Of the 1,058 professors identified in SU’s 2017 Faculty Salary Report, 73% were white. In interviews with The Daily Orange, faculty members across six SU schools and colleges who come from racially and ethnically underrepresented backgrounds said that their identities can impact their interactions with different groups on campus, particularly students.

Just under 57% of SU’s undergraduate student body is white, according to SU’s fall 2018 census. SU is considered a predominantly white institution because white people account for more than 50 percent of the student enrollment, according to M. Christopher Brown II and T. Elon Dancy II’s paper in the Encyclopedia of African American Education.

Incidents like what happened to Hurst-Wahl two decades ago aren’t a thing of the past. Santee Frazier, a professional writing instructor in the writing studies, rhetoric, and composition department of the College of Arts and Sciences, was sitting in a lecture hall less than three years ago as part of a consulting job when a student said there was no reason to talk about the Native American experience because “there are none of them around anymore.”

No other professors in the room corrected the student or said anything in response to that comment, which surprised Frazier. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Frazier was one of only a few other Native American people in the room at the time, he said.

Frazier may be one of the only Native American professors his students have in their college careers, he said. Just one professor in SU’s 2017 faculty report identified as “American Indian.”

“A lot of people see me as ‘other’ sort of right away,” he said.

At the end of last semester, Frazier was moving items out of his office when a campus parking official threatened to call the Department of Public Safety on him, according to Frazier. He and his wife, who is also Native American, were parked legally, Frazier said, but this official didn’t seem to believe that Frazier worked at SU.

“One of the interesting things about discrimination is that you deny people’s experiences and feelings exist,” he said. “The only reason why she was doing that is that she felt like she could get away with it.”

On Sunday, Frazier said he has accepted a job as the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and will not be returning to SU next academic year.

Chris Uyehara has been at SU since 2006 as a professor in the food studies department at the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. Uyehara’s grandparents immigrated to Hawaii from Okinawa, a Japanese island. His background makes him a better teacher and helps him relate to international students, he said.

“I understand their culture, and I understand the hardships and what they have to do to get here, and so at that point I’m more compassionate,” Uyehara said. “I try to see, how can I educate these students more?”

Sekou Cooke, assistant professor in the School of Architecture, is the only black faculty member in the school. He’s “viscerally aware” at all times of his blackness at SU, Cooke said. Some semesters, he’ll look around and not see a single black student in his class. Among all of the school’s current first- and second-year students, only a handful are black and none are black men, Cooke said.

Many responsibilities Cooke has at SU are “unwritten and implicit,” he said. Cooke is an adviser for two minority student groups in the architecture school, but he sees his role as being about identifying with students — making personal connections and showing empathy, he said.

“I understand what they’re going through, and I know that there aren’t very many other people on the faculty or staff that they can turn to for that kind of support, so a lot of that responsibility I take on myself,” he said.

Seyeon Lee, an assistant professor at the School of Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, said her Asian heritage helps her relate more with her students who share a similar background.

“Because I’m an Asian and I do understand the Asian culture, sometimes international students … feel a little more open to talking to me about their concerns or problems or even language barrier because I kind of went through what they went through,” she said.

For some professors from underrepresented backgrounds, the cultural differences in their own education play out in the classroom as well. The way that Texu Kim, an assistant teaching professor in the Setnor School of Music in VPA, learned music composition in South Korea is vastly different from how it’s taught in the United States. It took him some time to get used to the different teaching style when he came to the U.S. In South Korea, it was common for a good teacher to be very critical of students, but in the United States, the cultural expectation is for music teachers to balance encouragement with criticism, he said.

It took Kim time to strike a balance between the two, and he has to think about it every day still.

“I became capable to deal with different types of settings and expectations, and now I am figuring myself … somewhere in between,” he said.

Like Kim, Frazier’s teaching approach in the classroom is different because of his experiences as a Native American person. Frazier tries to not be punitive or corrective, which he said is because his ideas and perspectives weren’t always received in an academic environment. Instead, he tries to enable his students of color to both voice their own perspectives in his classes and also help students from less diverse backgrounds understand their classmates’ perspectives.

Frazier also finds that, as a Native American person, his perspectives on political and other issues are different from those of his fellow educators and community members. He consistently advocates for a native or indigenous perspective on issues but he added that his interactions with other faculty have been generally positive.

Many students of color who he has worked with feel that they’re not included in many of their classes, he said. One of his students this semester is Native American, and he tries to give her and other students of color a space in his classroom to explore issues they’re interested in, and also to discuss their experiences and identity in an intellectual space.

SU does a “pretty good job in general,” but those issues can be hard to address because they are systemic and deep, Frazier said. He commended the university’s efforts with the first-year forum SEM 100 and said that, for many of his students of color, they felt the conversations in the five-week seminar were effective.

Keith Alford, interim chief diversity officer, hopes to execute more programming that brings students, faculty, staff administrators together around issues of diversity and inclusion.

“It’s about clearly embracing all that we can around what diversity and inclusion means, but it’s also talking about the ‘isms’ and how they play out, even in ways that we may not think about.”

Chris Eng, an assistant professor of English, said a more robust hiring process for faculty of color and faculty doing work in areas of racial justice are also necessary for community building among students and faculty. Changing how SU approaches issues of diversity in this way could have a positive, trickle-down effect across campus, he said.

“I’ve known students who’ve told me that they have experienced different types of microaggressions in the classroom due to race,” he said. “That’s why it’s also important to have more faculty of color … It’s not just about numbers, but it’s about the fact that they can provide the support for students.”

Herbert Ruffin, professor and chair of the African American studies department, said the university needs to be more consistent when providing a path to success for black and brown students because the existing support “comes and goes.” The university operates backward in terms of the allocation of resources for black students, he added – SU classifies “diverse” as students possessing different qualities of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability, but prioritizes the latter four categories over race.

“This is a tuition-driven school and it hinders, without the proper endowment, hinders us from doing creative things,” he said. “The groups that are traditional black and brown are usually last … in terms of what is being implemented in terms of the diversity initiative program. It’s sort of like putting the cart before the horse (and) that needs to be rectified.”

For a university to succeed in being diverse, the faculty doesn’t necessarily need to mirror the student body, said Ravi Dharwadkar, chair of the management department and professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. But, faculty need to be properly trained in how to match what students are seeking out of their education in and out of the classroom, even if the students come from different backgrounds than their professors, he said.

“At the end of the day, students have to come first,” he said. “The more you can do for the students, the more the university will thrive in return.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the number of black faculty in the iSchool was misstated. There are two not one. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Illustration by Sarah Allam | Illustration Editor