SGA partners with BSU to expedite action plan

The Black Student Union has 12 action items they are promoting to foster a more inclusive campus. Graphic by HARRY LADA, Art Director.

Three months after its proposal, the Black Student Union’s (BSU) 12-item action plan has accrued a handful of victories. Mandatory diversity training for first-year students took place the weekend before the semester began, $500,000 was put toward hiring Black faculty and Africana Studies became an official minor. 

However, these successes are not a reason to let up, said Student Government Association (SGA) President Philip Goodrich.

SGA has formed 12 different task forces, made of two to four student government members, to promote the accompanying 12 BSU action items. These task forces serve as both liaisons between BSU and the Chapman administration and as researchers and reviewers, working in hand with staff and faculty members to plan the best approach for these initiatives.

“These changes are long overdue and warranted,” said Goodrich, a junior political science and history double major. “What we’re focused on is having the university administration create a specific, tangible and realistic list of goals with a time sensitivity attached to it … to act as a form of accountability, transparency and to show that there’s actual things being done.”

One such initiative is the creation of a mandatory diversity general education course. Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Nina LeNoir and Director of General Education (GE) Richard Ruppel are communicating with SGA to enact upon this request, but are contemplating over the most effective and meaningful way to do so.

“The question is, to me, ‘Would this new requirement in the GE do what we want it to do?’”  Ruppel said. “What we have to decide as a community … is what is it that we want to do and accomplish. We don’t want to create something that’s a checkbox for students.”

Ruppel explained the current goal is to produce long-term, sustainable courses that students can truly take interest in. Discussions are circulating over whether student engagement will be improved by incorporating required diversity courses into individual majors, built around the career fields students are pursuing. As such, there is no target date to offer new diversity-centric courses, but the earliest a proposal could be implemented is next academic year.

On a separate initiative, Dean of Students Jerry Price told The Panther he is confident that the vacant case manager position will be filled by late November. The case manager is responsible for bridging the gap between students and external resources to attend to their mental health and financial needs. However, since former Case Manager Lisette Martinez Gutierrez stepped away from her role in late March to pursue another job, the Dean of Students Office has been actively looking for candidates to take up the position.

“It’s very important to us to work from the student out … meaning we assess what students experience and what resources are in place to respond to those experiences,” Price said. “It’s a balancing act because we want to move quickly, but we also don't want the best applicants to be coming up and us moving before they get here.”

As different departments work to achieve some of these diversity, equity and inclusion goals, Ramya Sinha, the president of BSU, told The Panther she’s appreciative of the collaborative relationship between the student government and BSU.

“SGA was one of the first people to reach out to us since the start of this action plan,” she said. “They’ve been very engaged and very active and ... started getting an idea of how to really insert themselves and help.”

Sinha explained BSU members are currently balancing between both educating and creating social change. SGA taking on concrete steps of action helps alleviate some of these pressures.

“It’s a lot for us, now that everyone finally is realizing that Black students exist; for BSU, the struggle is nothing new,” Sinha said. “I really hope we can get a lot of these action items set up and put in place … I care about bettering this community not only for Black students, but for everybody.”

Both Sinha and Goodrich will continue to advocate for the implementation of new or revised curricula, diversity training, resources for minority students, policies on inclusion and employment screening practices. Goodrich said some initiatives might take longer than others to satisfy, but all have their own merit and will be evaluated with due diligence.

“(We want) to really create a school where it is, in fact, a campus culture with diversity – one that respects diversity, that acknowledges diversity and appreciates diversity,” he said. “But also one that’s equitable and inclusive and welcoming.”