Chancellor Kent Syverud is getting used to fielding questions about his thoughts on free speech.

Of his two Q&A sessions before the University Senate this semester, he has spent most of his time discussing the subject.

Syverud has listened to Syracuse University faculty express a wide range of concerns about a vague address he gave last month about the exchange of opinions on campus. At Wednesday’s USen meeting, he was asked to provide specifics about what a newly created “Free Speech Working Group” will do at SU.

Three members of the university’s Board of Trustees are on the working group, including former chair Richard Thompson.

“This strikes me very much as similar to other top-down kinds of initiatives that we’ve seen at this university in the last few years,” Senator Mark Rupert told Syverud. “It strikes me as unusual to have trustees on this kind of committee.”

Syverud first brought up the topic of free speech during the Senate’s Sept. 18 meeting.

“If our students are going to learn or going to seek knowledge and to grow, I think they need to be exposed to a true range of views,” the chancellor said. “Not a rigidly enforced and homogenous orthodoxy.”

“That exposure is very difficult to achieve at a university or in a department where the faculty are too ideologically uniform,” he said.

At the time, Syverud only said that he wanted to talk about the matter.

But the university announced Monday that the Free Speech Working Group is made up of faculty, administrators, students and Board of Trustees members. The group has been charged with reviewing SU’s free speech and civil discourse policies.

The group is also tasked with “suggesting revisions to further enhance a culture of open dialogue and diversity of thought on campus.”

That announcement, and Syverud’s earlier comments, dominated the Senate’s second administrator Q&A session of the year, which was held on Wednesday.

Senator Crystal Bartolovich told the chancellor she was confused about why SU formed the working group. A similar committee in 2015 recommended changes to SU’s free speech policies, she said.

“It may well be, in my view, that those are all the right policies and procedures, and no changes are necessary, and all that’s necessary is education about what they are, going into another election year,” Syverud replied.

“I wanted a group of people to look at it, if nothing else to raise our consciousness of it, so that we can talk about what our norms are, perhaps just educating us about what the committee did in 2015,” he said.

Bartolovich, president of SU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, also said she was upset that Syverud didn’t respond to a letter that the AAUP chapter sent him in September regarding his comments on free speech.

Later in the meeting, Bartolovich got up from her chair, walked to the Senate’s podium and gave Syverud a copy of the letter.

Senator Matthew Huber, the AAUP chapter’s secretary, asked Syverud if he could justify having three faculty members on the working group.

“We’re the ones in the classroom. We’re the ones producing research and ideas,” Huber said. “I count as many Board of Trustees members as faculty members.”

Syverud told Huber he thinks the working group will operate transparently, including with the Senate.

“The board does have oversight responsibility for the university and, particularly, has oversight for … if they’re concerned about protecting the key values of the university, which I think they believe this is one of them,” he said.

Trustees on the group include Thompson, the former chair, and David Edelstein and Reinaldo Pascual. Thompson is also a current advisory board member at the Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech and an associate professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, is a member of the group. So is Gladys McCormick, an associate professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and Marcelle Haddix, chair of reading and language arts and dean’s professor at the School of Education.

Rupert, the senator, had the final comment on the matter Wednesday. He said he was puzzled as to why Syverud didn’t push to create a new ad-hoc Senate committee to address free speech issues on campus.

“Especially if the goal is ultimately to foster broad discussion and consciousness-raising among ourselves,” Rupert told the chancellor.

A number of senators applauded after Rupert finished his remarks.

“I hear the concern, is all I can say, and will take it into account,” Syverud said, before walking back to his seat.

Published on October 30, 2019 at 10:09 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek