A Predominantly White Faculty and Curriculum

Last semester, a teacher initially ignored Paige when she expressed discomfort about the use of n-word in a scene. After the interaction, Paige said she had to temporarily leave class because she was so upset.

“I said that he, as a straight white male, won’t listen to me as a minority when I tell him that I’m feeling uncomfortable in the room, and I don’t feel heard and I feel silenced as a minority within this department,” Paige said. “It is really hard to feel like we can’t speak up against our faculty without having to explain race issues, privilege and why we feel uncomfortable — those aren’t things we would have to explain necessarily to faculty of color.”

Within the larger university, the black or African-American faculty and staff make up just 10.4 percent of the total faculty and staff, according to data from the 2013-2014 academic year. That figure represented 1,322 people in the university and is currently the most recent available data.

According to an anonymous Drama professor, only a few of their colleagues are professors of color.

“Perhaps the number-one obstacle I face daily, as one of the handful of professors of color, is having to constantly remind my colleagues that there are different perspectives, a different point of view, a different way of viewing art and teaching,” they said.

Benzizoune said that sensitivity, awareness and respect are crucial when discussing race in classrooms.

“Not everything is an educational experience and not everything should be treated as such,” Benzizoune said. “It is totally awesome to have conversations about race but subjects like that should be handled with sensitivity, rather than, for instance, ‘all the white people should debate political correctness together’ because the stakes are not all the same for every student in the classroom.”

While there are no available statistics on the diversity make up of the Drama program, Senior Public Affairs Officer Cheryl Feliciano told WSN in an email that in the last year and a half of Polendo’s tenure, there have been three new professional hires, two of whom are artists of color.

“It’s understandable that someone would feel anxious about filing a complaint against someone of authority,” Feliciano said. “The #MeToo movement has illustrated that visibly. However, we’ve taken many steps to make it easier to overcome their hesitation. The most important thing to know is that we don’t allow retaliation against someone for reporting a matter of concern.”

The anonymous professor critiqued some of their colleagues’ curriculums for their mostly white teaching material.

“It has been surprising that some professors might have their students read 10 plays and they’re all written by white men,” the Drama professor said. “There is not any thought to having a black actor in the class get up and perform material that was written by a white person. So, it’s simply the fact that it is not even being considered. I think now it is being considered more than ever but there are still plenty of professors who truly don’t consider it because honestly, they don’t have to.”

Tisch Drama junior Grace is one of those students. She said she felt excluded from conversations in the classroom because the curriculum focused solely on Eurocentric films and scenes. This year, Grace said her teacher approached her and the other two black students in the class to ask if they had recommendations for shows that didn’t center on a white narrative. Grace and her two peers compiled a list of 50 different works, and he brought a selection of those into the curriculum.

Tisch Drama sophomore Brooke said she’s had to explain to her teachers why it is not useful for her to study certain dialects based on the realities of type-casting in the industry. Brooke said it would be unproductive to learn techniques she knows she will not need as an African-American actor.

“I just feel like a lot of restructuring needs to happen, so that minorities feel like they’re actually getting training that’s going to be beneficial for them when we go out into the world and start working,” Brooke said.