Let's remodel UNM's front porch

President Schmidly has said that Athletics is the University’s front porch, and I’d like to say that I think we need to remodel the porch.
It’s not a matter of whether the team is winning. Remodeling the porch isn’t about capital improvements or athletic endowments. This remodeling goes to the heart of things. It’s about rethinking the University and how it relates to the community it serves and belongs to.

There are many examples of these front-porch activities where we interface with the community, but I’d like to cite just one because it came not out of cheering fans, pom-poms and tailgate parties, but from despair and death.

Last spring, graduate student Stefania Gray and professor Hector Torres were brutally killed in a domestic violence incident involving Gray’s ex-boyfriend.

Many faculty members and students felt a sense of hopelessness. I don’t need to speak about the toll such incidents have taken on us here in Albuquerque and specifically here at UNM. These were the dark events from which grew an extremely positive assertion of the University’s value — of the value of scholarship, of the value of community engagement. We faculty from diverse disciplines joined with grad and undergrad students, joined with staff, joined with members of community service agencies, joined with community experts, joined with University administration to work together on the Gray-Torres Conference on Domestic Violence and Stalking.

This signal event that will take place today and Tuesday in the SUB will present workshops, panels, presentations and films. These events are all focused on the curse of domestic violence and what we together can do about this extremely destructive poison that kills and cripples so many of us. This front-porch event invites members of our wider community to join with us in saying “No!” to the curse of domestic violence. This conference also says that we will not let the perpetrators of crime win out against us — that we reject complacency and hopelessness, and that we say that University members will not stand down in the face of this social plague. Instead it says that we will join with the greater public to address the issues of our times, to bring the great scholastic resources to bear on this difficult and intransigent problem.

This is the new remodeled front porch of the University, no longer the “Ivory Tower,” aloof from the community, but joined with our community in a single purpose: to address the social challenges of our time.

It is perfectly suitable that this great event will culminate in a reading by University poets and from the community who will gather in the Satellite area of the SUB at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in celebration of the lives of our colleagues, Gray and Torres, whose commitment to education and to the University we honor and pay tribute to. I think it is a response they would heartily approve.

So, I invite faculty members, staff, members of the public, and especially our students, to come on over sit on the front porch, and learn about domestic violence and stalking and how we can respond to these devastating crimes.

Maybe this is not as exciting or fun as a football game, but this conference shows what the University is all about and what a treasured resources this place and the people in it are; how we can serve our community, and how we can stand up together to address the difficult issues that challenge us.

Burbank is the vice president of UNM American Association of University Professors and a faculty member of the English Department.