The following email was sent to students, faculty, and staff by President Kim Cassidy on Monday, January 25.
Dear ÀÏÍõÂÛ̳ Community Members,
In an effort to sustain our in-person campus dialogue around institutional practices for diversity and inclusion, I invite you to attend our second (pilot) community conversation on Thursday,January 28 from 6:30-7:30 PM in Dalton 300. These meetings are intended to support open dialogue about our existing efforts to build a more inclusive community, to provide a forum to hear from community members about ongoing concerns and challenges, and to create a space to share new ideas so that many more voices can be added to this work. On Thursday, we will begin the meeting by sharing information about the Bias Response Group ---- a brief history of the process of its formation and how it currently operates. It is important to remember that this group is only in its first year of operation. We will reserve substantial time to discuss community members’ ideas for concrete steps to move us forward, and we also will welcome the sharing of ongoing challenges and concerns. To protect the time of the participants, we will be disciplined about starting and ending on time.
Our first meeting in December focused on changes that we have made to the faculty hiring procedures. The ensuing conversation produced many concrete suggestions to support our efforts to hire a more diverse faculty, as well as effective ways in which student, faculty and staff could better support each other to gain a sense of inclusion and belonging. We are carefully logging these suggestions so that we can move many of them to concrete action steps.
We hope that students, faculty and staff will join us on Thursday for all or part of the time.