Campus Connection

UWL hosts Hate-Bias Response Symposium

For the second straight year, UWL staff helped organize a conference on campus to help other universities and organizations respond to hate and bias. Assistant Director for Campus Climate Amanda Goodenough says she selfishly sparked the idea for the Hate-Bias Response Symposium last year. “I wanted to know who else was doing the work and build a network of people,” she says. This year, the expected attendance more than doubled to about 200 people. They took part in breakout sessions, panel discussions and learned from a keynote speaker. “This is an awesome group of people who are either committed or interested in hate and bias response and doing what they can to make their institutions more welcome and safe,” she says. https://youtu.be/hmNe_DF4xV0 “If we aren’t challenging things like racism, sexism, homophobia in our students here, where they can mess up, then they leave here and enter the workforce and they bring it with them and it isn’t acceptable,” says Goodenough. “People get fired for that. We are failing our students if we aren’t having these difficult conversations.”