Tuesday’s Dean’s Colloquium, “A Conversation on Campus Climate and the Educational Mission,” featured the diversity officers from several nearby colleges. The conversation focused on how to foster diversity at highly selective, residential, co-ed institutions.
Speakers at the luncheon included Danny Teraguchi, the University’s first dean for Diversity and Academic Advancement, Karla Spurlock-Evans, the first dean of Multicultural Affairs at Trinity College, and Judy Kirmmse, an Affirmative Action Officer at Connecticut College. Dean of the College Maria Cruz-Saco, who hosted the event, also spoke.
Cruz-Saco said that the colloquium was organized to address the growing awareness of diversity issues at colleges across the country.
“One of the reasons we put the Dean’s Colloquium together is because on many campuses there has been a concern about campus climate and how it affects academic excellence,” she said.
Kirmmse, who spoke first, began by depicting her ideal campus climate.
“It would be a campus so diverse that there’s neither a majority group nor minority subgroups,” she said. “It would be such an exciting and compelling place that alcohol abuse would no longer be a needed crutch. Therefore there would be less sexual abuse.”
Kirmmse said that colleges have been structured to exclude emotions from the classroom, leaving students to address them on their own time.
“There’s too much of a focus on ‘content’ and not relationships,” Kirmmse said. “We need ways for students to break out of their familiarity cocoons without having to get drunk before they participate in these events.”
While Kirmmse levied a sweeping critique, she admitted that she is unsure of how to achieve substantial changes in campus climate.
“I’m not sure how to do this,” she said. “I just know it needs to happen if we’re going to be agents in the positive evolution of our species.”
After the colloquium, Cruz-Saco highlighted progressive inter-disciplinary programs as one avenue for change.
“It is important for movements to transform the canon and make it more receptive to world views and perspectives that are not dominated by positivism and Euro-centrism,” she said. “For example, in the 1980s, there was a Fisk takeover where students mobilized and requested the creation of a program of African-American studies. It is the student movements, and the faculty’s interests and passions, given a particular context, that blend together and create new inter-disciplinary programs.”
Spurlock-Evans, who had been associate dean of Students and director of African-American Student Affairs at Northwestern University until 1999, recalled the trials and tribulations of trying to create a more diverse and accepting campus at Trinity.
To approach her goals, she held a number of campus forums and meetings that explored diversity issues. After several acts of intolerance occurred on campus, Spurlock-Evans helped to shut the college down for a day of reflection and to give students, especially those whose voices felt stifled, a chance to verbalize their feelings on issues of diversity as well as class.
“Many of the conflicts are masked as racial but are actually conflicts of class,” Spurlock-Evans said. “We have not found a way to stop and talk about them, and we need to lay the groundwork for a beginning dialogue.”
Teraguchi, whose position was created by Cruz-Saco last year, agreed with Spurlock-Evans that issues of class are less evident than issues of race.
“Class is spoken of, but not spoken of,” he said.
After the discussion, Cruz-Saco, who will step down after this academic year, reflected on how issues of campus climate affect her decisions.
“We have an obligation to pay an enormous attention to the educational aspect of the campus environment,” she said. “We’re here to learn from our own differences—it empowers each of us to know who ‘the other’ is.”
Cruz-Saco said that she has interpreted her role as a bridge between students and faculty. First Year Matters and the Campus Climate Log were attempts create more ties within the community, she said. She acknowledged, however, the controversy that the programs have aroused.
She said that she recognizes students’ criticisms of the Campus Climate Log, a public web page that records hateful incidents on campus but does not identify them specifically. Cruz-Saco and Teraguchi are considering being more specific as well as adding a more educational aspect to the log. Instead of only reporting the incident, she said, they may add links to the history of relevant hateful terms or other educational information.
Beyond large initiatives, Cruz-Saco said that her true priority is to improve simple daily interactions.
“Ideally, it should be that you can communicate intelligently with another person,” she said. “It’s more than language. It is the conviction that you understand another person.”
1 Comment
Anonymous
I am an international student admitted by Trinity College. I am sure the academic will be really great, but I heard that the racial interactions are scarce. I really hope that Trinity could transform into a much more diverse and multi-cultural place. I think this event is really meaningful.