Committee on Institutional Diversity and Equity Report - 6/01
The committee pursued a wide-ranging campus outreach effort to gather information and engage members of the community in a dialogue about diversity and interaction at Dartmouth. We worked together as a committee of the whole and also divided into subcommittees to investigate institutional structure, organize outreach to the communities and organizations that together comprise the Dartmouth community, and review data about various aspects of the College. We listened intently and also took care to observe campus interaction and dialogue. We reviewed previous reports and voluminous quantities of new data provided by various offices. In addition, we considered the growing body of literature concerning the educational benefits of diversity and strategies for institutional change.
We studied numerous reports produced over the past thirty years that address diversity issues. We appreciated the valuable insights embodied in the work of earlier committees. In particular, we were impressed by the judiciousness and candor of the 1993 Report of the Committee on Diversity and Community at Dartmouth ("the Roman Report"). Although some recommendations of these reports have been implemented, many have been repeated from one report to the next to no avail. We are convinced, based on our examination of these documents, our review of data supplied by various College offices and individuals, and our discussions with a wide range of campus constituencies, that the College must take significant action through a broad set of related initiatives if the Dartmouth community is to benefit from the opportunities created by our diversity.
Our review of previous reports (see Appendix B) provided a decidedly mixed reading experience. The consistently excellent recommendations were clearly the result of devoted and extensive effort. We relied on them heavily throughout this document; they provided a sense of the persistence of certain structural issues and problems. Yet we often found the tone of the reports to be contradictory. Some on the committee felt that the reports revealed a profound historic ambivalence in Dartmouth's relation to issues of diversity, even among the people explicitly committed to diversity work. Others felt that these reports reflected the contested and evolving nature of ideas and understandings about diversity. Our conversations about these differences of interpretation were sometime animated and always thought-provoking.
We note these divided perspectives not to distance ourselves from previous writers, but to register our sense that self-divisions, both conscious and unconscious, are endemic to and characteristic of the College as well as of this work. We acknowledge that we, too, are not necessarily free of such contradictions and ambivalence. (One anonymous web survey comment we took very much to heart pointed out that no committee members were drawn from the service staff (food service, grounds worker, custodial) areas of the College.) Yet we believe that we will be able to find our way to new successes only if we can honestly chart and understand the shortcomings and failures of the past. As an academic community, it is important that we examine and discuss the evidence that confirms and disconfirms our individual beliefs about the College's commitment to diversity. As a committee, we feel that the College should seize this opportunity to make a strong, affirmative statement about the educational value of diversity and to launch a long-term strategic effort to articulate and accomplish its goals. As part of this long-term effort we must, as a community, develop the ability to cope with discomfort as we confront our shortcomings, take stock of setbacks, and confirm our resolve to pursue our objectives vigorously.
To be specific, we were troubled that previous reports simultaneously praised the College for making progress and attempted to explain reasons why Dartmouth had not done enough, or could not do enough, to meets its stated goals. In fact, the same reasons were sometimes cited to explain instances when the College has lost ground. External factors were often cited to explain why progress had been slow or remained incomplete. Such external factors typically included: a view that change must always come slowly; a belief that diversity issues are beyond the control or influence of the campus; assertions that Dartmouth's failure to hire and sustain minority faculty is solely the result of academic market-conditions; the notion that the competitive market for students is to blame for relatively unimproved matriculation results for minority students; the argument that not enough qualified faculty, student, or staff applicants are available; and the claim that racial incidents, sexual harassment, and homophobic misconduct at Dartmouth merely reflects national trends. While not necessarily discounting all of these externally-focused reasons, we feel that they obscure the factors within the College's realm of influence that have contributed to our failure to more fully achieve various desired results.
In every phase of our work, members of the committee encountered students, faculty, staff and alumni who expressed skepticism or cynicism about the genuineness of the College's commitment to diversity. We found these reactions particularly among some of the women and people of color who have shouldered heavy responsibilities for the College's diversity work. Indeed, members of the committee themselves often struggled with the question of whether their own work would lead to timely progress and productive change. We noted the pervasive and harmful impact of the "cycle of frustration" that has hitherto characterized Dartmouth's efforts to promote interactive diversity. Committee members and other members of the community expressed concern that the WCI committee ran the risk of repeating that cycle by being just one of a long line of committees to produce a report on diversity while lacking any power to mandate the institutional structures and supports necessary to ensure progress. Over the past thirty three years, no fewer than three Trustee-led committees have studied diversity and community at Dartmouth: the Trustee's Committee on Equal Opportunity led by trustee John R. McLane in 1968; the Committee on Diversity and Community at Dartmouth led by trustee Stanford Roman '64 in 1993; and the Student Life Initiative committee led by trustees Susan Dentzer '77 and Peter Fahey '68, which released its report in January 2000. Diversity has been a prominent focus of the College's 1988, 1993 and 1999 accreditation self-studies and external reviews, and was a key element of the material collected by the Student Assembly in the 1998 Visions of Dartmouth project. Diversity has also been the focus of numerous reports and proposals by campus organizations, working groups and departments. (A partial list of these reports is provided as Appendix A).
Against this backdrop of frustration and skepticism, we nevertheless found reason to be hopeful. As indicated in the rationale included above, we believe that the broad, global context for the College's pursuit of interactive diversity continues to change in ways that lend both urgency and pertinence to our efforts. Although acknowledged as a desirable goal for the past thirty years, an increasingly diverse campus community has now come to be seen as an educational imperative. We were encouraged by the mandate given to the WCI Committee by the Provost, the call for such a committee in the January 2000 SLI Report, and the fact that the College has already, by votes of faculty as well as by administrative and individual initiative, instituted programs and held discussions aimed at improving the climate for diversity at Dartmouth.
Many centers of campus life, organized by students, faculty, and/or staff, focus substantial energy on programming, activities and other opportunities for involvement that nurture an understanding of various forms of diversity. (An example of only one administrative initiative that has already had wide positive repercussions is in the hiring and training of UGAs, who are asked to devise specific and systematic plans for creating an inclusive sense of community within our student residences.) Individual, group, and administrative initiatives make important contributions to the life-changing educational work of the College. We also take heart in the ongoing involvement of various individuals among all these groups and sub-communities, who continue to support and nurture diversity and community at Dartmouth in myriad invaluable ways. During the time we have been meeting as a committee, many students have come forward in various coalitions to foster campus discussion of diversity: these are building, of course, on the serious hard work of many long-standing student groups at the College.
Finally, we recognize that the college administration has worked to diversify the College faculty and student body. The Dartmouth community undoubtedly is more diverse today than it was thirty years ago. We should be mindful, however, that progress has not been steady, uniform or even entirely due to the efforts of the institution alone. National demographic trends have driven increases in Latino, Native American and Asian American college enrollment here and elsewhere. Dartmouth has recognized these trends and responded, increasing both the diversity and the academic caliber of the student body. However, the committee notes with great concern that the number of African American students enrolling at the College has fluctuated over the years; we are hopeful that the increase in African American representation in the Class of 2005 heralds the beginning of a positive trend.
It is this overall increase in diversity at Dartmouth that now presents us with an opportunity to capitalize on the educational power of interactive pluralism in the service of learning. Individual and group efforts like the ones noted in this report (and more can be expected) encouraged the committee in its task. Yet we remain mindful, largely because of the research we have done, of the danger of mistaking beginnings or even important contributions for conclusions. For that reason we are eager to suggest and to help implement structures and processes that will continue our work and incorporate it into the ongoing business of the College.
We encourage Dartmouth to embrace the ambitious goal of structural change that will lead to basic improvements in the campus culture. We firmly believe that Dartmouth should be a rigorous, challenging institution in which every member can be stimulated and enriched, both intellectually and socially. We believe it is possible to create an academic community that respects and embraces diversity, that enables all to achieve their full potential, and that causes none to feel damaged by the way they are treated by others in our community.
We also believe that, although our mandate was specifically non-curricular, no diversity initiative at the College can be fully successful without integrating issues of diversity into the curriculum. We reaffirm the significance of diversity in our intellectual mission: as noted in the 1993 Roman Report (p. 35), the "degree of complexity associated with diversity underscores the need for efforts and initiatives that go to the institution's fundamental character, efforts that foster interactive pluralism across the entire institution ..." We were struck by the consistency with which students described the importance of courses and classroom interaction in their understanding of diversity and in their experiences with inter-group exchange, especially between races and genders. Moreover, the curriculum was widely understood as a crucial element of Dartmouth's diversity efforts. It was generally agreed, as well, that many members of the faculty and student body would be eager to participate in new initiatives, and that the College should actively facilitate such innovations. The report on the Student Life Initiative itself attests to the educational benefits of strong connections between the curricular and social aspects of student life.
In short, after making contact with so many people in every area of the College who shared our overall goals, we find ourselves warily hopeful. Yet we feel it necessary to add that we consider the College to be at a moment of perilous opportunity. We found the atmosphere on campus, particularly among women and people of color, but also among many others, to be one of significant and increasing frustration. The risk to the well-being of the community is that frustration could turn to settled anger and cynicism.
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