By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
President Rodney Rogers said the university needs to do more to address issues of diversity and inclusion on the Bowling Green State University campus.
He made the remarks Tuesday to Faculty Senate. They come in the wake of a racist and threatening comment made by a staff member on social media. Rogers called the post “vile and despicable.”
The employee, a groundskeeper, Kevin Paridon, has been placed on paid administrative leave as required by Ohio classified civil service rules, pending the outcome of the investigation. All employees, faculty, administrators, and staff are entitled to due process, Rogers said. The university is “moving very quickly to do an investigation.”
But, he added, “what happened illustrated was how much work we have to do around education in diversity, inclusion, race and ethnicity in this country. We have so much work to do.”
BGSU was one of the first university to institute a general education requirement in diversity and ethnic identity.
That may not be good enough, he said. “I don’t think it’s achieving what our goal needs to be. … We need to think about what that curriculum looks like because that is our ability to educate the boarder group.”
Rogers suggested that the mandatory ethics training that faculty and administrators go through should include a module on race and diversity.
Higher education talks a lot about the problem, Rogers said, but “we need to do something.”
The discrepancy between graduation rates of different groups is unacceptable, Rogers said. And the university needs to do more to recruit and retain a diverse faculty and staff.
This work, he said, is as important as dealing with the pandemic.
