{"id":7924,"date":"2026-07-20T11:34:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T15:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=7924"},"modified":"2026-07-21T06:35:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T10:35:33","slug":"who-is-still-in-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aboutrc.com\/?p=7924","title":{"rendered":"Who is Still in the Room?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With Syracuse being in the news as of late, colleagues, students, and parents have reached out, sharing article after article and asking the same question: \u201cWhat is going on over at Syracuse?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Chancellor Mike Haynie\u2019s recent announcements \u2014 the university missing its enrollment targets, a grim financial outlook \u2014 many have wanted to know whether this is a passing problem or a pervasive one. And, quietly, some have wanted to know why I\u2019m no longer there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remain grateful for the chance to have taught at Syracuse. Working with those students was among the most meaningful work of my career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think the honest answer to that question \u2014 and the more useful one \u2014 is that my departure was just a small example of something larger. The challenges the university faces today are not only about demographics, politics, or technology. They are also about internal choices \u2014 who gets listened to, whose ideas are considered, and what happens when the people willing to imagine a different future are not considered. My story is not the point. It\u2019s just a confirmation of that belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2042<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my tenure I served as a digital specialist, an assistant teaching professor, and chair of the college\u2019s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. In those roles I took on thorny issues from staff, faculty, and students alike. And beneath the surface there was always a quiet truth: a certain subset of people did not feel supported. Students were sold the promise of inclusion and then left on their own to figure out how to build community. Among employees, the work of adapting and modernizing was pushed off from faculty onto staff, breeding resentment. Attempts to bring change forward were met with resistance, isolation, and silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat in a faculty meeting once and watched the room try to nominate someone to the DEI committee. No one raised a hand. Eventually someone nominated a colleague who wasn\u2019t present \u2014 the nomination passed to laughter. \u201cYou see, this is what happens when you miss a meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the next meeting, that colleague declined. Another round of nominations began. Then it was my turn to say a few words to motivate someone to step forward. I told the assembled faculty: \u201cNo. I don\u2019t want to do that. In fact, I was waiting for all of you to finish so that I could make a motion to disband the DEI committee altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The silence turned quickly to agitation \u2014 how could this be permissible, wasn\u2019t this a violation of shared governance? When the chatter died down, I spoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

{Day after day, I try to make sure students feel seen. I\u2019ve had more students crying in my office than I care to admit \u2014 sometimes a student I don\u2019t even teach, who came to me simply because I looked like them. I\u2019ve handed my office keys to students who had no computer of their own and no way to finish an assignment when the labs closed on weekends. I do not believe it should be my job, as the brown person in the room, to convince you to do one of the most important jobs we should be working on at this university?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could have heard a pin drop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Privately, a few texts came in thanking me. Publicly, it earned me a meeting with administration \u2014 not about what our collective body had failed to do, but about how I had said it. From there, the atmosphere around me only grew colder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kept fielding complaints from students belittled by professors for how they spoke. I kept trying to encourage the ones from the Syracuse community to hold on. One of them said something I haven\u2019t forgotten: \u201cYou don\u2019t know what it feels like to sit in conversations where they\u2019re talking about the statistics of your community \u2014 the poverty, the lack of education \u2014 with every eye in the room fixed on you.\u201d I watched students walk up the hill in the fall and, one by one, walk back down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2042<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When the current administration turbocharged the use of ICE for deportations, I stood with students. As someone who is Puerto Rican and Mexican, from the South Bronx, who rose from nothing to become the author of sixteen books and a professor, I built an immigrant-rights notification app, DEICER, and encouraged people to share it across the community. I spoke up in faculty meetings when the university moved to strip DEI content from the freshman seminar because students found it \u201cchallenging.\u201d How, I asked, do you think the next cohort will read that \u2014 arriving to find these issues quietly erased at the very moment this administration is erasing them everywhere else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was also, at the time, finishing a contract and had been in talks about applying for a tenure-track position \u2014 one that, I was told informally, would combine my background in technology and production with my doctoral research on using AI to close the educational gap in lower-income communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previously, I had built a twenty-three-point proposal \u2014 a slide deck and a video \u2014 asking whether we could stand up a Center for Technology, Literacy, and Citizenship: a college-focused, hopefully university-wide hub built around five aims \u2014 empowering digital literacy, promoting digital citizenship, bridging the digital divide, supporting academic and career success, and fostering collaboration. It treated AI not as a product to sell but as a tool for asking bigger questions \u2014 about ethics, information literacy, and what it means to be a citizen in this new landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What struck me most was that none of it was a departure from the university\u2019s stated direction. It mapped directly onto the Strategic Plan\u2019s own priorities \u2014 emerging technologies, human thriving, experiential learning. And it went where too few AI conversations go: toward equity. One of my students told me flatly, \u201cThere\u2019s this assumption that I have a computer, and I don\u2019t.\u201d I was already redesigning an AI curriculum for the Syracuse City schools \u2014 helping students who\u2019d only met these tools through the media use them to reimagine their own work, and their own history. It was exactly the kind of imagination the university now says it needs \u2014 and I laid it out, on the record, two years before it began publicly asking what it should become. It went nowhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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