Hamilton Pioneers New Diversity and Inclusion Initiative at SLU

Could you please elaborate on your role here at St. Lawrence?

My title is Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion and Chief diversity officer at St.Lawrence. Chief diversity officer is a position that universities across the nation have developed to ensure that we pay more attention to the diversity of the University. Not only the diversity of students, but also faculty and staff because studies have shown for the past decade that diverse communities that work together in an inclusive and respectful way produce better results. Corporations make more money and problem solvers solve problems more effectively when they work on diverse teams. If you want to solve a problem, get people who have perspectives that are shaped by very different experiences, not people who have the same kinds of experiences, who are all looking at problems from the same perspective.

What do you mean by the word diversity?

Diversity means a lot of different things. Most of the time when we talk about diversity on college campuses, we talk about the diversity of the community and social identity. They include things that we can measure, like race and ethnicity. When students are recruited, they are invited to indicate what racial or ethnic group they’re from. Some students indicate that they come from a variety of ethnic or racial backgrounds.  Other students don’t want to share that and that’s fine. 

What other types of diversity does the University measure?

We can also measure sex and gender- we ask people to disclose what gender they are when they come to college. When you fill out your FAFSA, we have a sense of how much money your family is able to contribute and that tells us something about your socio-economic status.  Your national identity, that is another part of your social identity. So, were you born and/or raised in the US? Were you raised somewhere else? What is your citizenship? Those are measurable things.

Are there aspects of Diversity that you are unable to measure?

There are things that we don’t measure very effectively because we really can’t ask. Those include things like sexual orientation. No one is going to ask you if you identify as LQBTQ+. You may disclose it in the form of a survey, but we cant ask you. We don’t want to ask you, we want you to tell us when or if you feel comfortable.

On disability status, those are things we need to know; if you have special needs that impact the way you experience the University. That’s why we have an accessibility office that supports students and provides them with the resources they need to do well here. Those are just some of the things that we don’t always know. 

Where is all of this information stored?

So when you look at the institution or research websites and look at the diversity tab, it’ll tell you about the student, faculty and staff diversity. It’s usually a little out of date, the one I have here is from 2018. They tell us things like gender, race, nationality and what percentage of students are financial aid eligible (as a measure of socio-economic status). But it doesn’t tell us other things.. In some surveys, like the diversity and inclusion climate survey from Spring of 2018, a fair number of respondents indicated that they identify as LQTBQ+. 

So the surveys like the Climate survey are meant to disclose those immeasurable qualities that help people in your position understand the varying levels of diversity at universities?

 Right. So if we ask you to tell us about your demographic identities, some respondents share everything and others don’t. 

How did you conduct the survey?

That survey was conducted in March of 2018, and we used a third party vendor to design it with our help. We had a lot of input of the survey. They collected the data, because we made a deliberate choice to have someone else collect it so that it could be completely anonymous. So, I don’t know who took the survey and who didn’t take the survey. I don’t know anything about the identities of the people who took the survey except what they revealed. I can say of the people who took the survey, certain people identified as students of color, as faculty of color, or international students, etc. However, if say you had taken the survey, I would have had no idea what you said. Now, that’s very important in a survey.

Where are the results of the survey?

 The vendor gave us the data back at the end of the summer of 2018. We spent most of last academic year analyzing the results and composing a report. You can read the report on the Diversity and Inclusion website. The results are password protected because they’re considered confidential, but not for the St. Lawrence community. This means that we don’t want people outside the community to have access. We just want people inside the community to use it to make the community more inclusive.

What did you do with the results of the Survey?

 We submitted the report in Spring and it was too late to plan open forums because it was too close to final exam week. So  we did an open forum after commencement for faculty and staff. I worked very closely on this survey with the director of Institutional research, Christine Zimmerman. We also worked with the 20 or so members of the University diversity committee to tailor the survey to St. Lawrence, then interpret it and form the reports. So I can’t take full credit for it. 

As soon as school started, we had open forums for the St. Lawrence community, mostly students because they didn’t have a chance to come to the big open forum at the end of May. I think we had four open forums where Christine and I presented the results of the survey. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, you could always read the report or come and talk to me. We’ve also done presentations for thelmo and several other offices such as Thelmo and the Admissions office.

Now you also gave an interesting presentation on Halloween night, is that correct? Could you tell me what that was about?

For Halloween, students have the chance to go out and have a lot of fun, go to parties and dress up as whoever and whatever they like. But, when you dress up there’s a chance that you may put on something that’s considered sacred or disrespectful to people from cultures you’re not a part of. 

The purpose of this event, called Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation, is to explain the concept of cultural appropriation and urge students to give some thought to their costumes and how others may feel when they wear it. 

Why is this discussion on cultural appropriation important for students?

If you’re wearing a costume with some attributes that are sacred or respected by a culture that is not your own, there’s a chance that people who are from that culture may see and interpret you as being disrespectful or even oppressive. 

My role in having this event or talking to people at all is not to censor people. I want people to enjoy their time and make their own decisions about what they’re going to wear and how they’re going to wear it, but I want them to be thoughtful. I don’t think any of us would intentionally hurt or disrespect another culture. However, you might do so unintentionally and then someone comes to you and says “you’ve hurt and disrespected me” and now you’re hurt too.

And so, you say you do this every year?

No, this is the first year I’ve had a forum like this. Last year, I spoke to some student organizations about cultural appropriation vs. appreciation. We didn’t have a big event like this. 

As you may or may not know, we have discussed this exact issue in our last two issues of The Hill News and it seems to be a hot topic on campus. Have you decided to focus on it because students have expressed concerns to you about cultural appropriation on campus?

Actually, no it didn’t. The Interfraternity Council, the Panhellenic Council, I House and La Sociedad wanted to do something to raise awareness about the issue.

Some years ago, other institutions have had the issue of Halloween costumes, cultural appropriation and censorship erupt on their campuses in a painful way. I believe these come from places of good intentions, but people end up feeling hurt of disrespected. I’m mindful of that. 

One of the things I really like at St. Lawrence is that the students I talk to tend to be very compassionate, and are good people who would not intentionally hurt somebody. And so, the way to avoid hurting people unintentionally is to raise awareness. There are people that I talk to who have never heard the term cultural appropriation.

Do you think that is a mark of our environment here?

I mean, we grow up in our own contexts. You could easily get senior year, hopefully not anymore, without discussing cultural appropriation. Then, you could do something that is interpreted as being very disrespectful and painful. So, I would like to skip that step.

So what have been some of the concerns that students have come to you with regarding Diversity and Inclusion?

Before we get too much into this, I’m going to give you the Bias Incident reporting booklet. This came out of my office. When I first came here, I had to build Diversity and Inclusion out of emptiness. And I don’t mean that there hadn’t been any work beforehand. There had been a lot of work beforehand.

You are our first Associate Dean of Diversity. Were there efforts made toward Diversity and Inclusion before you arrived?

Yes, I’m the first Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Dean. I’m going to back up and give props to people who deserve them. Chaplain Katherine Buckley started at St. Lawrence in 2001, and she spent much of her time programing for students who were underrepresented on campus. That’s students of color, LGBTQ+ students, international students or students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. She wanted them to have a voice and spent a lot of time, resources and talent just creating space for them. Then when Chaplain Sean Whitehead came in 2003, she did the same thing. They really helped build a foundation, but they weren’t chief diversity officers.

When did the University decide to make it a priority?

In 2013, President Fox launched a task force called Presidential Commision on Diversity. This was a task force made up of Faculty, trustees, alumni and students. The point was to figure out where we were in regards to diversity and inclusion. The nation’s changing, right? If we don’t do a really good job of recruiting students from a variety of backgrounds and not just the same background, St. Lawrence will not be to exist. 

There just won’t be enough people because the demographics are changing. This is not news. The admissions office knows it and President Fox knows it, but it’s easier said than done. So, what are we doing well? We were doing some things well. And what are we doing badly? What have we just not thought about? So, this was a really extensive self study. So we were looking at looking at reports, scholarship, and having a lot of focus groups on campus. So all that happened before I got here, so I can’t take credit for any of it. There are people here who really care about St.Lawrence being an inclusive place.

So when I got to campus,there had been a lot of pockets of activity. There’s Chaplains office and Residence Life, who do extensive training for their CA’s. They cover a lot of issues, including diversity and inclusion.

I know there’s a conscientious effort to hire a diverse group of CA’s for that exact reason.

There really is. There were a lot of people who were committed, but there had not been enough coordination. Nor was there anyone is a position to look at all these factors and figure out how can be combine resources. What do we need to do to actually move forward as an institution? That’s a lot of what my work is.

So, back on the subject of student complaints. Why did you create the Bias incident report system?

When I first got here, I had students share their experiences with me, and most of those experiences had not been reported. For instance, a student of color would walk on campus and be called inappropriate names or inappropriate things would happen. They complain about them, and nothing happens. I remember being very puzzled by that and saying, “ who are you telling?”. 

Sometimes they were telling faculty members, sometimes they were telling advisors or people in residence life. But, it kindof was going into a black hole because even though we had policies that were clear about denouncing thigs like bias and discrimination, it was very unclear about how to report. Even when it was reported, what happened then? I began hearing these more and more, and then we did the climate survey. Then, I got 2600 narrative comments.

What did you tell the students who submitted these reports?

It shouldn’t be happening, but it does happen. Even if you don’t know who’s doing it, if you report it I know it’s happening and I know what to look out for. After the Climate survey, I realized part of the problem was that we didn’t have a way to make Bias incident reports, and that was most of the problem. 

People didn’t know where to go. Even if I asked safety and security how many reports they had regarding race, they would have no easy way of answering that. They would have to go through the reports one by one. I thought to myself, “this is impractical”. 

How did you go about creating the Bias Incident Report?

I got together a team and said “this has to change and we have to get this in place by Fall 2018”. We’ve already been talking about it a little bit, but the Climate Survey and anecdotes I was receiving from students made me realize that this wasn’t something that would be hypothetically a great thing to have. This was something urgent that needed to happen very soon. So we worked very hard and August 2018 we launched this process

How does someone make a Bias incident report and where does it go?

 I chair the Bias incidents reporting team, and there are 7 of us in total. I collect all the data from the reports, which you can make in a variety of different ways. You can do an online form on the Diversity and inclusion website or you can submit a security report. 

I read the security reports and we see if there’s bias indicator. You can submit it as a bias report, and I will put it in my database.

 You could talk to a CA or an RC, or email a member of the bias incident reporting team- myself, John O’Connor, Rance Davis, Pat Gagnon, Donna Alvah, Mark Denaci, and Debra Mousaw. 

We have representation from student life, human resources, faculty and safety and security. I think it’s important to have all those voices in the room. Last year, I think we had 43 incidents reported. They did not all rise to the level of bias, some of them were things that shouldn’t have happened, but here weren’t really bias. They were something different.

Is it not enough to qualify as bias?

 Imagine someone calls you inappropriate names, but they’re not names that have anything to do with race, national origin,religion, LGTBQ+ status, etc. They’re just inappropriate things to say. It shouldn’t be tolerated, but it’s not bias. Those would still go to student judicial board and be evaluated as student violations of student conduct. Some of those things are very bad but are just misunderstandings.

What do you do in the case of someone reporting a non-bias discriminatory comment?

I’m always glad when someone reports something to me that ends up being a misunderstanding, because that gives me an opportunity to talk to both persons. I can get people in the room and say “Well I don’t really think this is biased, but I would like for us to talk about this together because I think we could all make different choices. 

What is your agenda regarding diversity and inclusion at SLU? 

Right now, our main agenda is to develop a strategic diversity and inclusion action plan through the University Diversity Committee. We’ll develop the plan using data from a variety of sources, including the diversity and inclusion climate survey (2018), the focus groups we convened just last month (and future focus groups), reports from the President’s Commission on Diversity (2014), the Diversity and Inclusion subcommittees of the University Retention Committee (2019) and the Institutional Strategic Assessment Committee (2019), and other sources as well. We want the plan to reflect as many voices from different identities, affinities, and positionalities as possible, so we have been reaching out to various groups and will continue to do so. 

How do you plan to implement change on campus/what would you like to see happen on campus regarding diversity and inclusion?

That’s a tough question – certainly we will continue to develop and refine workshops, programs, and training, but this is one area where we really need community input, especially from students. The work of diversity and inclusion isn’t the work of just one person, or even just one office or group. It’s the work of everyone, so we need to continue to solicit feedback and be willing to make changes when we see that our initiatives could be improved or if something doesn’t seem to be working. We would welcome ideas, suggestions, and support! 

What do you need from students to ensure you are successful?

I need students to be willing to work with me and the Diversity Committee, and to be willing to talk to one another across various differences. Most importantly, we really need a “can do”positive attitude. We know that we’re not where we need to be, and we are receptive to constructive feedback. But it’s easy to focus on our faults and failings, get lost, and become pessimistic. We do need to acknowledge those failings, but we also need to work together to map a path forward rather than be consumed by negativity, which won’t get us very far. I also need students to: 

1) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but acknowledge when you’ve made one and be willing to apologize and learn from them; 

(2) Try to have a generous spirit and forgive others when they make mistakes. None of us is perfect, and I don’t believe any of us wants to do anything deliberately to hurt others, but cultural receptiveness is a skill that needs to be learned and we don’t all start from the same place. Some of us have more to learn than others, and will make more mistakes.  

If you could say one thing to students about Diversity and Inclusion (something you really want everyone to hear), what would it be.

Diversity and Inclusion work is difficult – Johnella Butler calls it a “wicked problem” that resists solution. As soon as you think you’ve solved one problem, another one (or several!) appear. So we need to be patient, try to be optimistic, and work collaboratively. The University Diversity Statement says it best, “We are willing to risk difficulty and discomfort” to achieve the goal of becoming a diverse and inclusive community!