President David M. Dooley of The University of Rhode Island held a community conversation on December 1st addressing issues and concerns that arose from the presidential election of 2016.

            There was a short introduction given by Dooley followed by a question and answer portion for the students and faculty to express any concerns or issues they had following the election and the behavior of those around them post election.

            The first question asked by a student was, “if you’ve heard about sanctuary campuses, may college campuses have declared themselves and their community as a sanctuary campus, making the campus a safe place for undocumented students, would you consider making URI one of those sanctuaries”

            In response to this question Dooley said, “The answer is certainly yes, but let me also say this a public institution and a decision I am going to talk about with the governer, it’s a decision that I’m going to talk about with our colleagues at the Community College of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island College because I think theres power in acting collectively as opposed to individually in a manner like this”

Dooley continued to explain he’s already signed on with a letter that encourages the new government to continue to support the differed action plan for undocumented students. This plan states that students who are here, attending The University of Rhode Island, and are undocumented could not be threatened or intimidated by the possibility of quick action.

“ I think we want to look very carefully at the stance that The University of California took on this which is a very strong stance indeed, and push for that potentially to be a stance that we take here at The University of Rhode Island and CCRI,” Dooley said.

            The next question asked by a student was, “I noticed there are only about maybe less than 10 percent of our university that is here and the students that need to be here are not. Theres 16,560 undergrad students so what is your office going to do and what are you going to do personally to make sure that the information that we’re talking about at this critical conversation be dispersed through our university and how are you going to continue to disperse this information so that students that may be doing things that are inappropriate to other members of our community are actually understanding that we will not stand for this”

            Dooley responded: “Here’s the value of community, I can give 100 speeches, I can ask all of my best presidents to give another 100 speeches, I can ask Naomi to give 500 speeches and 10,000 emails on the subject but we’re not everywhere all the time but everyone here has a network of friend and colleagues they live with and talk to, it’s incumbent upon all of us to be communicators of our values” He also talked about getting better speakers to come and talk about these issues in order to get more of an audience to attend these assemblies.