Last Wednesday, College President Phil Hanlon and Provost Carolyn Dever announced the creation of three working groups that will tackle issues of diversity and inclusivity at the College.
The announcement said that these working groups will present their findings on problems and suggested solutions to an executive committee, which will be responsible for implementing the strategies suggested.
After the groups complete their work and submit findings to the executive committee around the beginning of May, the committee will produce a report around the end of spring term with with the identified next steps, college spokesperson Diana Lawrence said. The executive committee will also be advised by an alumni advisory group.
There will be a student working group chaired by Dean of the College Rebecca Biron, a faculty working group chaired byvice provost for academic initiatives Denise Anthony and vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer and a staff working group chaired by director of talent acquisition Ahmed Mohammed. Each group will include students, faculty and staff.
Biron identified the goals of the three working groups as “to better document our current efforts and improve coordination across the institution to define clear goals and metrics for how we’re going to define success, establish standards for accountability along with mechanisms to ensure that we continue to hold ourselves accountable.”Ameer said that both Dever and Hanlon are anxious to hear what groups recommend and to get going with the process.
Last Friday, Dartmouth’s NAACP released an email statement to campus with a critical response to the working group initiative, citing “ambiguities of the plan” and the absence of an outline of “how accountability will be concretely measured.”
NAACP president Jon Diakanwa ’16 said he is happy that the school is taking issues of diversity and inclusivity seriously. However, he said there was plausible reason to believe the working group plan may not work out as expected.
“The first and the biggest reason is the history of the way administration has handled these types of situation,” Diakanwa said. “They have a track record of deferring action rather than taking action, and just kind of pushing things out of the way until we’re at a point where students aren’t in a position to respond.”
He said that previously, College officials have released statements during finals or have waited until students have graduated before making a response.
The announced executive committee is comprised of executive vice president and chief financial officer Rick Mills, vice president of Institutional Equity and Diversity Evelynn Ellis, Hanlon and Dever.
The alumni advisory group will be chaired by two staff members from the alumni office, Ann Root Keith, chief operating officer for advancement and Derikka Mobley ’10, assistant director for affiliated and shared interest groups.
“The executive committee was eager to seek alumni input at appropriate times so they thought that working with us once they had some recommendations would be the best way to do that,” Keith said.
She said the advisory group is informal in nature and does not include a set group of alumni. She added that its role is to facilitate alumni input and insight on the issues the working groups will be discussing while allowing interested alumni to give feedback and be helpful in support of the shared goals of the community.
Ellis said that the benefit of the working groups is that it will not just be the senior administration advocating for solutions.
“There will be voices from across this campus saying, ‘Based on research of the things we’ve already done, based on suggestions we’ve made in the past and based on where we are now, this is where we need to be to move forward, and these are the people or resources we need to do that,’” Ellis said.
Diakanwa recommended that there be a more direct line for students, faculty and staff to work with the dean of the faculty on faculty diversity or with the dean of student affairs.
He said the working groups will offer students the opportunity to raise their concerns to administration and to speak directly to a group in a platform where “these things will be transparent.”
“We’re hopeful that working groups will bring about serious change; we’re glad to see some form of response,” Diakanwa said. “We definitely would’ve liked to see something more concrete and more substantial in terms of immediate action, but in terms of moving forward, we’ll definitely work with administration to try and make these as effective as possible.”
Diakanwa and the vice presidents of NAACP have all nominated themselves for the working groups.Anthony said that the working groups are responsible for identifying accountability in issues regarding diversity and inclusivity.
“Let’s make sure we are aware as an institution of what is happening for ourselves,” Anthony said. “We want to see where the gaps are and what they are in order to do something about them.”
Anthony said the groups will be studying the current diversity and inclusivity initiatives at the College, looking at what other institutions are doing and how their models might work for Dartmouth.
Ellis said she does not think there will be too many surprises on the list of recommendation — for example, a push for more faculty diversity. She said the work will begin on these known issues before the recommendations come in, so that progress can be made faster.
“Their job is, given the information they will collect, help us determine, as quickly as they can, action items to move us forward where inclusivity and diversity are concerned,” Ellis said
Diakanwa said that the College has already taken steps toward faculty diversity, including more funding and more hiring transparency. He also said that exit interviews for faculty would allow the College to work on different ways to retain faculty based on the responses in the interviews.
Diakanwa said the NAACP’s three target goals this year are faculty diversity, inclusivity and diversity education for all of the student body and faculty. NAACP also aims for some permanent structure in which students and administration can work together and address more concerns in the future.
“For a school that’s truly producing good leaders, I don’t think anyone should graduate here without a sophisticated understanding of systemic racism,” Diakanwa said.
Mohammed said that his role is to attract talent to the College, and that diversity has always been an integral part of talent acquisition. He said that one of the biggest challenges of this new initiative would be the element of change.
“The most difficult part of any change is the beginning, because you’re dealing with skepticism and people who aren’t sure if this is real or not,” he said.
English professor Aimee Bahng said this working group initiative is unique from past efforts because the administration is making a call across the various different bodies of campus life, meaning faculty, students and staff.
She said that her main hope for these working groups is that they will not only revisit the reports from past working groups but discover a way to translate those recommendations into action.
“We need to reimagine what Dartmouth stands for and reimagine what the Dartmouth student looks like, what a Dartmouth faculty member looks like, what excellent scholarship at Dartmouth looks like,” Bahng said. “Beyond that reimagining, we then need to support implementing that vision really boldly, in terms of hiring, admissions policy and actual structural change.”
Mohammed said that his optimism for this initiative stems from the involvement of Mills and Scot Bemis, Chief Human Resources Officer, who “genuinely and authentically want to see changes and bring about change,” he said.
“It’s not one person’s job, the whole community has to rally around trying to make this thing happen,” Mohammed said.
Keith said that the focused and collaborative efforts of students, faculty and staff will contribute to the effectiveness of this initiative.
Correction appended (Feb. 12, 2016):
The original version of this article incorrectly stated which of the three working groups vice provost for academic initiatives Denise Anthony and Dean of the College Rebecca Biron will preside over. In fact, Biron will chair the student group and Anthony will chair the faculty group. The article also misstated the release date of the executive committee's report as May 1. The actual release date is slated for some time near the end of spring term.
Sonia is a junior from Ottawa, Canada. (That is the mysterious Canadian capital that no one seems to ever have heard of.) She is a double major in Economics and Government, with a minor in French. She decided to join The D’s news team in her freshman fall because of her love of writing, talking to people, getting the most up-to-date news on campus, and having a large community of fellow students to share these interests with.
