Building Community Through Dialogue Task Force
In January 2024, President Ann Cudd launched the Task Force for Building Community Through Dialogue and Fighting Antisemitism, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab Bias at PSU.
The pillars being addressed by task force committees include:
Violence Prevention and Response: Ensuring that all members of the campus community are physically safe and free from violence and fear.
Climate and Psychological Safety: Promoting a campus climate that provides emotional and psychological support to members of the campus community who are experiencing pain, fear and instability in their lives.
Intergroup Dialogue and Engagement: Forging new opportunities for learning across cultures, faiths, identities and experiences.
Academic Freedom: Ensuring academic freedom while also safeguarding students’ civil rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Each pillar will be addressed by a committee of the task force. In response to the urgency of the current context, committees working on the first two pillars will begin work immediately. The other two committees will embrace a longer-term strategy with work continuing through the spring term.
More about the Building Community Task Force
Through this task force, PSU is committed to learning about ourselves as well as about others within our diverse, urban-serving institution. We are working to embrace our majority BIPOC future and to be a destination for minoritized communities, which means we will be a place that supports the thriving of all people and communities. We are resolute in our commitment to work for justice and equity through deeper understanding and engagement. There might not be anything we can do or say to alter global conflicts, but we can build the community we desire here at home by rejecting intolerance and co-creating an environment where peace and the pursuit of knowledge can thrive.
PSU values inclusion, academic freedom, robust academic discourse and free speech. Sometimes these values can seem to be in tension with one another, especially during times of increased violence, discrimination and war. PSU has resources for students who are seeking assistance or experiencing bias incidents.
Our road to building a community committed to full inclusion and respectful dialogue, that abhors prejudice and promotes education and justice, will require all of us in the campus community to be engaged. In our own ways we need to:
Reflect on our own lives; understand how we have both experienced prejudice and acted with prejudice.
Make room for multiple positionalities; engage respectfully with contested truths, even as we seek to remain grounded in our full and common humanity; learn about and empathetically appreciate the identities of others and seek to create bridges between each other.
Advance a deeper understanding of antisemitism and anti-Arab hate on college campuses and in society in order to find pathways to heal and create respectful communities.
Recognize that our speech may be hurtful to others even if that is not our intention. Wrestle with the tensions between our responsibility to each other and to creating an inclusive community and free speech.