This week, the Fordham Faculty Senate wrote an open letter condemning the Fordham Administration for its reliance on open letters over actual action in regards to past racial incidents and hate crimes on campus. The Senate took a bold stance, saying that Father McShane’s request that students “Be kind, in other words, to your classmates, and to yourself” was not enough to count as actually handling the issue. Instead, they flexed their role as the administration’s little brother that keeps trying to hang out with his brother’s friends by penning an open letter complaining about the open letters. It said “A series of so-called isolated incidents’ comes to look more and more like a culture urgently in need of some serious and painful interrogation of its persistent structures of racism. Open letters including the President’s and ours do not do enough to effect meaningful change.” Little did they know that this letter would make a world of difference.



A cynic might ask “Wait, are you really using the very thing that you say doesn’t work?” or “Give me a second, you say that Fordham needs concrete solutions, couldn’t you do that with this letter instead of proving you have no clue what irony is?” but that would be ridiculous. We at The Ramtime Times bet that that same cynic might think that the Fordham Faculty Senate is doing this more as a public relations grab than as an actual attempt to make change at this university, but of course we would all take said cynic out to the public square and mock him for being so idiotic.

While doing so, we would also remind him that the letter does have a concrete solution. The letter calls for the administration to make the Diversity Task Force’s (the organisation put in place to respond to racism at Fordham last year) report public. That cynic from earlier might say “Isn’t that once again shifting the blame to another group? Doesn’t it kind of seem like nobody wants to be the one to actually suggest anything but instead seems to want to draw this out long enough to get political points while hoping that students get bored or adjust to the situation?” At this point we are tired of talking to the cynic, so we are just ignoring him.

Luckily, The Fordham Faculty Senate didn’t listen to our cynic, because their letter has fixed racial strife at Fordham. It seemed unlikely that an administration that still hasn’t explained why tuition went up would take much notice (To be clear, the administration didn’t comment). And it also seemed unlikely that this task force made up mostly of the very Deans and administrators who got us into this mess would have some new solution to the problem. That seemed like a classic stalling technique, and maybe it was. We still don’t know what the task force found. In the end it didn’t matter, just writing the letter was enough.

Since the Fordham Faculty Senate’s letter was made public, there have been no major racist or biased incidents on campus of which we at The Ramtime Times are aware. That’s almost two days now, which is a big deal at Fordham. When reached for comment, Alexa (‘17) told The Ramtime Times “I’m just glad the Faculty Senate sent that letter. I mean other than the Lincoln Center Halloween decorations that started this whole thing and the racist email that white professor sent a black student, I can’t think of anything else super racist that has happened in the last week. I’d like to imagine that the Faculty Senate had something to do with that.” Alexa went on to say “Personally, I’d like to rename Alumni Court South ‘The Fordham Faculty Senate that Ended Racism’ building because I’m just nervous people are going to forget about these great two days the Senate has given us.”

