Several years ago, FRIT formed a departmental Committee of Diversity and Inclusion, and the committee has been very active ever since. During the 2019-2020 academic year the members were Professor Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Professor Lucille Toth, and Ph.D. student Badou Fall.
The committee began the year by reporting on the results of an anonymous survey that asked all members of FRIT, including faculty, associated faculty, graduate students, and staff, to indicate their sense of safety, inclusion, and equality within the department. The results were heartening, but also showed some areas where improvements were necessary. A discussion on how to address these areas continues.
Spring and summer brought numerous events that demanded the response of the committee, and it rose to the occasion. When Columbus became a center of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, the committee released a statement stating the department’s support of the movement. Combs-Schilling and Toth also opened a weekly virtual Zoom room, where all members of the department could stop by to ask questions and share and discuss their feelings surrounding the movement and protests.
The Committee also participated in the conversation on the removal of Christopher Columbus’s statue(s) from the city. As an expert in the fields of Italian studies and Italian-American studies, the department supported the removal of this symbol. However, the committee also stressed the importance of recognizing and understanding that this action can feel like a personal attack to some members of our community.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been and continues to be at the forefront of the committee’s work. During the summer the government announced that all international students who are in the U.S. on an F1 visa must leave the country if all of their courses are online. The committee took an active response to this situation by contacting each of the department’s international students individually and making sure that their course loads and teaching assignment met the criteria that would allow them to stay in the country. The committee and many department members joined university efforts to take a stand against this policy and to act as a resource for international students during this very stressful time.
The COVID-19 pandemic is also linked to issues addressed within the committee in that exposure, quarantine and at-risk conditions depend a lot on age, race, class, and even sexual orientation and gender. This conversation will be a big part of the committee’s work in the coming year as the pandemic continues to alter our lifestyles. This is a time when we need to be extra vigilant about the pandemic’s inequitable effects on members of our communities, and to ensure that we are reaching out with support rather than excluding.
The department is greatly enriched by the work of the Committee of Diversity and Inclusion and we are grateful to its members! During the 2020-2021 academic year the committee members will be Professor Combs-Schilling, Professor Mullins, graduate student Enrico Zammarchi, and Office Associate Nicole Allender.
