A “Forum on Student Issues” and a meeting with President Karen Gould were two of the solutions that ten students and the Dean and Vice President of Student Affairs Milga Morales came up with in her Boylan office on Friday, March 25 at 12:15 p.m. in an attempt to solve the tension on campus after the controversial speech by David Horowitz weeks before.
This “Campus Conversations” meeting was a continuation of the one that occurred on Friday, March 18, where many students showed up to voice their concerns over the remarks that Horowitz had made. At that meeting, several potential solutions were listed, but there was not enough time to implement any of them. At this meeting, there were several solutions that the students came up with, including a “Forum on Student Issues,” a meeting with President Gould in the near future, an interfaith club, and a Campus Unity Dinner event.
“We pulled together this group to have a community conversation,” Morales said. “I anticipate that there may be other issues in the future, and I want this meeting to talk to where we are going and the kinds of unity events that the campus is already proposing.”
One of the bigger ongoing solutions was proposed by Vice President Morales under the title of “Forum on Student Issues.” The tentative idea is to create a council where the president and a representative from each club can meet together and speak about issues on campus. The first such meeting will be on a smaller scale, in order to draft up concerns to be brought to President Gould, but the hope is to get the entire campus involved at some point.
“That group can actually discuss an agenda to be brought forth, and then immediately after, we can set up a meeting with the president,” Morales proposed.
Selected members from that group and those who were directly affected by the issue will get a chance to speak to President Gould within the next two weeks. The point of focus will start on David Horowitz’s speech and will then move on to see how the campus is moving forward from the situation. In addition to that meeting, there is also a statement that President Gould is working on that is supposed to come to light soon.
“A piece of the meeting [with the president] will include a follow-up to the conversation about the Horowitz event. In addition to that, we also want to see what other types of activities that are being planned by people on the campus,” Morales said.
There is also a newly formed club called The Interfaith Engagement Project which hopes to quell some of the tension between different groups. It was founded by Rachel Silberstein and a few others who hope to create some kind of peace on campus. The mission statement says that the club’s objective is to “protect religious freedom on campus, to cultivate goodwill and understanding between religious groups and to counteract extremism and bigotry on campus.”
“We’ll achieve our goal by organizing discussions on issues relevant to all of us with a representative from each religion and by sharing in cultural cuisine, music, films and rituals,” Silberstein, a 25-year-old Journalism major, said. “We also want to collaborate on several community service projects.”
The Campus Unity Dinner will take place in Tanger Hillel on Thursday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m. and is sponsored by the Israel Club and the CLAS Student Government. The purpose of the event is to “emphasize community, global activism and the importance of building alliances,” and the ones hosting the event are hopeful that it will bring people together so they can all forget about the friction caused recently and work on getting to know each other better by forging friendly bonds.
“The point of the dinner is to really emphasize that collaboration between clubs and partnerships can really help to build a strong campus,” Marcos Askenazi, a member of Tanger Hillel, said.
Vice President Morales also mentioned a Unity Day event that is being organized for Thursday, May 19, the day after the Spring semester ends.
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