Report of the
External Review Committee
on Diversity Initiatives

June 2005
Williams College, Williamstown, MA
May 1-3, 2005

Submitted by: Kimberly Goff-Crews, Dean of Students, Wellesley College, and Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Ethnic Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University

The basis for our report consists primarily of reading the 101 page Self Study Report (April 2005), and 1-1/2 days of meetings with administrators, faculty, students and staff, individually, in small groups, as standing committees, and other informal groupings. We met together with the President, student members of the Coordinating Committee for Campus Diversity Initiatives and the Committee on Diversity and Community, and some informal groups (staff and LGBT faculty and staff), but mostly, we met separately with other stakeholders. Our assignment was divided into two main components: Faculty (Hu-DeHart) and Student Life (Goff-Crews). A long and detailed schedule of meetings was provided to each of us, which we followed scrupulously and mostly on schedule. We did not have an opportunity to meet with any additional persons or groups during our campus visit.

Hu-DeHart met separately with the following individuals and groups of individuals:

• Associate Dean of the Faculty John Gerry
• Dean of the Faculty (DoF) Thomas Kohut
• Committee on Appointments and Promotions (CAP), which included the President and DoF
• Assistant to the President for Affirmative Action Nancy McIntire
• Random group of minority faculty
• Select current and former chairs
• Faculty Steering Committee
• Committee on Education Policy
• Select group of program chairs

The main issues covered during these meetings included recruitment and retention; culture and climate; workload issues; curriculum and pedagogy; programs and departments.

Goff-Crews met separately with the following individuals and groups of individuals:

• Dean of the College Nancy Roseman
• Associate and Assistant Deans of the College
• Faculty and Directors of special academic programs
• Select staff from student services
• Staff of the Multicultural Center (MCC)
• Committee on Undergraduate Life (CUL)
• Selected student leaders and students from the general student population

The discussions covered a range of issues including support structures for student development; special academic programs; diversity among student life staff; residential life and the role of MCC.

While the focus on diversity in the initiatives and the self study is clearly on race, with gender and class closely behind and sexuality largely absent, the discussions began to integrate all these critical differences and examine the intersectionality among them. Our report will reflect this vision of diversity.

The following report combines separate observations and recommendations made by each of us respectively, with some shared reflections at the end.

Analysis of Faculty Issues Submitted by Evelyn Hu-DeHart*

[*I first visited Williams in the late 1980s, invited by then Dean Preston Smith (now faculty at Mt. Holyoke), and have made numerous visits since, each time invited by a different group of students or faculty. In the late nineties, President Oakley asked me to campus to help broker the Latino student hunger strike. I also encouraged my first born, daughter Maya DeHart ('98) to choose Williams over Stanford. My most recent visit to Williams prior to this diversity consultation was in the Fall of this current academic year, when I was invited to speak by the Asian/Asian American student group and the MCC.
  During this long association with Williams and repeated visits to campus, I have seen tremendous progress in diversity, esp. the recruitment of students of color and international students. I was especially impressed during my last visit to learn about the new policy of extending need-blind admissions (and thereby equal financial aid opportunities) to international students, because that ensured more class diversity within that group.]

Some General Observations:

I note the acknowledgement in the Self Study that the focus is on Racial Diversity, with attention to Gender, and anticipation of more attention to Class ("Low Income"); to acknowledgement that diversity is in response to a historical pattern of legal and social segregation, exclusion and discrimination; and to the distinction between "racial diversity" and "international diversity." I also applaud the recognition that "Privilege" is missing from the vocabulary of the college's discourse on diversity, and that serious efforts should be made to find ways to bring "privilege" (not defined, but presumably referring to race or skin color, class, gender, sexuality) into focus and into the conversation.

Regarding students of color, while the number of Asian American students continues to rise steadily and outpace the proportion in the society at large (an "over-represented" group) mirroring the pattern in most highly selective institutions of higher learning, public or private, liberal arts or comprehensive, I am encouraged to see that Williams continues to reach out to African American and Latino students from across the country, maintaining reasonably respective percentages and striving to do better each year. In short, the progress to diversify the student body continues. Williams's stated goal of reaching out to more low income students and students of color is especially commendable, and is mindful of the need to put into place more structures and programs to ensure that these students will succeed at Williams academically and comfortably if not flourish, socially.

Regarding Faculty Diversity, clearly, women (predominately white women), have made great gains in the faculty, now almost reaching parity with (white) men, and are present in most departments. Most women, however, are clustered at the associate and untenured assistant ranks (not a surprise), so the challenge of mentoring, nurturing and seeing them through P&T remains a challenge, and the senior faculty, men and women, should be vigilant about their progress. This also means that as a group, women faculty are younger and have lower incomes, while struggling with higher rents and mortgages, child care, and perhaps long-distance marital and partner relationships, and even paying off student loans. Women faculty also highlight family and partner issues more than ever, so that questions regarding health benefits, child care, housing, etc., as well as workload definition, distribution, expectations, etc., all need to be broached and openly discussed, changing or adjusting policies if warranted, even if some of these go against entrenched practices and traditional culture.

For International Faculty, there may be another set of issues. For those who are not short term visitors from abroad, but on the permanent faculty, yet not U.S. citizens, transnational relationships between "homeland" and the US seem to characterize their work, life, and self-identity. They do not have the same history, practices and identity of US Minority Faculty, although many do ally and identify with Minority faculty issues, concerns, values, etc. after spending considerable time in the U.S. To factor this group into Faculty diversity, I find the term "transnational diversity" useful.

The critical group of faculty within Williams's Diversity Initiative and the Self Study Report are US minorities -- those who self identify with the four government named groups of non-Anglo white faculty, and may include immigrants who have received much of their education in the US, worked here for many years, and raised American-born children, and most of all, identify as "minorities" in the historical and sociological sense of the word, that is, as a subordinate group in relationship to the dominant or mainstream.

Within each of these groups, gender, class and sexuality are part of each individual's identity and experience, and often influence not only the substance of their scholarship (in terms of fields and direction), but most assuredly their perspectives, approaches, methods, pedagogy, and other social, professional and intellectual relationships and orientations.

All of these "differences" make up the basis or core of what we can call faculty diversity, which in turn is linked directly to diversity in the curriculum, in knowledge production or scholarship, and in pedagogy and classroom culture and climate.

However, it is also clear that here at Williams, the second oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts, there is still a presumption of a normative tradition and culture that is implicitly white, male, "middle class" and heterosexual, a culture that reflects and is in turn reinforced by the surrounding environment. This normative standard permeates the departments and into faculty scholarship and classrooms as well. Thus, faculty diversity is tacitly accepted even if not enthusiastically embraced by all in the Williams community if it means inclusion of racial/ethnic and gender/sexuality differences in members of the faculty as matters of cultural heritage and personal identity. But in opening up Williams for diversity, little thought has been given to what else about the practices of the institution and culture of the place needs to adjust, reform and change, so that diversity can flourish and become institutionalized, and no longer an add-on, a sidebar or shaded area in the textbook while the master narrative remains largely intact. In other words, is the model and goal of diversity at Williams an assimilationist (also known as "Anglo conformity") or a pluralistic one? Or as one senior (white male) faculty member I met with suggested: Diversity is about power sharing!

Most institutions of higher learning in the US practice and incorporate some aspects of diversity. Borrowing freely from Prof. James Banks*, a leading scholar of multicultural education, I see diversity initiatives falling into four categories and levels, each one entailing a higher degree of commitment for institutional change:

[*James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, eds., Multicultural Education. Issues and Perspectives. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon., 1989 (and many subsequent editions).]

1. The Celebratory or 4-F approach (Food, Fad, Fiesta and Fun), similar to the Contributionist approach, "focuses on heroes, holidays, and discrete cultural elements." We do these diversity initiatives with comfort and ease, in that these are cultural events that generally do not challenge or disturb the status quo in any fundamental way. If anything, it adds color and flavor to campus programming. Typically students who are organized around racial/ethnic/cultural lines, and international students, take turns showcasing their cultures in music, dance, performance, films, food, etc. Programs such as Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo are quite well institutionalized on most campuses. Frequently, groups invite lecturers to present more serious discussions about a group's history, culture, politics, etc., so it can and does go beyond the more superficial or "consuming diversity" kind of celebration. This approach does not require a high degree of faculty diversity, in that it is not primarily faculty and curricular driven.
   
   Williams is already doing a lot of good programming around cultural diversity, with help from the MCC and other offices on campus, and should continue. The emphasis is on cultural heritage and differences, all worthy of recognition and equal attention.
   
    
2. The Additive approach, in which "contents, concepts, themes, and perspectives are added to the curriculum without changing its structure," began appearing in the curriculum two decades ago or longer. A common example is to add literary works by women writers and writers of color in an Introduction to American Literature course, inevitably displacing a few canonical works by white males to make room for "diversity." In history and the social sciences, these additives are the sidebars I referred to above. In some cases, a unit is added to the established syllabus without seriously rethinking the whole framework. This is often the first step that individual faculty take as they add diversity to their courses. It is still valuable, for it offers ALL faculty a chance to buy into, contribute and participate in diversity initiatives.
   
    
3. The Transformation approach changes the basic assumptions about the curriculum and "enables students to view concepts, issues, events and themes from the perspectives of diverse ethnic and cultural groups." The mainstream is de-centered, and shares space with multiple perspectives. The sidebars are integrated into the main narrative. One should add here that the emphasis is no longer on celebrating differences as cultural diversity, but in deconstructing historically situated and socially constructed "differences" that result in structured inequalities, exclusion and marginalization; obviously these are not the kinds of differences worthy of celebration and preservation, but rather, give rise to resistance and re-formation. The transformation approach, then, seeks also to give voice and agency to the historically excluded, to validate and document their histories, creative productions and experiences which have not been deemed worthy of serious academic attention. Williams has long invested and embarked on this approach, in the form of its Women's and Gender studies program, African American studies program, US Latina/o studies program, and the fledgling Asian American studies program. For this approach, as Williams has already learned, dedicated faculty trained in these studies must be hired to anchor the programs, create courses and provide stability and coherence in the curriculum, and therein lies the challenge, for the path has not been easy or smooth.
   
   Like many other institutions, Williams has also realized that this is the surest and most efficient way to diversity the faculty, for those scholars and teachers engaged in these studies are also predominately women and feminists, and men and women from racial/ethnic groups. With few exceptions, Williams has learned that, for a variety of reasons, traditional disciplinary departments have been reluctant to hire interdisciplinary scholars in these studies -- particularly in the ethnic studies program. Without faculty, these programs which lie at the heart of curricular diversity cannot flourish and will likely wither. Faced with this impasse, Williams has broken with tradition by hiring faculty of color directly into these programs (mostly untenured), knowing full well that such a bold move presents both opportunities and risks, for the faculty involved and the institution alike.
   
    
4. Banks concludes his model with a fourth level of engagement, which he calls the "social action approach," when students apply what they have learned to "important social issues and take actions to help solve them." I don't see this as exclusive to diversity initiatives, but rather, as central to the values of a liberal arts education, which expects knowledge to be used to serve the common good.

At any campus, one or more of these levels of approach can be operating at the same time. Indeed, at Williams, I see aspects of all four levels at work. This model may not appear to directly address some other diversity issues, such as how to get more women and under-represented minorities in engineering and the sciences, but as a conceptual framework, it can be modified to include diversity in the sciences as well.

I offer the following recommendations for the Williams faculty community to consider, all of which I have discussed with one or more of the many faculty groups I met during my visitation.

1. Articulate a clear conceptual framework for Diversity at Williams, and continue to engage the entire Williams community in a continuing conversation about the vision and specific goals, using whatever means available and appropriate to engage faculty and students across the curriculum; the Self Study is only a beginning, far from the end. What does Williams mean by Diversity? The Self Study begins to do that, but seems to shrink from completing the task of stating a clear framework that provides guidance and coherence for the various diversity initiatives. There is considerable confusion and some resistance to the current diversity self study. Diversity is a dialogue between the core and the periphery, between the margins and the mainstream, so diversity is not for women and minorities only, but must engage both sides of the same coin, or both ends of the same spectrum. We are all stakeholders in diversity, but initially some will have more to gain, others to lose; some will feel more empowered, others destabilized and discomforted. As noted above, the Self study is fully aware of the tension in the brief reference to "privilege."
   
    
2. To encourage more faculty across the curriculum to take an interest in diversifying their own courses, consider implementing some version of the Curriculum Transformation Project (CTP)* pioneered at the U. Maryland and the U. of Washington by Betty Schmitz and Johnnella Butler. (depts.washington.edu/ctp) The idea is to move diversity across the curriculum. The basic framework is for the President, Provost or Dean of the Faculty to invite a group of faculty from various departments, including the sciences, who teach introductory or survey courses in their fields, to revise their syllabus towards more inclusion of diversity as content and perspectives (intellectual diversity) and in pedagogy and classroom climate. Inclusion can be at the basic level of contributionist or additive approach, or at a more profound level of rethinking the entire framework or organizing principle and course materials, hence the grandiose project title of transformation. In addition, pedagogy in and outside the classroom, as well as recruitment and retention of under-represented student groups, are also part of the transformation. Regardless of what level of engagement, the faculty embarks on a process of re-tooling and re-discovery, often finding out much more about the new methods and approaches, research and publications, and creative works, of their own field or discipline. Participants typically meet once a month to discuss their own courses with each other, to share and solicit ideas and insights, offer critique, engage with occasional guest speakers, and act as a support group for each other; they occasionally work in their divisional groupings to share more focused resources and discuss pedagogical challenges. Ethnic Studies colleagues can be invited to ignite the conversations and act as resources and consultants. As incentives, participants are provided with a supplementary salary stipend, a research and resource materials stipend, a student research assistant (a mechanism to allow students to be actively engaged in the process). At the end of the year, participants present their revised syllabi to each other, or to an open campus forum.
   
   This "diversity across the curriculum" approach supplements the ethnic studies programs and is one proven way to involve a broader spectrum of faculty in curricular diversity.

   [*We implemented a semblance of this project at Brown two years ago, consisting of core faculty in English, Philosophy, History, Classics, Art and Architecture, Sociology, Political Science, Public Policy, Medicine, Musicology, Psychology, Education.]

3. Having hired several young faculty of color and women faculty into programs without tenuring authority, extreme caution must be taken to ensure that these untenured faculty of color are well mentored towards tenure, not marginalized beyond what is already a certain degree of marginalization given the absence of a tenure home department, protected against excessive student contact hours, mentoring and service, social and intellectual isolation, and all other challenges that might make life difficult and their retention at Williams questionable. I am certain the Dean of the Faculty and the senior faculty in the various hiring programs have created mechanisms and structures to address these and other issues. I would like to recommend two other ideas as options for your consideration.
   
   One, create a position of Faculty Advocate; this would be a senior faculty with deep familiarity with faculty affairs processes and culture of Williams, who as advocate would actually assume the perspective of the young faculty of color, and not act merely as a neutral ombudsperson. The advocate would be readily available to the untenured faculty for advice on annual professional reports, questions and concerns regarding the structure and personnel created for their professional advancement at Williams, and all other issues regarding their work and lives at Williams. Without the benefit of a chair and a cohort of senior faculty that their departmental counterparts have access to, these "floating" untenured faculty of color can turn to the advocate to fill that void, and gain confidence that their needs and concerns are attended to seriously. The advocate need not be a faculty of color him/herself, but one who obviously has a deep commitment to faculty diversity at Williams, and a good understanding of climate and professional issues impacting untenured faculty of color.
   
   A second suggestion to the Williams faculty and administration is to consider creating an Interdisciplinary Department or department-like unit that would serve those faculty hired directly into programs in the way departments do when they function well, that is, provide senior faculty to mentor junior faculty, close colleagues for collaboration in research, teaching and curriculum development, and standing vis-à-vis other colleagues housed in departments. Many institutions have already created such large interdisciplinary units, an increasingly popular option being the integration of ethnic studies programs (and sometimes women studies as well) into existing American studies programs and departments. The University of Michigan and the University of Southern California are two outstanding examples. Williams has an established American Studies program that can be upgraded to departmental status if it incorporates the other ethnic studies programs into its structure. It can still keep the established ethnic specific degrees in Afro American and US Latina/o studies, while offering one or more comparative options within a US perspective, or comparative with diasporic and transnational subjects and perspectives. An American Studies coordinating framework will also allow Asian American studies (now with two dedicated faculty) and in the future, some Native American studies (no dedicated faculty yet), to be more readily incorporated into the curriculum, as well house the faculty.
   
    
4. Broaden and deepen the pool of under-represented minority candidates for diversity hiring across the curriculum. We all know that the opportunity to hire such candidates is only as good as the pool; and we have all heard many excuses that blame the pool for being too small or shallow. One way to enlarge the pool is to go beyond the usual Ph.D. granting institutions that elite colleges such as Williams usually fish for candidates.* In the aftermath of the court-mandated de-segregation of public colleges and universities in the South, the Southern Regional Educational Board (SREB) in Atlanta created a network called Compact for Faculty Diversity to mentor and promote the careers of under-represented minority doctoral candidates, focusing on engineering and physical, life and biomedical sciences, with some attention to the social sciences and humanities. Faculty across the country participate in the annual Institute for Teaching and Mentoring meetings to mentor these young scholars and also to recruit for their own institutions. The Compact is also partnering with other organizations and programs interested in the same goal, such as the NSF Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professioriate (AGEP) and the NSF Postdoctoral Fellows Program, the NIH Bridges to the Professoriate Program, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. Program, and the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program.**

   [*The recruitment last year of Bolin fellow Julia Camacho by history and American Studies Profs. Kunzel and Wong is a good example of fishing in a new pool. Only the second Ph.D. candidate in the History department at the University of Texas at El Paso, a regional Research II campus of the vast UTexas system, Camacho completed a successful Bolin year at Williams, where she proved herself an excellent teacher and more than held her own intellectually.
   **At the last Compact meeting I met a young Chicano McNair scholar from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, interested in pursuing a doctorate in Brazilian Studies. He had never heard of the excellent Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Department at Brown, nor had Brown ever thought about recruiting from a place called Las Cruces. I put them in touch with each other. The happy outcome is that he is starting his Ph.D. in Brazilian Studies at Brown next Fall.]

   I encourage Chairs, especially science chairs, to join the Compact for Faculty Diversity and SREB at its next (12th) annual meeting in Arlington, Virginia on Oct. 27-30, to meet and recruit some of these young men and women to their faculty. In the meanwhile, the chairs can go online to http://www.sreb.org/ and doctoral@sreb.org for more information on the Compact for Faculty Diversity and the Institute for Teaching and Mentoring, as well as the list of current doctoral candidates. The Director of the SREB State Doctoral Scholars Program is Dr. Ansley Abraham (404-875-9211, ansley.abraham@sreb.org). (A good idea is to invite Dr. Abraham to Williams for a consultation in the early Fall, before the annual meeting.)
   
   In addition to finding new strategies to increase the pool, the Bolin fellowships can be tweaked, even redesigned. It appears that the Bolin is a grossly under-utilized resource for recruiting under-represented women and minorities to the Williams faculty. I suggest that the President or Dean convene a committee to study how the Bolin can be used more effectively, especially as a tool for science and social science departments to recruit under-represented minority candidates. Link the Bolin with the Compact for Faculty Diversity to maximize the potential of both resources. For example, a more concerted effort should be made to tie the Bolin more closely to anticipated vacancies. If a Williams chair discovers a promising minority graduate student through the Compact for Faculty Diversity and also anticipates a vacancy in the field of the graduate student, that department should be given every incentive to recruit the doctoral candidate as a Bolin; every effort should then be made by the senior faculty to mentor this young scholar into a competitive candidate for the vacancy. Another idea is to consider converting one or two Bolins from a dissertation fellowship to a postdoctoral fellowship, which would make it more attractive to certain candidates and departments. Once on campus, the Bolin postdoc can experience first hand the very favorable conditions for scientists who are interested in research as well as teaching and mentoring students, especially from under-represented communities.
   
   Finally, identify under-utilized academic resources already on campus and afford them an opportunity to teach courses that add to diversity in the curriculum.*

   [*One such person I have identified is MCC director Dr. Gail Bouknight-Davis, who has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown and an expert on the Caribbean, an area of the Americas not well represented in the curriculum even as Williams actively recruits students from the region. She can obviously contribute to diversity in the Anthropology department, which currently lacks faculty and curricular diversity, so it is a mystery to me why she has not been offered an affiliation with her disciplinary field and invited to teach a course on a regular basis.]

5. Re-design the Peoples and Cultures requirement, which seems to have lost its focus and has become a near meaningless diversity initiative, serving an unclear purpose that some students resent and many could not fathom. Find a new rationale for a diversity requirement if there is general consensus that such a requirement is still a good and necessary component of a Williams education. A good example to study is the Berkeley model for its required diversity general education course initiated some ten years ago. The initiative stipulated new courses that faculty designed specifically for this requirement; these courses had to conform to certain clear criteria and structured as comparative US cultures (one majority or white, one minority), hence comparative and relational in focus. In addition, a special office was set up to oversee, guide and provide necessary resources to faculty designing these courses.* Whatever the new requirement at Williams is to be called, the point is that the courses should be intentionally developed to meet a clear set of criteria collectively determined by faculty and students within Williams's conceptual framework for diversity. One possible approach is to encourage faculty within each of the three curricular divisions to work together, each division addressing the key issues relating to diversity. For example, if social science departments at Williams already examine issues such as stereotype and stigma (Psychology), racial and gender disparities in income, health and education (Economics), intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality (Sociology), the historical and social construction of whiteness (History), how can these courses be modified to tie in more explicitly to a diversity requirement? The Physical and Natural Sciences can examine hidden and exposed biases in the values, assumptions and practices of their fields, including pedagogical issues and the low participation of African Americans, Native Americans and US Latinos/as in most of the sciences.

   [*This diversity requirement at Berkeley was initiated over ten years ago, so things might be different today. Now so many years later, my recollection is a bit hazy, and I may not have all the fact entirely correct, but someone at Williams should be able to research the history and details of this requirement from inception to the present.]

   There may be a tie-in with the Curriculum Transformation Project (CTP) discussed in Recommendation no. 1 above, in that some faculty willing to re-examine, revamp, re-design their introductory or survey course with Diversity in mind might choose to follow the clear criteria set up for the redefined Diversity requirement.

I am certain I have not exhausted all the possibilities for advancing faculty and curricular diversity at Williams. I hope that what I have proposed above for consideration by the Williams faculty will stimulate further action and innovation.