To President Eduardo Peñalver, Seattle University Students, Faculty, and Staff:
We write and share this writing about President Peñalver’s May 7th town hall–a town hall ostensibly presented as an opportunity for the highest level of SU’s leadership to not only share its “vision” of the university with the SU community but to listen and answer questions from students, faculty, and staff. Yet when students demonstrated deep care and courage and took the risk of sharing their thoughts, as well as their pain and anxiety, challenging their university with urgent demands in the face of tragic events, President Peñalver silenced them; he dismissed their ideas, their convictions, and their moral clarity, asserting only his own perceptions of what is true, what is “factual.” Our highest leadership repeatedly interrupted, chastised, and belittled students for using what he considered the wrong words, the wrong terms, claiming that they were neglecting technical details and thus effectively declaring they did not–could not–understand what they were talking about. Proclaiming SU’s unblemished record of honoring free speech, President Peñalver used his position of power to illustrate disdain for student speech. We write publicly now to report a campus climate violation on the part of President Peñalver as the tone with which he spoke to students at the town hall “contribut[ed] to creating an unsafe, negative, or unwelcoming campus climate.”
We write also to our students to say, we see you, we hear you–we saw you, we heard you. We write to our students to say, we are proud of you because what you did and what you are doing was and is brave. We write to our students to say that we, your faculty and staff, understand what it looks like, feels like, and sounds like to be a whole person–the sorts of whole people that we are called upon to teach and to nurture by SU’s mission. We write to you, our students, to say you have modeled the kinds of critical thinking and action we have told you SU values–you have demonstrated how intellect is interwoven with emotion and conviction as social justice demands. You embodied our university’s stated mission and values by acting on your concern for justice and commitment to the common good.
Equally, we write to our University president to say that we also saw you, we heard you. We saw you respond to student comments and student emotion not as a caring steward but with disdain, with dismissal, using the skills of “intellect” in the service of power rather than compassion. We heard you get defensive, get angry about both the content of the questions and the fact that you were questioned at all. We saw you fail to follow even the most basic guidelines for inclusive excellence and non-violent communication–you did not listen, you did not allow space, you did not validate, you did not value. It should go without saying that a university president should be able to model inclusive communication and cultivate a sense of belonging for all members of the university community–and that SU’s president, in particular, should be able to do these things. They are, after all, written into our strategic directions, they make up at least part of the foundation of our Office of Diversity and Inclusion, they are woven throughout the values of Ignatian pedagogy upon which SU has built its reputation.
We equally acknowledge the president’s email of May 10th in which he reported on his meetings with students since the town hall. We are pleased to see the steps outlined in the email, but are deeply disappointed that the president failed to acknowledge his tone and treatment of students on May 7th. We write to express more than simply our unhappiness with what happened at the town hall. We write to demand that the president immediately move to repair the damage that he has done to the well-being of our students and thus to the university community as a whole. In addition to the steps outlined in his email, this must include open listening sessions with students, faculty, and staff–moderated by faculty and staff and not by President Peñalver or his immediate staff members and it must include a shared outline of the work that President Peñalver will personally do to learn how to lead Seattle University’s community with inclusion, compassion, and care.
We remind our entire university community that the very first value listed on SU’s Mission, Vision, and Values page is “Care: We put the good of students first.” It is from the perspective of this value that we share this letter and it is from the perspective of this value that we demand a response from the President. Finally, we remind President Peñalver of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm which “aims to educate the whole person and inspire individual transformation and action through the interplay of context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation.” We write with hope that the events of the May 7th Town Hall will inspire in him particularly an urge to practice reflection, action, and evaluation in the service of our students, our faculty, and our staff.
To see this letter with a current list of signatories, click here.
