TCNJ

9 FALL 2020 "This can't sit on just a few people's laps. People need to see themselves being contributors to this work." treated. And that means we have to be as uncomfortable as those folks are in their daily lives. We can't run away from that when it gets to be too much for us. Some people don't have the luxury of getting to run away from their issues. And so you have to hold space with folks in order to empathize as well as sympathize with their social and lived experiences. TM: It sounds like administration and student activists want to achieve the same thing. How do we move from mission to action? JF: You've got to bring people together and create a sense of community and engagement as the first step. And then work from there. When folks say they want to opt in, figure out where they're most needed and how they can contribute. But I don't think we have a right to ask for patience anymore. TM: How do we know when the work is complete? When is your job no longer needed? JF: When our demographics in terms of employee workforce and our student population mirrors the demographics of New Jersey. And we'll know when there's not a need for Instagram pages, when people can engage in meaningful and authentic dialogue on campus and have respectful conversations, and people are listening and responding to the concerns that are being addressed. — Interview by Kara Pothier the administrators of those sites are. But we know that they're collective voices of experiences that people have had at the college. Some of those stories are heartbreaking in terms of folks never really feeling a part of the community and the microaggressions that they experienced from peers, from employees, and from local community members. People need to have outlets or safe spaces where they can voice their pain, their frustrations. That's not in opposition to our work. I see it as informing us about the work that needs to be done. TM: What are you doing to address these stories? JF: The only way we can respond is if people go through a formal process for addressing issues of bias and discrimi- nation. And that's through the Bias Education Support Team. We want them to report, we want to hear those stories, we want to offer assistance and support where we can. That's not to say that we can't address it. We have programmatic efforts to engage students, faculty, and staff around this — here are the things that people are reporting, or here are the things that we've heard have happened. TM: Some say the campus has to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to experi- ence real change. JF: Diversity is not about sameness. I like to practice the platinum rule: treat others the way they wish to be part of, and contributors to, this work. I'm connecting with TCNJ community members to hear their stories — to provide context and direction for the work that needs to be done. We're expanding what we're calling affinity groups or social identity groups on campus. For example, an accessibility resource center advisory, an LGBTQIA+ group for our faculty and staff, and continued support for the minority executive council. We want to provide spaces for people to express who they are. We've been working with our sororities and fraternities and our student athletes on campus. When we think about traditional student organizations for inclusion those usually aren't ones that come up. Faculty need to be a part of this, too. How does their expertise and scholar- ship lend itself to this work and how can we connect what's happening in the classroom to outside of the classroom? And, given the current events around Black Lives Matter and the racial hostility in our nation, we want to be an anti-racist institution. So we need to discuss what that means and develop a set of principles to support TCNJ in that work. TM: Some TCNJ students who feel marginalized are turning to social media to talk about the exclusion and discrimination they have faced here. What have you seen on these accounts and does it worry you? JF: We don't know who the authors or

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