain your story from the beginning again to a new person every year is an added pain for Black students.”
Ajasa explained why its so important for students of color to have counselors of color to speak to.
“While a black counselor would inherently understand the student’s plight as a black person in America, any other counselor would not,” she said. “So we often have to go through the extra emotional labor of explaining our trauma during our short therapy sessions.”
Owens also discussed the importance of having access to counselors of color.
“Data shows that students of color do better when talking to counselors of color,” stated Owens,” but if the university just hires one or two, everyone will go to them and they will be overworked and will possibly quit.”
Senior, Athena Dawson, shared her experience of having to switch counselors after a short time of speaking with a counselor of color.
“In my sophomore year I had a black counselor for a while,” Dawson said, “and then she left and I had to switch to a white one, and although she was great, there were certain things pertaining to my identity as a black woman at a predominantly white school that I just didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about…even though its supposed to be a safe place.”
These concerns were brought to the attention of Officer Craig, to which he responded the following:
“The director of the counseling center is a black man, but yes, it is important that we look to hire more counselors of color,” he said. “Due to the pandemic, the University had to undergo budget cuts and does not have the financial backing to hire anyone new in any department right now. However, we should start planning for what is to come.”
Professor Tomeka Robinson responded to Craig’s comment by pointing out that the director of the center is not the person who will be sitting with students of color and talking through their issues, so it doesn’t really help the situation.
Savannah Miles was also skeptical about Craig’s response.
“If they are blaming this on budget cuts, I would say to look at the actual university budget,” she said, “This is a multi-billion dollar institution. We just spent a ginormous amount of money on the new Starbucks deal…. but we don’t have enough money to afford black counselors? That doesn’t add up.”
Thomas Jefferson Statue
In additional to all these other issues, Hofstra’s black student community has consistenlty expressed their resentment and discomfort towards the slavery-linked Thomas Jefferson statue on campus.
For over 20 years, a statue of the controversial founding father, Thomas Jefferson stood in front of Hofstra University’s David S. Mack Student Center, according to the Long Island Herald. While Jefferson has no known significance to the history of Hofstra University, he does have known significance in running one of the largest slave plantations out of Virginia, owning over 600 slaves, the most of any U.S. president, and committing statutory rape of an underage slave, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
The black student community has led an extensive campaign to get this monument removed over the past few years. The university has responded to their efforts by relocating the statue to a less conspicuous area of campus in July of 2020.
Students like Victoria Bell and Kayla Stadeker called this relocation a mere attempt to appease the black student community.
Faculty members like Professor Lippencott agreed that the relocating of the statue did not help and that it should be removed entirely.
“Even though there was a commission to discuss potentially removing the statue,” Lippencott said, “it was made very clear that the statue was never going to be removed and the resolution was just going to be to relocate it to where we don’t see it as readily… which doesn’t do much. It needs to be removed or at least placed in Hofstra’s museum instead.”
Furthermore, according to students like Ja’Loni Owens, even more traumatic than the presence of the statue was the backlash that students of color faced for leading protests against it. Owens described her experience as one of the initial organizers of the “Jefferson’s gotta go” movement.
“When we held our first protest,” she explained, “we put out a flier on campus which had my school email address on it. Someone from the University sent the flier to Fox News, and they posted it on their website and aired it on their evening news show.
“From this, I began receiving death threats and threats of being raped via email, in letters to my home, and on social media,” Owens explained, “Since people got my name from my email address, they were able to find my other information too. I told the school that this was a threat to my safety and they responded by saying that we just shouldn’t protest….so this went from being about the statue to being more about Hofstra not protecting us from danger.”
Greek Life
Lastly, yet another sphere of campus life that black students have historically felt excluded from is Hofstra’s Greek Life, according to students like Owens, Miles, and Bell.
Bell detailed her experience when trying out for a sorority on campus.
“There was a line of about 70 girls outside, who were all white,” she said. “I immediately felt out of place and intimidated but forced myself to stay anyway. I looked to one of the recruiters and asked her what the sorority was looking for in terms of its new members. Her response was ‘well, first of all, you have to fit THE look.’ As soon as she said that, I realized I had no chance because I looked totally different from every other girl there. I also realized that I had began devaluing myself based on people I just met.”
When asked to comment on this situation, Officer Craig tried to clarify Hofstra’s stance in a case like that one.
“Entry to a sorority should not be based on immutable aspects of one’s identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any of those things,” he said.
Miles further explained the exclusion of students of color from Hofstra’s Greek life in past years.
“We didn’t have any sororities or fraternities of color until recently in 2014,” she said, “and it was the students of color who pushed for the university to create them…the University did not create them by their own free will.”
Miles also went on to detail some of the horrors students of color have faced when they have been initiated into fraternities or sororities.
“Even if students of color do make it into these sororities or fraternity,” she said, “the hazing processes for many of them are far worse. I have friends who have been physically choked during initiation and repeatedly called the n-word, up until the point where they had to drop out of it. I also had a friend who formerly went to Hofstra that was put in a tiny dog cage and force fed until he threw up. He went public about his experience after he left Hofstra.”
Video footage of an interview with ABC 7 News shows the former student, Syed Ali John Medhi, sharing his experiences in the fraternity.
Medhi also shared photographs with The Hofstra Chronicle of other pledges being forced to kneel under a swastika.
Owens also shared that during her time at Hofstra, student groups were pushing for diversity training to be implemented in Greek life, but they faced pushback from many students who didn’t want to participate.
“The NCAA chapter and black student union had been pushing for there to be mandated cultural competency training for fraternities and sororities,” Owens explained, “just because there were a lot of issues such as a fraternity party where there was cultural appropriation with very offensive Halloween costumes… and there was a lot of pushback from students, they were saying ‘we’re not racist, we don’t need this.’ Being asked to engage in other world views shouldn’t be looked at as a punishment.”
Officer Craig agreed that Greek Life needs to be reformed.
“It is important that Greek life be revamped,” he said, “greek life athletics has training for diversity and inclusion. This kind of training must be implemented for fraternities and sororities as well.”
When asked for his overall comment on the many racial inequities at Hofstra, Craig shared some positive words about what the University hopes to accomplish in the future.
“There is always room for improvement and we are dedicated to continuing to support the needs of the Hofstra community,” he said. “Ultimately, the University and President Poser as well as the Office of Diversity & Inclusion seeks to create and maintain a sense of belonging for students and faculty of color, and students of other traditionally marginalized identities.”
