By Derek Hawkins

Following an incident in late September 2006, in which an African-American Studies professor received a voice mail that contained racial slurs, President Joseph Aoun called on student and faculty leaders to create a university-wide committee to help “enrich diversity and combat discrimination.”

Founded in a wake of criticism of President Aoun’s handling of the incident, the Committee on Community, Harmony, Inclusion and Justice has held semi-regular meetings since last January. Its members include students, faculty and staff members and it has an operating budget of $20,000, according to Aoun’s office.

But in the year since its inception, no readily accessible records exist of the committee spending any of its allotted money or acting on its established goals.

“We tried to come up with programs, plan events and open up a dialogue on campus,” said Margaret Kamara, a former student member of the committee who said she left last summer because of schedule conflicts. “When I was on, what we did was basically brainstorming.”

Attempts to reach other committee members were unsuccessful as of press time.

Student Government Association (SGA) president Joey Fiore said he was unaware of the group’s meetings and members.

“I’ve never had any contact with it or about it,” he said. “I’ve heard that it was called together, but I had nothing to do with picking who’s on it.”

The voicemail, left on associate professor Leonard Brown’s office phone Sept. 24, 2006, shook campus that fall. In a message loaded with racial crudities, two unknown male callers advised members of the African-American Studies department to “go back to Africa” and “go fuck your fucking selves and quit being niggers like you usually are.”

“It came out of the blue,” Brown recalled in a recent interview with The News. “But I wasn’t surprised. It’s still America and racism is old and deep here.”

For several weeks following, Brown kept relatively quiet about the message, alerting only a handful of faculty members and administration officials. Among them was Aoun, who had been sworn in as president less than two months earlier.

Then, on Nov. 15, after Aoun circulated a letter that alluded to a “recent, distressing incident,” Brown played the message in a Faculty Senate meeting.

To respond to the incident, Aoun called on the leadership of the Faculty Senate and SGA to create what is now the committee.

“Resolutions expressing strong sentiments against racism and discrimination have been advanced by the Faculty Senate and the Student Senate,” Aoun said in a Dec. 5 letter addressed to the Northeastern community. “We must seize the momentum created by this dialogue and the heightened awareness of our Northeastern community to learn more about how to foster our rich diversity and how to be on guard against any type of racism or discrimination.”

Now that more than a year has passed since he received the message, Brown said the sting is gone but the lesson is not.

“It’s not something that happens too frequently in contemporary times. People know how to react to those things,” he said. “We need to use this as a vehicle to look forward. How does this happen? The opportunity to use it as a teaching tool is great.”

Brown, reflecting on his 22 years teaching at Northeastern, said the voice mail was an “anomaly to a degree.” Still, he said, the university should “stay diligent.”

“There’s always the potential for something like that to come up again,” he said. “Scrapping it is the wrong idea.”