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On Monday, faculty and staff of the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics were invited to listen to a presentation from Dean Jeremy Jordan and Provost Gretchen Ritter titled “The Future of Falk College.”

The faculty and staff left not only with a new name of the college — David B. Falk College of Sport — but also with an uncertainty of what is to come in the future for their respective departments.

“At the end of the coming year, we will likely evolve in kind of two separate directions,” Ritter said in the meeting. “We have a sense of one of those directions quite clearly here, and we are going to be asking all of you to help us to develop the other direction.”

The new name will take effect at the end of the semester, said Jordan, who has “extensive experience in sport and recreation management,” according to SU’s website. He said the college will be composed of four departments: Sport Management, Nutrition and Exercise Science, Sport Analytics and Esports.

The future of the human dynamics departments — Marriage and Family Therapy, Social Work, Human Development and Family Science and Public Health — will be determined by a task force convened by Ritter. The task force will have until the end of October to understand “the opportunities” and the “best way” to accomplish its goals moving forward, Jordan said.

The university plans to release the name of the task force in the coming days, Ritter said.

The faculty and staff received no prior official university communications pertaining to the changes to Falk College before Monday’s meeting, said Kenneth Corvo, associate professor in the School of Social Work.

“There’s no determination that we have a home, any of us,” Corvo said. “The committee that established the elevation of sport was done surreptitiously — none of us knew this was going on.”

A professor in the department of Public Health, who requested to remain anonymous, said rumors regarding the change originated from a community-based agency the college worked with to coordinate internship placements. A staff member from the agency said they heard the department was “being closed.”

“An external organization heard about this before we did, and that caused everybody to be terrified,” they said. “It is truly not fair to hear about potential closure of our department from community colleagues.”

When asked for comment regarding effects on human dynamics, the university referred back to Monday’s release. Jordan did not immediately respond to The Daily Orange’s request for comment.

The task force will be co-chaired by Associate Provost for Academic Programs Lois Agnew and newly-appointed Associate Dean for Human Dynamics Programs Rachel Razza. Razza said at the meeting that she was “brought into the conversation last week.”

Razza did not immediately respond to The D.O.’s request for comment.

“We mapped out a positive path forward that came out of a task force on sports management, and now the next phase is to do it with human dynamics,” Ritter said.

With developments such as Micron’s new facility and the I-81 Community Grid project bolstering the local population, the region will have an increased need for the services human dynamics train people for, Jordan said.

“We need to allow our human dynamics group the opportunity to not do their work in the shadow of this college that is focused on sport,” Jordan said.

Eric Kingson, a professor of social work, said he expected a change, but he was surprised that it happened with a “lack of focus on the other departments.”

“It’s emblematic of really just not giving a darn about the caregiving professions,” Kingson said. “I think that’s something we see in society. We see it in how we pay people who do the most basic care work like aids in hospitals, aids in nursing homes. We see it in the full lack of recognition that giving care as a whole is a very significant contribution to our society.”

Other members of the Human Dynamics Task Force include Syracuse Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens, Deputy County Executive for Human Services Ann Rooney, partners from across campus and faculty and staff from Falk College, Jordan said. As of now, faculty will make up one of eight constituent groups in the task force.

“The committee that they’re establishing is a committee that diminishes faculty voice,” Corvo said.

As the meeting ended, undergraduate students in Falk College received an email with “advanced notice” of the “reimagination” of the college and its academic programs. Grace Brashears, a junior studying human development and family science and public health, said the email “came out of nowhere.”

“Overall, it was really confusing as to what was going to happen to all the human dynamics majors,” said Brashears, a student ambassador for Falk. “Throughout the email, they were just emphasizing how important it was to kind of lift up all the sport majors in the school … so I was just confused as to what even the options for our majors are going to be.”

The email states that future changes will not impact current students’ coursework or academic progression and that “all students enrolled in programs currently housed in Falk College may continue their studies and complete their respective degree programs without any changes to existing curriculum requirements.”

Grace Sacco, a senior majoring in social work, wrote in a statement to The D.O. that the lack of clarity in the email “leaves room for almost too much interpretation.”

Corvo said he doesn’t think the university is driven by marginalizing groups, but that it does not put any effort in to avoid it. He claims at least 85% of the students in the human dynamics departments are women while those enrolled as sport majors are mostly men.

“Essentially, sport, which is mostly male, is being valorized. The other programs which might be reasonably considered to be socially conscious or helping (are) mostly female and the female students … are being marginalized,” he said.

Penelope Lee, a junior studying public health, said that taking away the “human dynamics” part of the college’s name can be misleading for current students and future graduates who will be applying for jobs.

“Taking away that part of the name basically takes away the entire point of why you’re putting that on your resume … and your diploma,” Lee said. “It really doesn’t think about these other majors that have done … so much work and so much effort that they’ve put into making these programs great.”

The university did not respond when asked which college name would appear on students’ diplomas.

The college started as the College of Human Services and Health Professions in 2001 after a merger of the College of Nursing, the School of Social Work along with two departments in the College for Human Development. About two years later, the university decided to eliminate the College of Nursing, Corvo said.

The college was renamed the College of Human Ecology in 2007 and included the Sport Management department, which had been introduced to the university two years earlier. In 2011, the university received a $15 million gift from David B. Falk.

Corvo said he and other faculty members thought the college would be named David B. Falk College of Human Ecology, but Falk instead “demanded” the college be named “Sport and Human Dynamics.”

“The irony, I guess, is that we took Sport Management on, supported them, nurtured them, funded them, and now they are ‘elevated’ to become the college, and the other units that supported, nurtured, and funded them are being treated as inferior remnants,” Corvo said in a statement to The D.O.

The task force needs to determine the “optimal structure and alignment” within the university, Jordan said. The findings will be reported and reviewed by Ritter in October, and future plans will align with Chancellor Kent Syverud, the Board of Trustees and other areas of central administration, he said.

Brashears said she is concerned that the departments will not receive the acknowledgement they deserve in the future.

“All of the programs at Syracuse are very historic. A lot of them are the first of (their) kind in the country, and a lot of them are some of the best in the country,” she said. “In my time at Syracuse … I’ve already seen it get very overlooked by the nation as a whole, which is really unfortunate.”

Currently, Kingson said the university could move the existing human dynamics programs into a new school, add the units to an existing college or eliminate them entirely.

He said many of the faculty would like to stay in one college but that it will not happen if the process is “taken out of the hands of faculty.”

Jordan and associate deans will host a town hall meeting on Thursday at 12 p.m. in 335 White Hall as an opportunity for “students to learn about the reimagining of Falk College and engage in discussion.” Brashears said the timing of the meeting is “really weird and really inconvenient” as many Falk classes either end at 12:20 p.m. or start at 12:30 p.m.

“I know that if it were up to the professors of the human dynamic majors and even the people who run those programs, they would absolutely (gather student input),” Brashears said. “But I think that would be a good compromise to allow us to be a part of that task force in some shape or form.”

On Wednesday, over 24 faculty members petitioned for a special University Senate meeting following the renaming of Falk. The meeting will be held on April 30th at 10 a.m.

“They have lost the trust of everybody in our college and I don’t know how they can recover it,” the anonymous professor said.

Published on April 18, 2024 at 3:27 am

Contact Kendall: kaluther@syr.edu