Every new student on Syracuse University’s campus this fall is enrolled in SEM 100, a five-week seminar designed to confront implicit bias and promote health and wellness and communication skills.

Students will begin the course in late September, about five months after the initial suspension of the Theta Tau fraternity, which was eventually expelled for the creation of online videos showing members engaging in behavior Chancellor Kent Syverud has called “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.”

Amanda Nicholson, SU’s assistant provost and dean for student success, said the unified first-year experience was already being planned prior to the Theta Tau videos, but the release of the videos accelerated its campus-wide introduction. Planning for the updated first-year experience began in November 2017, Nicholson said. The book, Trevor Noah’s memoir “Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood,” was chosen in March 2018.

“We started with this idea that we wanted to do a shared reading to pull the students together when they come back on campus,” she said. SU doesn’t currently offer a cross-campus course for all first-year students.

SEM 100 is a non-graded course that will be evaluated as pass/fail. The class will be connected to each college’s anchor course, or introductory class. If a student fails SEM 100, they will fail a portion of their anchor class.

To develop the course, the steering committee tasked with designing the seminar needed to find a course prefix that had enough flexibility to create the unified first-year experience. The SEM prefix was able to do that.

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Initially, the shared reading was going to be voluntary, Nicholson said. After the Theta Tau controversy, the committee decided it should be mandatory for all first-year students.

Trevor Noah’s memoir, what the course is centered on, details “The Daily Show” host’s experiences as a child of a black mother and white father in a country where government-mandated racial segregation persisted until the mid-1990s.

Noah will speak at SU in January 2019 as part of the university’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration.

According to the SEM 100 syllabus, Noah’s book was chosen because “it addresses ideas of identity, belonging, diversity, inclusion, health and wellness, from a global perspective.” The university provided every incoming student with a copy of the book free of charge.

Students will meet each week for shared reading discussions led by a lead facilitator and a peer facilitator. The lead facilitators are a current faculty member, staff member or graduate student, and peer facilitators are current students.

Faculty and staff were also hired as training facilitators to teach other facilitators how to conduct the discussion sections. Twenty trainers of facilitators and about 400 facilitators have been hired.

khristian kemp-delisser, the director of the LGBT Resource Center at SU, co-chaired the subcommittee on shared reading and helped develop the five-week course for the students.

kemp-delisser said first-year experience trainers will oversee a four-hour training for facilitators. The trainers will also offer ongoing support and troubleshooting to the facilitators, kemp-delisser added.

Applicants were asked to give a statement about diversity, and few were turned away due to the need for facilitators and the quality of people that applied, kemp-delisser added.

Karen Hall, the assistant director of civic engagement and academic advising in the Renée Crown University Honors Program, has been working with students as a training facilitator during the summer.

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“I’m doing it because it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough,” she said. “It’s an ongoing process that we all have to be involved in.”

Dan Harris, a correspondent and anchor for multiple programs on ABC News including “Nightline,” will launch the first-year experience with a speaking event at the BeWell Expo in late September. Harris once had panic attack on air, and is the author of “10 Percent Happier,” a book about meditation mindfulness.

The expo will include a health and wellness fair to showcase the university’s services to new students, Hall said.

Students’ pass/fail grades will be based off journal assignments, engagement and attendance, according to the syllabus.

SEM 100 will meet once a week and run from the end of September to the end of October, Hall said. But the course will not be permanent — the University Senate’s Curriculum Committee must propose and approve all new classes.

kemp-delisser said the new first-year experience is not a sustainable model and, eventually, the goal is to merge the curriculum of the first-year forum into each college’s anchor course.

At the end of the course, students will receive a course evaluation and that data will be used to improve the course in the future.

“This is definitely a year we are learning from the process,” they said.

— News Editor Jordan Muller contributed reporting to this story.

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Published on September 12, 2018 at 9:24 pm