Dear Kentucky Wesleyan Family,
Over the past several months, we at Kentucky Wesleyan College have been working with our faculty, staff, students, and community on dealing with emotional wellness with respect to COVID-19. Workshops, letters, videos, and other methods of outreach have been shared to help our community stay healthy during this time. The college has discussed sensitivity with respect to wearing masks, giving others their safe space, acting in a manner that is both respectful of and collegial toward others in our community among other mannerisms. We have worked hard to help ensure a healthy campus physically and psychologically.
As national events have shown, and continue to reveal, the concept of equality upon which the United States was founded is a goal that has yet to be reached. As mentioned in an earlier communication, one of the goals of Kentucky Wesleyan College is to teach our students to live ethically in a complex world. The question often arises, what is meant by living one’s life in an ethical manner and how does KWC impart this guidance upon its students. The Methodist origins and alignments of our college are steeped within the campus’s mission and help guide the decisions and pedagogical mannerisms we wish to instill within our student body. A powerful potential definition of living an ethical life is to “love one’s neighbor as you love yourself.” Treat everyone as you would wish to be treated, with the same equality and love you would hope for yourself each and every day. As strong as these words may show, we have not been working with our community to the same level with reference to treating each other with the respect and equality. As the nation reals from one alarming event to another with regard to the treatment of our nation’s citizens, KWC must act in a manner to help lead and develop our students to be leaders in the next generation while treating all human beings as equals.
On September 12, 2020, College community members will be joining our students and Brescia University for a peace walk beginning at Brescia, passing the Owensboro Police Department, and ending on the KWC campus. The purpose of this march will be to show support for our black community and an attempt to bring our positive actions to the community of Owensboro so that we may all grow and learn together.
Kentucky Wesleyan College will be joining hands to help as a conduit to move our community forward in a positive fashion. Words alone are not enough at present, we have to show our support through actions and leadership.
Statistics show that American minorities, African Americans in particular, are victims of systemic racism. All one needs to do is study the rates of incarceration, health care coverage, unemployment rates, or earned income data, to realize we as a nation have yet to rise to the goal of “all men created equal.”
Kentucky Wesleyan College will also be hosting a campus town hall on racial tension and leadership for our students. More information about this event will be disseminated later. The campus is also committed to training of its community members to avoid micro-aggressions, to create a bias response team, to look closely at hiring practices as we move forward, and to ensure that we all stay well informed on how to treat each other as we would always hope to be treated.
Students, faculty, and staff, please take advantage of the resources at Kentucky Wesleyan College. We are here for you. For our larger family, we are here for you too. You can have your voices heard beyond our campus! Write to your elected officials. March peacefully, and safely. Join with civic groups in demanding change. History has revealed that this change will not come quickly or easily. History also has shown that change ultimately prevails when people join together. As Martin Luther King stated “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right!!”
Kentucky Wesleyan College students have trodden the path to live ethically for generations. Let us stand strong and make our voices heard to help others follow us along this path and help our nation heal.
Sincerely,
Tom Mitzel, Ph.D.
President