Some Science Profs at Syracuse Not Interested in Campus-Wide Diversity Initiative

Some Science Profs at Syracuse Not Interested in Campus-Wide Diversity Initiative

This is easy to understand. Science cares about provable facts, not feelings and identity politics.

The College Fix reports:

Science professors at Syracuse aren’t interested in campus-wide diversity initiative

A proposed diversity initiative at Syracuse University has divided some of the professorship there, with over 100 arts and sciences faculty signing a call for a new diversity curriculum but only one STEM professor affixing his name to the document.

Last month, religion professors Biko Gray and Virginia Burrus published “a statement on behalf of SU faculty proposing a university-wide liberal arts core curriculum to improve campus climate and educate on issues of diversity,” The Daily Orange reports. That letter calls specifically for “an extensive liberal arts core curriculum attuned to issues of difference and diversity and required university-wide for all undergraduates.”

Presently the school mandates a diversity seminar, SEM 100, in which freshmen are required to meet once a week for five weeks to discuss diversity matters. The letter-writers call this course “inadequate as other than a transitional measure and ultimately ineffective in shifting the campus climate of discrimination.”

Gray’s and Burrus’s letter was ultimately signed by 148 faculty. But only one of them was a professor from a science, technology, engineering or mathematics field: A lone biology professor stands out as the 132nd signatory to the document.

In The Orange, Burrus expressed disappointment over the near-complete silence of STEM professors on the matter, speculating that science-related fields “are very focused on professional training, often in ways that don’t overlap with the agenda of a liberal arts curriculum.”

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