“I felt so uncomfortable in Maren Stange’s HSS1 class. She was very hostile to us for no reason. She would constantly talk about her black husband as justification for her authority on the black experience. Everyone in the class dreaded going. It was a terrible freshman experience. Another important aspect of the class was that there was one black student who was constantly asked to talk about her experience and they expressed being uncomfortable with this. One time Maren Stange said, “for all we know I could be black”. She spoke about histories of racism with no sensitivity”

“In Maren Stange’s HSS1 class during the fall of 2016, on the subject of Kate Chopin’s Désirée’s Baby, she alluded and then explicitly referred to the fact that she can talk and lecture about the black experience because of the fact that she had a black husband. She was also consistently hostile during class when the answers to her questions were not the ones she expected, making everyone in class rather uncomfortable”

“In Pospisil’s class, and the Sophomore HSS3 & 4 curriculum, was a complete- ly inadequate and incompetent teacher that if any provided to be a detriment to my learning experience. I addressed it to Sonya Sayres and I was told that she was going to address it but in fact understood that she could not do anything due to the structure of the bureaucracy of the adjunct - faculty structure. To have a teacher that may be adequate to research but does not know how to even make eye contact with a student is someone who should not be providing a higher education class, especially in a place where I found that I was not prioritized” “

Sayres has...attempted...to diversify the curriculum some time ago. In HSS2 we are required to read books about Native peoples in the Americas as well as ancient Chinese societies, but they were written from a European perspective and treated as the “other.” During her lectures she *tried* (I guess) to present herself as socially aware about issues such as racial segregation and colonialism, but everything she says with her tone sounds disingenuine, high-and-mighty, and comes off as honest-to-God bullshit. I don’t believe the faculty is even equipped to diversify the curriculum as, if there were more diverse courses and curricula added, the problematic faculty would teach it in a way that does none of it justice.”

 “In HSS1 freshman year we were reading a play out loud, and the part I was reading said the N word, so naturally I stopped. Professor Swann started yelling about how it’s a historical word and I have to say it. He would not move on until I said it. I was really uncomfortable and afraid of him so I did and I felt really bad about it, as there were a few black kids in my class.”

“After taking Sayres for HSS 2, I failed her class. Her teaching skills do not encourage students to participate. Instead, she often ignores when students question her arguments and settles for her own opinions. This kind of environment made me shut off in class and made it difficult for me to keep going, and keep up with the work. As a student who doesn’t have a strong entry point into academia, it was difficult for me to keep up with readings, conversations and essays. This is not the kind of learning environment that I come from. This year I have professor casper. He inhabits the classroom like a dictator and doesn’t seem to understand or value when women speak. I am worried about failing this class, and often feel uncomfortable expressing myself because of how he speaks about history. He also has shamed me for coming in late which I find unfair. HSS is a requirement but the work we are given takes away from our studio classes and also does not inform our art practice, although we would like it to.”

 

"I've had to speak with Dean Buckley a few times about courses and scheduling, and every single time, he made me feel like it was a burden to speak with me, that he was doing me a favor taking time out of his day to see me. POC students often have a strong sense of when they are being "othered" by the look in faculty's eyes - I definitey“Swann didn’t follow the curriculum at all which was good in some ways I think because we read a lot more diverse work like Dutchman and Fires in the Mirror that dealt with race and religion relations and were not just by a bunch of white people asserting their opinions and only that, so material wise, we were exposed to a variety of views rather than just a

“As someone who has tried to go through the preexisting routes to change HSS, I feel that I am ignored and not taken seriously. During the HSS curriculum committee meetings students are talked over and completely ignored. If we disagree with some- thing, the professors sitting on the committee will rarely address it in a constructive way. Sayres will openly cut off people in the meetings, and talk over students. She only cares about following the ‘rules’, unless she has something to say that she deems more important. The students on the committee are referred to by the school they are in and not their names, and its a dehumanizing experience. I leave every meeting feeling frustrated and walked on. The methods of change that exist now are not working and will continue to not work while the people in charge are still here.”

sense this hostility from Buckley."eurocentric frame of mind. The issue [is] with rather the environment that Swann created in the class, since all the readings were plays we spent class time reading them out loud basically acting it out. When reading the plays like the Dutchman, he would force us to say the N word which was extremely uncomfortable especially with only one African American in our class, and yes, that is what the author who is a black man wrote but that does not make it okay for us to say it. There was even an instance when a girl in my class was refusing to say it and he called her stupid and she left the class crying. It was just really insensitive of him, his argument was that if we didn’t say it it would be censorship and that we needed to say it to fully experience the impact of the word, it’s supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. He ended up siding with us and not forcing us anymore but still stood by his opinion. Another major issue with the class though was the treatment of international students, particularly from Asia. From the first day of class, he was very rude to them..also he would yell at them for mispronouncing words when reading and call them stupid pretty much even take away their parts because he said they were doing so awful.”