A Syracuse University survey gauging the success of SEM 100, a new first-year seminar on diversity and inclusion, showed that a majority of students who responded believed the course met expectations and achieved its goals, SU announced Wednesday.

Out of the 3,778 students enrolled in the course, 66.1 percent of them responded to the survey, which was emailed to all enrolled students in late October, according to an SU News release. More than 80 percent of those students said they were able to “identify complex sources of identity” and they were able to identify the “differences between implicit and unconscious bias,” which were two learning goals of the course, per SU News.

More than 95 percent of surveyed students said their facilitators maintained an atmosphere of respect and trust and 92.8 percent said their facilitators encouraged everyone to participate in the forum.

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SEM 100 was a five-week course in which first-year students met once a week to talk about implicit bias, health and wellness.

One component of SEM 100 was a shared reading experience, in which all students were asked to read comedian and political commentator Trevor Noah’s memoir “Born a Crime.” Many students previously said in interviews with The Daily Orange that the book was rarely a subject of conversation.

Only about half of survey respondents said they thought the classroom activities were valuable to the experience. Several students enrolled in the course and peer facilitators for SEM 100 told The D.O. that, though they thought the idea of the experience was valuable, the course wasn’t well-executed.

Provost Faculty Fellow Kira Reed and Dean of Student Success Amanda Nicholson, co-chairs of the First-Year Experience Initiative Steering Committee, both said that there are plans to completely change the course. At University Senate meetings, the two have presented future intentions to restructure the course, making it a three-credit liberal arts course. If approved by the Senate, the course would replace an existing humanities or social science course in all non-College of Arts and Sciences majors.

During the presentations, Nicholson said that a first-year experience to discuss implicit bias and inclusion is now a standard among SU’s peer institutions and other New York universities.

Nicholson said in September that the unified first-year experience was already being planned before the release of the Theta Tau videos this spring, but the controversy accelerated its campus-wide introduction. Chancellor Kent Syverud called the fraternity videos “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.”

SEM 100, as part of the first-year experience, was organized during the summer, according to emails sent to the student body by Syverud.

Published on November 28, 2018 at 10:40 pm

Contact Catherine: ccleffer@syr.edu | @ccleffert