It's been over six weeks since the release of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's final report, and the campus buzz surrounding the three-year endeavor is as weak today as it was when the report first came out.
Currently available only on the Internet, the report was intended to start a campus dialogue. But in a recent e-mail to committee members, even President Ruth Simmons described response as "somewhat more muted than anticipated." Muted indeed - a poll conducted by The Herald found that 44.9 percent of respondents either had not heard of the committee or did not plan to read any part of the report.
Perhaps University officials were na've to think students would erupt into discussion of the report over lunch at the Ratty and scour the University Web site to unearth the 110-page opus. To be sure, we used this page to encourage the community to read the report. But University officials and committee members made little effort to spark the intended conversation. Simply telling students to visit a Web site or attend a forum isn't enough.
Now that Simmons is ready to speak publicly about the report - she will discuss it at today's faculty meeting, meet with various campus constituencies over the coming weeks, consult the Brown Corporation in February and issue a public statement shortly thereafter - it's time for University officials to engage students in this important issue.
Many students don't see what a historical link to slavery has to do with them. If administrators want to expand this inquiry beyond a project that exists largely in University Hall, they need to better communicate its importance. Posting it to a Web site and sending out a campus-wide e-mail clearly wasn't enough to get students involved.
University officials could start by distributing color copies of the report to students. As challenging as it may be to distill the complex report into a few pages, a summary would bring the committee's work to more people. If incremental developments in the Plan for Academic Enrichment warrant periodic updates in our mailboxes, then so does this report, which could alter the University's history forever.
If faculty and administrators truly believe that starting a dialogue is important, they should do exactly that. As elegant as its prose may be, 110 pages on the Internet don't speak for themselves.
