http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2012/02/29/diversity-symposium-announced-spelman-college-president-to-be-keynote-speaker/
February 29, 2012
By Amy DiPierro
Swarthmore’s December 2011
Strategic Directions document invokes “inclusion” 12 times, “diversity” 23
times, variations of “engagement” 43 times, and “community” or “communities”
about 93 times combined.
All of these numbers – without context – do
little to describe Swarthmore’s current state or future priorities. Dean Braun
says the same is true for evaluating what diversity means to a community.
“A lot of times when people talk about
diversity, they think about it only in terms of numbers,” she said in an
interview last week, “but I think in order to truly have the kind of learning
environment we want here, you also have to have inclusion, which means that
everyone is working on these issues.”
With Swarthmore’s first Diversity Symposium
in the spring, Dean Braun hopes to move beyond the numbers. Working with
individuals and groups across the entire community, the Symposium aims to
foster campus-wide engagement in the college’s current diversity policy and its
possible improvements in the future. The Symposium will include four events
over a two week period, culminating in a keynote address from Spelman College
President
Beverly Daniel Tatum and a Collection
to reflect on the Symposium the following day.
In addition to the Dean’s Office, the
Symposium has received early support from Director of Equal Opportunity
Sharmaine LaMar, Vice President for Planning Garikai Campbell, Associate
Provost Patricia Reilly and the Provost’s Office, and President Chopp and the President’s
Office.
The Diversity Symposium will begin after
spring break with a Sharples Takeover to catalyze discussion and solicit
student feedback. As in Student Council’s Sharples Takeover last spring, which
collected student input for the Strategic Planning Council, the event will
feature table tents with discussion topics, as well as index cards for students
to submit recommendations. In addition to this school-wide event, Braun and
LaMar will hold smaller dinners and discussions with a range of student,
faculty, and staff groups on campus.
Olivia Ensign ’12, Dean Braun’s intern and
assistant in planning the Diversity Symposium hopes combining these two
strategies will incorporate the voices of both niche groups and individuals in
further discussion. “That’s why this is so helpful,” she said of outreach
efforts, “in terms of different groups kind of figuring out points of
intersection.”
Recommendations will then go to the
Diversity and Inclusion Implementation Committee, a group of faculty, staff,
and students who will plan the Symposium and future discussions. Lamar said she
will be seeking “thought leaders” for the committee in the coming weeks,
community members able to gather input from their peers and generate
provocative ideas for the future.
“Diversity means a lot of different things
to different people,” she said. “We need to define it for our community.”
Proposals for the evolving definition of
diversity will no doubt be central to the second event of the Diversity
Symposium, a faculty panel discussion. Members of the panel are yet to be
determined.
For the next Symposium event, President
Tatum of Spelman College—a historically Black liberal arts college for women in
Decatur, Georgia—will give a keynote address on Thursday, April 6th in LPAC.
President Tatum, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, is the winner of the
2005 Brock International Prize in Education and, most recently, the author of
2007’s Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School
Resegregation. Previous to her current post at Spelman, President Tatum was the
dean and acting president of Mount Holyoke College, where she hired Dean Braun
as director of student life.
“She’s a tremendous intellectual, and
writer, and thinker, and practitioner when it comes to higher education,” said
Braun. “She’s just a fantastic speaker and I think it’s a terrific way to kind
of kick things off.”
The final event of the Diversity Symposium
will be Collection in the Swarthmore Quaker Meeting House on the Friday
following President Tatum’s address. The Strategic Directions envisioned a
“re-imagining” of Collection, in which Collection would be one of many spaces
that “bridge communities closed off by political beliefs, racial lines,
religious beliefs, or class differences.”
Dean Braun emphasized that the Diversity
Symposium is part of a continuing effort to evaluate and implement an inclusive
sense of diversity to fit Swarthmore’s changing community. In the spirit of the
mandate from the Strategic Directions, Braun hopes to continue conversations
with student groups, events featuring outside speakers, and faculty panels on
diversity into the fall.
“When it comes to things like diversity and
inclusion,” she said, “our work is never done.”
The Daily Gazette: Diversity Symposium Announced, Spelman College President to be Keynote Speaker
