All SU minority students need resources validating on-campus diversity, and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication is taking an important step to initiating that support. MARGINS is Newhouse’s first mentorship program for students of color and LGBTQ students.

Newhouse may be one of the first, but cannot be the last to implement programs that acknowledge the struggles of being an ambitious minority student dealing with the reality of institutionalized prejudice within the workforce.

MARGINS’ mission statement is to “recognize that our university is a predominantly white institution” and therefore, has a goal to “support students during this transition and help make their experience at Newhouse and Syracuse a great one.”

The program’s implementation is highly commendable as Newhouse’s magazine, news and digital journalism department stands as the first to support a student-run program that explicitly recognizes the need to normalize a minority student’s place in a predominantly white workforce.

Even prior to the hate crimes that inspired the #NotAgainSU movement, department Chair Melissa Chessher said she was aware of the deficit of people of color in the magazine industry through a benchmark trip provided to Newhouse students in her department.

“One of my best students, a woman of color, got back from the trip and she came to me and she was like, ‘I just really don’t think I’m going to go into magazines because we went to all the top publishers and I did not see one person who looked like me,’” Chessher said.

Minority students are in need of connections to individuals who stand as clear-cut examples that being in the minority does not stunt them from succeeding within the workforce majority.

By providing initial ‘speed dating’-style meetings to match students up with an exemplary, relatable counterpart, and follow-up community bonding sessions, MARGINS stands as a perfect solution to students who feel as if their certain career path is not achievable due to their sexual orientation or the color of their skin.

Schools other than Newhouse need to recognize that the magazine, newspaper and digital department is not the only department threatened by prejudice, and the creation of relative career-based mentorship programs is a good place to start.

The one student from the trip’s testimonial moved Chessher to ask herself, “What role am I playing in perpetuating this problem that we have?” she said.

It is this question that should be asked of each and every SU faculty member. Faculty members of other schools on campus seem to see the issue of misrepresentation as someone else’s issue. Almost three months after the beginning of the #NotAgainSU movement, students of color continue to see institutionalized privilege as a constant reality. While Chessher, “could not wait for other people to do larger things,” it is time for administrators and other SU colleges to follow suit.

“This should be a carrot that we use to diversify the student body but then also give them special programming to help so that then they become leaders,” Chessher said.

Just as the MARGINS program needs to expand across other SU colleges, it also needs to expand within Newhouse itself. While the Newhouse diversity forum in response to the on-campus hate crimes brought up ideas of diversity scholarships, learning communities, and leadership growth inspired by programs at Iowa State University, these ideas need to transform into substantial plans of action.

In the words of Chessher, “institutional racism is not going to be fixed by one mentor program. It really is going to need to be a large holistic initiative.”

Cori Dill is a freshman studying newspaper journalism and political science. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at crdill@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter at @dillcori.

Published on February 24, 2020 at 11:12 pm