President Fox Announces Task Force Agenda for Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity

On Monday, January 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, President Fox outlined an agenda for this spring semester to “keep faith with the untiring vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. and with St. Lawrence’s recently adopted mission statement on diversity.” The community heard of his intentions via email. With an increasing focus on student diversity, the University’s standing Committee on Diversity and Inclusivity, co-chaired by Dean Val Lehr and Dean Joe Tolliver, has expanded to include Director of Athletics and Recreation Bob Durocher and chairs of two Thelmo committees. President Fox hopes that the four new task areas will add foundational value to the University.

President Fox recognized that that there is far more that has to happen at St. Lawrence than a committee alone can accomplish. He also announced plans to develop a new position for a full-time professional diversity officer for St. Lawrence to begin at the beginning of the next academic year. The committee will help to create a preliminary budget in order to support the diversity officers’ work. There will be a national search conducted. For the interim, President Fox appointed Dean Tolliver to serve as the Chief Diversity Officer while maintaining his role in Student Life. Associate Dean for Student Life Rance Davis will serve as Interim Deputy Chief Diversity Officer. Both will serve until the national diversity officer search is complete.

In the email that President Fox shared with the campus; he outlined the four task forces of the committee.

The first of the subcommittees will focus on curricular and co-curricular programming, by working with campus organizations to develop events, talks, and symposiums around campus. The second is the intergroup dialogue subcommittee, which focuses on training sessions occurring this February that will discuss how to have important and meaningful conversations surrounding issues. The third subgroup is pedagogy and classroom issues that focus on recruiting and retaining future faculty, including methods of teaching a diverse class. The final subcommittee is protocols and community building, which is responsible for campus climate assessments, response plans, and attracting and mentoring a diverse staff.

The committee is also planning to collaborate with neighboring college campuses, in order to understand the specific nature of the North Country, economically and socially. It also hopes to share ideas and activities within the NY6 consortium with the other liberal arts colleges in New York state, as there are countless similarities between all the schools.

As a community, we all recognize the extreme work that has to be done on campus. It is no secret that over the past few years, racial tensions have increased across the U.S., and this strain is now hitting St. Lawrence as well. Any steps that we can take now to create a more welcoming community are steps that will provide SLU with a better diversity foundation for the future.

The email was well received from students all over campus.

“I loved the email from President Fox,” Anna Hughes ’17 says. She believes that it was, “extremely well written, discussed issues in many areas all over campus, and owned up to our weaknesses.”

The Black Students Union president Maxime Bost-Brown ’17 believes that a lot of her friends and students on campus knew about the new committee tasks, and they have already started to have meaningful conversations with each other and other community members.“It is good that SLU is finally doing something about diversity on campus,” Bost-Brown says. “While stats show diversity is increasing, it doesn’t feel that way in the SLU culture.”

She also added that it is unfortunate that public insults of international students are what shed light on the situation, but she is very glad that the word is out now. She is hoping that conversations all over campus will pop up about diversity, race, and our SLU culture.

As soon as students returned to campus, signs of the progressive new task force were seen. The large board often set up in the Student Center was plastered with questions asking students about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This started of the semester with students immediately talking about race on campus and discussing the well-worded email sent out by President Fox. The hope is that the new task forces will also inspire these conversations.

Thanks to President Fox and the new directives for the committee, we are a few steps closer to creating a better campus and a better feeling of belonging for our entire community.