The Campus Safety Commission held a supplemental meeting on April 22 to review recommendations made by subcommittees relating to communications and the safety of marginalized communities.
Who is on the Commission?
- Students, staff, faculty and community members make up the Commission.
- The Commission was formed in April 2019, according to their website, to assess safety on campus, including the campus climate and culture around issues of safety.
- The Commission was created to address a “crisis of trust” between the campus community and campus police, relating largely to the events that accompanied the removal of Silent Sam, according to the website.
What’s new?
- In terms of communicating potential safety issues on campus to the community, one recommendation the Communications Subcommittee discussed was modifying the current University communication plan to “ensure messages related to safety and well-being are delivered with expediency, accuracy and consistency.”
- Eric Muller, a UNC professor of law, expressed concerns about how the results of recommendations will be monitored.
- “I'm worried that we're going to kind of send these off," Muller said. "And we're not going to know what's being done or when."
- One recommendation made by the Safety of Marginalized Communities Subcommittee was to “increase the representation of individuals with marginalized identities among staff, faculty (particularly tenured faculty) and administrative leadership here at Carolina.”
- “Put simply, representation matters,” the recommendation read.
- “We're hemorrhaging faculty,” Frank Baumgartner, faculty co-chairperson of the Commission, said in the meeting. “Faculty of color especially. So I feel like this is more urgent and more catastrophic.”
- After further discussion, a decision made the recommendation a clearer goal of establishing UNC as a national leader with respect to its diversity of staff, faculty and administrative leadership.
What’s next?
- Approved recommendations will be included in an end-of-year report given to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz by the Commission in early May.
- The end-of-year report will include many other recommendations relating to safety on campus, including police behavior, sexual violence and anti-racist activism.
Explore The Daily Tar Heel’s latest coverage on the events accompanying the removal of Silent Sam — which prompted the creation of the Commission — here.
