Gaudino responds to student protest, demands

Near the end of Thursday’s demonstration, protester Gianni Glover challenged President James Gaudino: “If you give us false hope by making these commitments and fail to do them, would you be willing to resign as our president?”

“Yes, yes I would,” Gaudino replied.

On Monday, Gaudino met with the Black Student Union to hear what they had to say. In addition to diversifying curriculum, students wanted Central and Gaudino to make them feel more accepted on campus.

Gaudino said he started the process on Friday after the protest.

“We’re going to look at the search committees and make sure they’re doing everything they can to achieve diversity in the process,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

Gaudino added that Central is already trying to diversify its faculty, but acknowledged search committees could be doing more.

However, Matthieu Chapman, professor in musical theatre performance, said he doesn’t believe the school is doing enough.

“It’s mostly a numbers game and the fact of the matter is that a lot of times when courses focus specifically on non-Eurocentric ways of learning and knowing and thinking, students don’t enroll in them,” Chapman said at the BSU meeting Monday.

Chapman spoke at a recent Black Student Union meeting about a special topics literature course that would focus on black history such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement and Post-Black Theatre. The course is scheduled for the spring quarter.

Gaudino also attended the meeting and told the students he does not have the ability to change the curriculum.

“The diversification of the curriculum, the president has little influence on the curriculum other than persuasive,” Gaudino said on Tuesday. “I don’t have authority over the curriculum, the faculty have authority over the curriculum.”

However, he said he plans to talk to the Faculty Senate and the deans of each college about their efforts to diversify the curriculum.

Additionally, students said they wanted Gaudino to attend meetings of organizations that represent minorities at Central.

“When I first came here seven years ago, I would try to go to all of them,” Gaudino said on Tuesday. “Students told me as politely as they could, ‘You know you kind of maybe change the nature of the dialogue when the president of the university is sitting there, so why don’t you come when you’re invited?’ and I will if my schedule allows it.”

Gianni Glover, an organizer of the demonstration on Thursday, said Gaudino has also been invited to the graduation celebrations for black, Latino and LGBTQA minorities but has either sent someone in his place or not gone at all.

“The reason I didn’t go to them in the past is because I understood them to be actual graduation celebrations,” Gaudino said on Tuesday. “So if they are in fact, as I now better understand them, as celebrations of achievements of graduation, I will absolutely go to them.”

Another promise Gaudino made to the students was to write a letter to the University of Missouri about the events that inspired protests across the nation last week.

Gaudino said Tuesday he has written a first draft and sent it to the students from various minority organizations for suggestions and changes. Once they are done with the letter they will sign it together.

“If what they are saying is accurate — and I have no reason to believe that it’s not — there is some discrimination that takes place not just at the university but in the supporting community as well,” Gaudino said on Tuesday. “If that’s the case, then it’s obviously very bad.”