Week 7 Famous Last Words: THE SIT-IN

It's only Saturday but I'm ready to write up famous last words for this week, and it is easy to know what to write about: THE SIT-IN. I am still amazed at what the students accomplished with the sit-in in Evans last week, and I'm grateful also for the great reporting by Nick Hazelrigg and others at the OU Daily. This is the first week I can remember where the very first thing I did every morning when I got to work was to check the OU Daily website and Twitter feed to see the latest news. Here's a photo from the Daily on Feb. 26:

It was an intense push all the way until Friday afternoon when the president agreed to a 360-review of Kyle's work as provost (and apparently for other senior administration officials in rotation), which I think was a good compromise in response to the demands for Kyle to resign; here is an announcement from BERT with details. Some revelations came out during the week that were new to me, and really distressing; in particular, I learned that there was an OU faculty member (so far unnamed, to my knowledge) being investigated under Title IX for rape who was allowed to resign and thus forestall the investigation. That all sounds scarily reminiscent of how OU severed ties with Boren last year in order to end that Title IX investigation, not to mention the god-awful goings-on in the Drama department.

So, it was an intense week, and throughout all the proceedings it was the students who proved themselves to be really admirable leaders, with the administration having very little of substance to say for themselves. The official university statements were consistently disappointing. In particular, hearing further allegations of sexual misconduct cover-ups at OU was not something I expected, and I really don't know how that kind of administrative culture can even be corrected. We need to hear more during the rest of the coming semester and also as part of the process (more transparent this time I hope) as a new president is selected.

Meanwhile, one of the most exciting things about what is emerging from the student demands is that there will be some real attention paid to equity, diversity and inclusion in faculty development, which I hope will also mean improvements in the curriculum and course design. I started using #EquityRedesign as a hashtag to start collecting and sharing relevant materials; I'm really optimistic that there will finally be some serious conversations about that across the board at OU, among all faculty members. This is something everyone who teaches needs to be thinking about, and I'm going to be thinking about it more too.

Just yesterday someone shared this great equity graphic at Twitter, and I subsequently learned that an initial form of the graphic was created by Craig Froehle whom I've known online since back in the Google+ days, but I had no idea that this was something he had done; here's a Medium post he wrote about it.

WHAT A WEEK. Let's hope we can keep on taking down barriers and finding better, more equitable efforts in the future.