A Syracuse University professor is using social media to bring the community together following a series of racist incidents that made some students feel unsafe on their own campus.
Jeff Rubin is with the SU School of Information Sciences.
"The goal was to show how powerful our students are and how much they care for and love their institution. The Our Orange Voice and the OneCuse was a way to display that love to the world.”
He started the hashtag #OneCuse, alongside its partner website, OurOrangeVoice.com, with the help of his IST 165 class. After the events that shook SU in November, Rubin invited his students to send him their thoughts—and the responses, he said, blew him away.
"What I did was I had taken all their thoughts, quotes, pieces of them, and I put them on a webpage so they could see how similar they all were.”
Rubin challenged his students to come up with a name for the site—and OurOrangeVoice.com was born. Rubin shared the site on Twitter under the hashtag OneCuse, which also came from his class. Since then, both the hashtag and the website have taken off.
"It's kind of neat to see the power that students can have by coming up with a message. Again, this to me was about them, about their workds, and about their platform.”
Rubin says OneCuse is not about taking over, ending, or dismissing the fear and feelings of those students leading the #NotAgainSU movement. At the same time, he feels the narrative needs to be more positive. So what’s next for OneCuse? Rubin says that future of the hashtag is for his students, not him, to decide.
"This is now up to the students. This is really their message. If they choose to keep this going on their own, if it means something to them, I will support them in any way I can.”
Rubin says the OurOrangeVoice.com website is reaching far beyond SU. It’s been viewed by people in 32 countries in the past week.
