Cupola Conversations — Driving Out Darkness: Influencing Change

The wrongful death of George Floyd last week is shocking, appalling and disturbing. And, sadly, it’s not new.

If we go back in history – one year, five years, forty years – the narrative remains largely unchanged. Systemic racism continues to exist with marginal progress, if any, being made to address a societal problem.

There is no question we need to do more. In fact, it has never been more important than now that we do more. Politicians, professional athletes, community leaders and activists have released statements and made speeches. There have been town halls, marches, rallies, and protests to raise awareness and yet, people don’t seem to be listening or it doesn’t quite hit close enough to home to matter.

Mr. Floyd’s unnecessary death occurred thousands of miles away from our campus, but the public outcry quickly found its way to the streets of Greenville with a peaceful protest that turned violent. We have a responsibility to do more.

We started the ECUnited initiative in 2016 with Cupola Conversations, a face-to-face town hall program intended to have meaningful conversations about topics and issues that are impacting our campus and our university community. We have talked about gun violence, DACA, national elections and more in the last five years. ECUnited was started by one student, Janae Brown (SGA Vice President), who wanted to make change on our campus following the 2016 summer of violence where we watched incidents occur in Ferguson, Missouri, Dallas, Louisiana, Baltimore and too many other cities around country.

Janae said let’s focus on ECU and what we can do to change the narrative. Since 2016, there are more than a dozen programs under ECUnited including Cupola Conversations, NC Civility Summit, Play for Peace, Unity March and Netflix and Chat. Many of these programs have been replicated at other universities and have also received national awards and recognition.

Once again, we can’t change the entire state or nation at one time. We can create significant change one student – one employee – one campus – one community at a time. And we aren’t going to wait until the summer ends to start. We are starting now.

On Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 4pm, ECU will host a virtual Cupola Conversation. This will be first ever summer Cupola Conversation because we felt this was too important to wait until the fall to have the conversation. The program, “Driving out Darkness: Influencing Change,” will host panelists who will answer questions and talk about where we go from here.

The panelists are as follows:

• Kamari Purvis, ECU student and president of ECU NAACP
• Loren Alves, Clinical Associate Professor in ECU School of Dental Medicine
• Jon Barnwell, ECU Chief of Police
• Virginia Hardy, ECU Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
• Mike Houston, ECU Head Football Coach

On June 4 at 4pm click this link to join this special Cupola Conversation. This will be open to the entire campus as well as the general public and participants will be able to type in questions as part of the conversation (Note: Not all questions and comments will be included in the program).

ECU and the Division of Student Affairs will have more programs and opportunities throughout the summer and into the fall. An ECUnited Steering Committee has been formed that includes representation of the entire campus so that we can continue to provide strong programming that meets the needs of our students, faculty, staff and community.

To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, darkness cannot drive out darkness. We can only do that by shining a light.

-Dr. Virginia Hardy, Vice Chancellor, Student Affairs