Chancellor Kent Syverud didn’t fully understand the importance of the Advocacy Center’s role in the Syracuse University community prior to the decision to close the center, he told The Daily Orange in an interview on Thursday.

“In retrospect, what I’d like to do is know every student and every student issue much better before I make a decision,” he said. “Do I have regrets? I guess I’d say if you don’t make any decisions in this job, disaster follows.”

The reorganization of sexual assault resources has been a contentious issue at SU since May when Syverud announced the Advocacy Center would close and its services would be moved to the Counseling Center and other campus offices. Since the announcement, the administration has been criticized for the way it made the decision and how it communicated that decision to the campus community.

On Wednesday, those criticisms were made again when a group of about 40 SU community members marched up to Syverud’s office as part of the “Rally for Consent.” After a few tense moments between the protesters and administrators, Syverud came out of his office to briefly talk with the group. The protesters also presented Syverud with an online petition, which had more than 8,000 signatures and 700 comments.

Sitting in his office at Crouse-Hinds Hall a day after the protest, Syverud said he did expect pushback from the decision to close the Advocacy Center. By the time he arrived in January, Syverud said, “things were pretty far along” in the process of reorganizing sexual assault resources and many people, especially those in the Division of Student Affairs and in the legal department, understood the challenges the university faced.

“I don’t think anybody came at the Advocacy Center issue with an ‘Oh boy, we really want to piss off a lot of people’ agenda. Nevertheless, it does seem to have annoyed a great deal of people and people of good faith and good values,” he said. “So that concerns me.”

Syverud did read the comments on the petition and the variety of opinions and experiences they expressed helped him understand the wide range of needs and purposes the center served, he said.

Many comments on the petition voice concerns about the decision that was made and how it was announced — which occurred during the summer when most students weren’t on campus.

The reason for announcing the closure during the summer was because there were “legal reasons that change had to occur,” Syverud said. As a lawyer, Syverud said he understands the importance of dealing with legal issues in a timely manner before they endanger the university or the people it serves.

The closure of the Advocacy Center was announced in a university-wide email that detailed many other administrative changes, including the ongoing progress of revoking tenure from a professor accused of having a consensual relationship with a student. Many of the issues addressed in the email were urgent and Syverud said he wanted to tell campus about all of them at once rather than having them “dribble out like Chinese water torture.”

“Candidly, a lot more time was spent worrying about some other issues and how to deal with them than the Advocacy Center,” Syverud said. “From my point of view, that was the case because of not knowing in a kind of visceral way the importance of the center to various communities for reasons that I also didn’t know.”

While information can’t always be perfect, Syverud said part of his job is deciding when to take the time to learn more about an issue and when to just “make a decision and go forward.”

Said Syverud: “This is an area (where) it would be really good if I had known everything I know now about the Advocacy Center and about sexual assault.”

— Editor in Chief Lara Sorokanich and Managing Editor Meredith Newman contributed reporting to this article.

Published on September 22, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Jessica: jliannet@syr.edu | @JessicaIannetta