When a woman decided to rip an ISU student’s protest poster at the Cy-Hawk game on Sept. 14, the action ignited a larger conversation among ISU students, faculty and staff. Whether the people who were involved knew that their actions would spark a movement much larger than themselves, they certainly shed light on multicultural issues on our campus.

The student whose poster was ripped was a member of a group consisting of mostly hispanic students protesting Donald Trump’s hate speech on undocumented immigrants while he was visiting Ames. The woman who ripped the poster, Shelby Mueller, is white. News coverage of her actions went viral, and she triggered an emotional open forum at Iowa State on multicultural student issues.

The racism, discrimination and safety issues discussed in the multicultural open forum inspired Student Government to propose various initiatives to the administration about how to improve the multicultural students’ experience at Iowa State. While the initiatives are not perfect, and some are unrealistic, they are positive starts to improving the multicultural student experience. And most of them are feasible.

The Student Government initiatives submitted to administration last week include the creation of a multicultural safe zone program; the creation of an ISU Police Department multicultural liaison and sensitivity training for the department; a diversity awareness course required for all incoming students; improvement of existing cultural centers and consideration of additional centers; and the creation of multicultural-based learning communities.

Many Student Government senators said during their meeting last Wednesday that while these initiatives are not perfect and will not fix everything, they are steps in the right direction for Iowa State. We would have to agree.

Perhaps the most unlikely of the initiatives is the required class for incoming students on multicultural issues and awareness. Incoming students are already required to take both Title IX and Alcohol Edu online classes that prove to be to be not very effective. Should another required course be developed to only focus on one subset of students at Iowa State? And where should the line be drawn for these required classes?

However, the two most promising initiatives seem to be the police liaison and the learning community. ISU Police already has a LGBTQ+ community liaison who has proven to be beneficial to that community, and it appears that one for multicultural students would be easily implemented. An ISU Police position also addresses one of the most talked about issues at the open forum — multicultural students don’t feel safe on campus.

Learning communities for multicultural students seem to be easily implemented as well. The university already has framework for both residential and nonresidential learning communities. These learning communities would allow students to voice concerns and share common experiences. This may be especially beneficial in a student’s first year on campus in a new environment.