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Campus Tours

Mission

Our committee is exploring ways to incorporate growing knowledge about, acknowledgment of, and responses to the University of Delaware’s role in perpetuating disenfranchisement (legacies of dispossession, enslavement, segregation, and white privilege) through campus interpretation broadly defined. That includes developing language for campus tours given by Blue Hen ambassadors, co-creating campus tours or virtual tours available through the UD website based on race and ethnicity, public-facing exhibits/websites focused on UD’s history and the histories of Newark, creative writing and storytelling in collaboration with student theatre groups or classes in live performances and/or virtual interactive maps/tours.

Goals

  • Explore how UD’s complex history is currently being interpreted in relation to its status as a land-grant institution situated on historic Lenape land in a city where people were enslaved and in a state that codified racial segregation in higher education.
  • Identify stakeholders at the University and affiliated programs (including the WPAMC) and formulate a plan for communication and collaboration.
  • Connect to UD Archives to gather campus specific-context (building names, first BIPOC UD students, first Registered Student Organizations, campus developments and land space, major events and celebrations) – acknowledging UD’s racist past and present.
  • Interface with the UD Task Force on Building Names.
  • Develop collaborative ventures with Creative Writing, student theater groups, and Theatre classes to write and to perform stories that engage with UD’s histories.
  • Think about community partners and possibilities for outreach with Newark History Center and DE Historical Society.
  • Undertake comparative study of how other institutions in the mid-Atlantic region are interpreting their problematic histories and furthering current antiracist agendas.

Members

Chair: Jennifer Van Horn (Art History and History)
  • Kathryn Benjamin-Golden (Africana Studies)
  • Stephanie Chang (Diversity & Inclusion Student Life)
  • Kenneth Cohen (History and Museum Studies)
  • Sarah Dobe-Hund (Honors College)
  • Adam Foley (Equity & Inclusion)
  • Cole Galloway (Physical Therapy)
  • Kelly O’Rourke (Theatre, Resident Ensemble Players)

Committee Highlights

Intern Alenoush Davis is currently working with the Campus Tours committee to research spaces on campus with significant backgrounds pertaining to the history of race on campus. Her research is part of an ongoing project to create a campus story map which will be a digital visual map of important black historical events on campus.