Rutgers has been in the news a lot this week, and it's not because we're winning football games.

Here's a rundown of what's been happening in the past week:

Rutgers professor, Michael Chikindas, has been very active on Facebook, making racist and homophobic remarks. It sucks that there are still people like that in this world, but I feel like it's even more terrible that people like this are living, breathing, and walking on this campus with us. We literally just opened up the Rutgers Hillel as a safe space for the Jewish community here at Rutgers. But here's an example of something Chikindas posted:

Identity Evropa is a white supremacist group on Rutgers campus that has been putting up flyers expressing their views. Now, I'm not one to hinder anyone's first amendment right... but if you're trying to create an environment that isn't welcome to everyone, do you really have the right to speak freely? Rutgers is in the heart of Central Jersey—do they expect that only white people with their same views go here? And furthermore, how do they expect people of color who attend Rutgers University to feel? Threatened? Undermined? Yeah, because that's pretty much how we're feeling right now. I'm not sure if this is related or not but on a Cook/Douglass bus, someone graffitied the words, "BLACK LIVES DON'T MATTER."

Again, I don't want to speculate what group or who used the graffiti, because we literally just don't know but like.... still. Especially after the events that happened in Charlottesville, we're still worried about Neo-Nazies and POC feeling threatened on college campuses.

And I'm definitely not saying that what happened in Charlottesville was supposed to make everything better with our country (because let's face it, it didn't), but I feel like it did have to happen because it opened up people's eyes to our sad reality. At the same time, however, it enabled certain people to express their views in an unkind manner and "woke up" the neo-nazis of this generation.

I guess it's both good and bad.

Another thing I just recently learned is that Rutgers' leaders literally had slaves. Yeah, I was shocked too. One of our past presidents owned Sojourner Truth, a SLAVE that literally set the groundwork for the layout of the Old Queen's campus on College Ave, and not to mention, people put Paul Robeson and James Dickson Carr (among the few of the first black men to graduate from Rutgers) through HELL while they were here. Recently, Rutgers named a few landmarks in honor of the blacks who set the foundations for Rutgers.

I applaud Rutgers for its effort, but is there more the university can do? Naming buildings after iconic black people (i.e. Kilmer Library changed to James Dickson Carr Library, or The Yard Apartments changed to Sojourner Truth Apartments) and putting up posters of them on dorm buildings (i.e. the Paul Robeson poster outside of Frelinghuysen, which is actually named after a family who helped start Rutgers up, who also had slaves) isn't enough. That's just like how they changed Lenox Avenue in Manhattan to Malcolm X Blvd. Sure, you can change the name all you want, but that doesn't spread awareness or help the issues at hand.

So yes, Rutgers can change all the names it wants to, but the fact of the matter is that we still have racist groups and people on this campus who are prospering. I'm not saying that Rutgers shouldn't hire or admit racist people into this institution, because who really thinks about that when they're looking at someone's application to be part of the Rutgers community? But I think Rutgers should take more steps to raise awareness of anti-Semitism and racism, just like how they did for sexual violence this past month. These are huge issues too that still need to be addressed and things will only progress if everyone is on the same page.