news@dailylobo.com
@ChloeHenson5
A new campus council aims to make UNM a more tolerant place for everybody.
UNM President Robert Frank said the Civil Campus Council, a campus initiative that he spearheaded, seeks to create a more comfortable atmosphere where the University community can freely exchange ideas.
“It’s the true nature of the University where ideas can be exchanged in a fair and open way,” he said. “This is really what higher education is. You can freely exchange ideas and listen and be heard and valued as you say those things. It’s really just a matter of respect.”
Planning for the council started last semester and the UNM administration worked on it during the summer, Frank said. He said now that the new semester has come, “it’s time to really launch it.”
Frank said incidents of intolerance that occurred on campus last year caused the council to come into being.
“There were a couple of episodes where some hate language was used that we thought was below the dignity of our campus,” he said. “We said, ‘Well, maybe we just need to relook at how we’re handling the entire culture of the University.’”
Frank said the council will not cost the University any additional money.
“This is our culture,” he said. “This is what we believe. This is going to be the things we talk about all the time. It doesn’t cost us a thing to do the right thing.”
The council will be a collaborative effort and will include numerous organizations around campus, with the dean of students as the “day-to-day manager” of it all, Frank said.
“It touches every group that touches students,” he said. “It’s from our student housing, to our student success groups, to our … special student groups, like (El Centro) de la Raza, and (the UNM LGBTQ Resource Center).”
And it continues to be an ongoing process, Frank said.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“It’s still emerging and we’re unrolling how it’s going to work,” he said. “So it’s going to be going on for a while.”
The council will have its first meeting in September, Frank said.
UNM Dean of Students Tomás Aguirre said the goal of the initiative is to improve the overall civility of the campus.
“I don’t think anybody is saying that this campus is out of control or anything like that,” he said. “But could we do better?”
Aguirre said the first step in the initiative includes creating a council that represents “the entire campus community.”
“The ASUNM president is a member of the council, the GSPA president for graduate students is a member of the council, the president of the faculty senate is involved, the president of the Staff Council is involved, and the chief of (UNMPD),” he said. “Someone to represent every entity on campus is going to be a part of this group.”
Another step in the program involves identifying “everything and anything that the University is doing,” Aguirre said.
“Before you try to recommend solutions to anything, you should really get a better understanding of what the problem is,” he said.
Aguirre said the council will meet once a month and will utilize electronic resources, such as Google Documents, to accomplish their goals. He said the council members want to gather resources for students into one accessible location.
“We know that it’s already out there,” he said. “We don’t need to recreate the wheel here. But we just need to bring it all together, (to) put it on one website so that we can identify it all.”
One of the first activities planned by the council would focus on having students sign a “civility contract,” Aguirre said. But he said the council will try to find a more engaging name for the initiative.
“We want to come up with a new name of the campaign because the Civil Campus Council doesn’t sound very fun to me,” he said.
Aguirre said he thinks UNM should continue to work on making the campus more civil for its community.
“We can still be better,” he said. “I think whenever we stop trying to be better is when we start to have problems.”
