Last night, the Student Assembly passed a resolution pressuring the Board of Trustees to take more responsibility for the promises they made to support diversity education at the College.
The resolution charges the Trustees with making a "greater commitment" to the World Cultures Initiative they outlined in the Student Life Initiative last January.
Students -- in minority and non-minority groups -- have called the WCI vague and ambiguous.
"You can create committees and say you're concerned with diversity, but that's been done over and over," SA President Jorge Miranda '01 said.
The original WCI suggested permanent staffing, funding and space to enrich programming for the community, but failed to delegate the responsibility for those charges to any group or office on campus.
Since the Initiative was released, however, Dean of the College James Larimore has increased part-time positions for advisors to many minority groups on campus to full-time positions.
Larimore is also chair of the World Cultures Initiative Committee, which has been charged with giving a report to the College's provost in May regarding diversity in the community.
Despite those changes and the creation of the committee, students have not seen concrete long-term plans or financial outlines for the support of diversity issues at the College. The Assembly resolution detailed these two points as necessary for a healthy cultural community at Dartmouth.
Larimore pointed out that funding is necessarily obscure because "it's hard to know what things might cost when we don't know what the things themselves are."
The WCI Committee's first meeting of the Spring term is today, he noted, and will set forth the term's agenda. The group will likely discuss splitting into subcommittees and leadership working groups.
Larimore said the committee has discussed creating an outreach program between the committee's members and the campus. Statistical data reports are also on the docket for examination, he said.
The concerns of students, faculty and administrators are far different in reference to the issue of diversity than those of the Trustees, Miranda said.
"The Trustees seem to talk about affirmative action and improving the numbers of [diversity] and nothing else," Miranda said.
The resolution will be presented to members of the Committee on Student Affairs on Thursday, he said. COSA's membership includes several Board members.
"[The resolution] sends a message," Miranda said. "If you're not constantly letting them know these kinds of things, then what's the point?"
In Miranda's opinion, one of the best things about the resolution is that it was designed and written by two Caucasian students, Molly Stutzman '01 and Eleanor Leahy '01.
The authorship of the resolution is an indication that "not only students of color" have concerns about community diversity issues, Miranda pointed out.
Despite the resolution, Miranda predicts the College is not likely to jolt itself out of this rut anytime soon, noting he expects it will take a major incident to push the College to take diversity issues within the community seriously.
The College as a whole, the resolution noted, "appears to go through a cycle of incident, response and apathy, reacting only when there is a problem."
"While I certainly understand the frustration that folks sometimes feel," noted Larimore in response to that section of the resolution, "the [WCI] committee is the Board's attempt to get some handle on some very complex issues."
"I have what I hope will happen and what I expect will happen," Miranda said when asked to predict the outcome of the presentation of the resolution to the Trustees.
He called students "angry and frustrated," and insisted that "it's a matter of having accountability all the way at the top."
"The College responds to bad press and terrible incidents and protests," Miranda went on.
"I hope it doesn't take [a major incident] to convince them of the importance of this issue."
SA will wait to hear back from the Trustees after tomorrow's presentation.
