Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) councillors turned down a proposal to support an open letter signed by 800 people criticizing the university’s recent diversity report, but passed a motion to draft their own letter expressing the GSA’s concerns with the report.
GSA president Kelly Black said council passed a motion to join the public opposition to Carleton’s Commission on Inter-Cultural, Inter-Religious and Inter-Racial Relations.
He said the GSA will draft their own letter which will raise issues with the commission’s “methodology and exclusion of other inter-cultural, inter-faith and inter-racial groups on campus.”
The original open letter criticizing the commission was signed by over 800 people, most of them Carleton students and faculty.
The letter was delivered to the university administration, including president Roseann Runte.
Runte said she will not be responding to the letter, and declined to comment further.
She has also formed a President’s Diversity Advisory Committee to look into the recommendations of the commission, which has met once.
Runte said the committee will not be addressing the open letter either.
She said she has received wide-ranging responses to the commission’s report.
Reflecting this difference in opinion, GSA councillors rejected another motion to sign on to the original open letter.
Political management program representative Emile Scheffel said the open letter used “unfortunate language to attack the report that Carleton published,” and for this reason, “the GSA council rejected the idea of signing that open letter.”
“This letter seems to be attacking the methodology of the report which is fine,” Scheffel said, but he voiced concern with the treatment of Jewish concerns within the letter.
“[Much of the letter] was devoted to dismissing the complaints of Jewish students, and faculty members and basically calling into question their motivations for complaining,” Scheffel said.
Scheffel also said the letter “tried to tie it to Middle East issues that were highly controversial.” He described the tone as “ugly” and said he “didn’t want [his] name associated with it.”
While over 800 people signed the letter, Scheffel said this number was not reflective of campus opinion.
“I’ve seen it posted on anti-Israel blogs, I’ve seen it posted on all kinds of websites that have no connection whatsoever to Carleton so it’s clear to me there’s been a very concerted campaign to get very radical activists around the world to find [the letter],” he said.
Scheffel acknowledged there were problems with the report but said the open letter was not the right way to solve them.
“Critics of the report have raised some legitimate concerns. I think the university should take those concerns seriously, but I think the open letter itself is fatally flawed . . . something that should be seen as what it is, a very political document that’s meant to divide the campus rather than heal it,” he said.
