Emeritus Economics Professor W. Lee Hansen recently claimed in a Wisconsin State Journal guest column that students of color are under-qualified and over-represented on the UW-Madison campus. Hansen's remarks are not only extremely narrow-minded and painful to read, they are also rooted in a larger pattern on campus in which the voices of men and women of color, LGBT students and white women have been silenced and ignored.
It has become increasingly common to disregard our daily experiences of harassment and discrimination and how these affect our academic performance and life on campus. Any efforts to discuss issues of diversity among students must therefore take into account our relevant experiences of campus climate.
Recently, the ASM Diversity Committee submitted an open records request concerning cases of harassment which have been reported to the dean of students' SpeakUp program. The request aimed to clarify the issue of campus climate, which has become mired in opposing opinions as to who is responsible for changing campus climate, as well as muddied by misunderstandings of what it really is.
The committee believes if we can simply better understand how harassment occurs on campus, we can then develop a more effective strategy for improving campus climate.
The results of the open-records request were horrifying.
The reports were rife with death threats, sexual assault, physical violence and hate speech. In one report, two students of color were attacked by four white male assailants. Both students were injured and expressed difficulty returning to classes afterward. One of the students has since dropped out.
In another case, someone received a long and vicious e-mail threatening to kill him for being gay. These incidences are among the most obvious forms of a broader range of everyday harassment and discrimination, which perpetuate discomfort and fear among many students.
The university has attempted to address discriminatory harassment (racial, sexual, homophobic or religious) through its SpeakUp program. SpeakUp is designed to funnel reports of harassment to the Dean of Students Office, which is then charged with helping victims and deciding how to address the perpetrators.
Though well intentioned, there are some serious flaws with SPEAKUP. Since its inception in 1995, SpeakUp has steadily declined in the number of reported incidents. In 1995, SpeakUp received 64 reported incidents. In 1999 this number dropped to 34, and this year Chancellor Wiley has said that only 16 incidents have thus far been reported.
This swift drop in reported cases shocked many students. The shock, however, results not from a happy surprise that campus could improve so swiftly, but rather that SpeakUp is so inefficient. As Jennifer Chen, co-chair of the ASM Diversity Committee stated, \I could come up with 34 cases of harassment just between me and five friends. Something isn't right here.""
SpeakUp's reported incidents are also surprising when compared with numbers presented by the University Health Services. UHS states that between one and eight female undergraduates are sexually assaulted on campus during their undergraduate years. Through the experiences of white women alone, it is clear that the incidents of harassment on the UW-Madison campus are severely underreported. Our efforts to improve the problems of campus climate are therefore crippled simply by our failure to accurately assess just what those problems are.
For SpeakUp to function effectively, it must accurately analyze why discrimination and harassment are so underreported. The harassment experiences of men and women of color, LGBT students and white women have long gone unheard. We cannot continue to hold back our voices.
In response to this glaring need, the ASM Diversity Committee has undertaken a SpeakUp campaign. Our goal is to gather written and artistic testimonies of racial, sexual and homophobic harassment on campus and to compile the responses into a book.
The campaign will also distribute surveys which seek to understand why students are not using the SpeakUp program. The ASM Diversity Committee hopes this effort will help in understanding why cases are underreported, as well as mobilizing students to raise their voices to demand that the Dean of Students Office improve its well-intentioned SpeakUp program.
We would like to invite students to the kick-off of the SpeakUp Coalition Campaign on the opening night of the Student of Color Art Show in the Red Gym's second-floor gallery Friday, March 8, at 6:30 p.m. Free food will be provided, as well as graffiti walls for students to artistically relate their own experiences of harassment and discrimination. The graffiti walls in the Red Gym and the Campus Women's Center will be up March 8-15. All students are welcome to participate.
