Regaining a “Sense of Humanity” at Providence College - Marzullo and Haig

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Vincent Marzullo and Theodore Josiha Haig, Guest MINDSETTERS™

 

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Two powerful forces are at play in any social structure, like Providence College (PC), where discrimination has been attributed to the social interactions of one group to the detriment of another.

Maintaining this social environment creates the "oppressed" and the “oppressor's" mystique, where the dominant social relations over the years has produced a “Culture of Silence” that by its nature, attempts to instill a negative, silenced, and suppressed self-image into those that feel oppressed, the Black and Brown students and staff, generation after generation.

Secondly, once you have created this “Culture of Silence” it causes the dominated individuals to lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture so, “they don’t see what they should have been able to see.”

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The mystique of this “Culture of Silence” is that it strips away the "oppressed" and "oppressor’s" natural inclination to be humane. So, they hate, accuse, lash out, or remain silent claiming “they don’t see what they should have been able to see.” And their “sense of humanity” gets lost along the way. Compassion, sympathy, empathy, and “love thy neighbor,” loses its place in the institution. It could also manifest itself in the institution’s policies and practices; admissions, recruiting, interviewing, selection and hiring practices, scholarship offerings, grading, social clubs on campus, team sports, and event planning as examples. Even their ability to be objective can become dehumanized. Especially, when incidents of discrimination are raised.

We believe that both the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” must be liberated from this mystique by regaining their “sense of humanity”  through a process called “consciousness development education.”  Where each must constantly be rethinking their way of life on campus and examining their roles in maintaining and sustaining the system, so both can regain their “sense of humanity.” It must be viewed as a “continuous process” that along the way allows each to begin looking at the “world”  through the ‘lenses’ of a compassionate and sympathetic person; one that exhibits generous behavior or disposition towards another human being.

Bringing key stakeholders together like the PC President, staff, students, Board of Trustee members, and alumni via a KIVA is one way to facilitate this process. The KIVA is a “human technology” that allows the administration to collect, analyze and report data related to the shortsightedness of the “innovations” Providence College has put in place over the years in addressing the discriminatory treatment of students and staff of color.

As a human technology the KIVA is used for targeting this mystique. This facilitated process will identify where this mystique dominates in the institution by allowing the participants to respond to four probative inquiries that will no doubt generate a “conflict in values.”

Secondly, the community of participants will identify where and what parts of the institution needs to be humanized or should we say, re-humanized. All suggestions about humanizing will come from the participants.

Thirdly, following up, we will analyze the data we collected, report the analysis to the KIVA participants and then recommend a “system of innovations” with the Administration, which must match the magnitude of change required - one with checks and balances that humanizes the effected parts and proposes a system of collecting data continuously, where the data informs future decision-making. And then propose revisiting the system periodically (e.g., monitoring and adjusting) to determine if it is working and to what extent.

By the way, critical to the integrity of the process is that the data collected, analyzed, and the recommendations reported must be first reviewed, as sequenced, and reported to the KIVA participants and PC’s constituency.

A second session with another cohort of participants may be necessary in response to a need to broaden the sample and collect more data.

Lastly, we realize “institutions,” in part or as a whole, and individuals fear change…whether it be in attitudes, behaviors, or norms. Neil Postman, the cultural critic, taught us long ago that when the “method you are using gets deeply associated with what you are trying to change, to the point where it is difficult to know what came first, the method or what you are trying to change. Then you will lose sight of what it is you are trying to change.” It will be up to leadership to put in place a quality assurance mechanism for monitoring and sustaining change while fostering continuous assessment and institutional improvements.

The KIVA will allow us to get the most out of the participants in an abbreviated period of time. It is designed for “face to face” interaction, with the capacity for streaming live input, if desirable.

Logistically, up to 100 participants (e.g., 4 circles of participants) could participate over a three-hour period. Four probative questions will be asked, by a facilitator, to three stratified concentric circles of participants. The fourth question will be “Who else should we be asking these first three questions too?” Because the participants are a cross-section randomly selected from the institution, if anything, our experience tells us the participants usually recommend more of the same sampling. In effect, participants from each concentric circle will have an opportunity to answer the probative questions, followed by observational feedback from circle #4 and potentially streaming participants. The process is designed to:

Target the conflict in the values of the participants;
Identifies adaptive leadership strategies;
Diminishes the gaps between those values and the realities they face; and
Minimizes the re-occurrences of those conflicts in the future.

With that in mind, the data collected and analyzed would lead to analyzing existing regulations, policies, practices, activities, and behaviors that are perceived as favoring any majority over a minority at the college and revising them through the ‘lens’ of a compassionate, sympathetic person that exhibits generous behavior or disposition towards another human being, on campus.

And then creating new regulations, policies and/or practices, activities or behaviors that are humanizing and allow both the oppressed and the oppressor to begin the process of healing and feeling liberated.

We are not naive. Eliminating discrimination in any American institution is a tall order. Every now and then, it will raise its ugly head. It is like a disease. But its effect on the students and staff at Providence College must be minimized, at the very least. It is the effect of the disease that must be tackled because if not, it will continue to deprive some students and staff members of some basic human qualities that could have influence in the process of their human development. Not to mention the effect it will continue to have on the ethos that characterizes our beloved Providence College community.

Theodore Josiha Haig, PC ’70 – a former superintendent of schools in both Hartford, Ct. and East Orange, New Jersey, and currently functioning as an international educational consultant. Ted lived in the state of Qatar, the Middle East, for eleven years and holds both a doctorate from Boston College and a law degree from the University of Florida, College of Law. A native New Yorker and former PC basketball player, Ted served as the first president of the Afro-American Society at PC and the college’s first director of the Martin Luther King Scholarship program. Among all his accomplishments Ted is a five-time published mystery-suspense novelist, and currently publishing a 6th novel, “Baldwin Village.”

 

Vincent Marzullo, PC ’70 - for 31 years he served as a federal civil rights and social justice Director in RI for the Corporation for National & Community Service.  He is a previous Chair of the RI Federal Executive Council and a President Emeritus of AARP RI. For the past 5 years, Vin has been volunteering weekly at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and serves on the Boards of NAACP Providence Branch and the Senior Agenda Coalition of RI. He has served three Rhode Island Governors and is the Founder of USA Compassion Corps.

 

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