Columbus State Earns Placement in Inaugural Year-Long Racial Equity Leadership Academy

tolerance hate-speech policy, more diversity among professors, support for Black mental health, a revitalization of the Africana-studies program, and mandatory undergraduate requirements for courses on race and racism in the United States.

Across the country, we’ve seen similar pockets of change, some more radical than others. The University of Chicago announced that it would admit only Black-studies scholars into its English Ph.D. program for 2021, citing Black Lives Matter. Similarly, the Rhode Island School of Design said that it would hire ten new faculty members focussed on race, decolonization, and cultural representation—a move that was made possible by an anonymous donation large enough to pay their salaries for the next five years. The California State University system is phasing in a requirement that all students on its twenty-three campuses take at least one ethnic-studies course. The University of Pittsburgh required its first-year students to complete an online course on systemic antiBlack racism in the fall.

Students and faculty nationwide have expressed their unwillingness to continue on as before. They’ve insisted on confronting white power structures directly and challenging the myriad ways in which America’s racial hierarchy is ingrained in academic institutions. In November, about seven hundred and eighty students participated in a two-week strike at Haverford College, in response to what they saw as an insensitive e-mail from the school’s president, Wendy Raymond, who had been serving as the interim chief diversity officer at the time. The e-mail urged students not to participate in protests after police fatally shot Walter Wallace, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old Uber Eats driver, during a domestic dispute near the college. Students ended their strike after receiving a commitment from college administrators to meet the majority of their demands.

White officials like Raymond aren’t the only ones struggling. In August, after a difficult conversation with Shardé Davis over the future of their movement, Joy Woods announced that she would no longer be associated with #BlackInTheIvory, removing her name from the Web site and Twitter account. Many who had donated funds felt betrayed, vowing to return merchandise purchased on the site. Both the site and the official Twitter handle @BlackintheIvory have been inactive since September.

Still, #BlackInTheIvory lives on, having taken on an identity that is larger than its founders. “The visibility of this hashtag allowed institutions to start to have conversations that people have been begging them to have for years,” Woods told me when I caught up with her in November. “I still get messages from people saying, ‘You gave me courage to finally say something.’ ”

Davis agreed, citing a recent speech she had given about #BlackInTheIvory at the University of Northampton, in England. “For so long we barely talked about racism,” she said. “Now I feel like that’s actually happening. This has opened the door in a really powerful way.”

Kristal Brent Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University and the author of three books, including “Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television.” She is currently writing a family memoir.

Article from www.newyorker.com

The College’s participation in this new joint Achieving the Dream and USC Race and Equity Center initiative will support concrete next steps in institutional racial equity change.

Columbus State Community College has been named as one of 10 leading community colleges in the nation to further its racial equity work through participation in a practitioner-guided Racial Equity Leadership Academy designed to break down institutional barriers to racially minoritized student success. The Academy will provide the College with critical opportunities to enhance and promote its commitment to racial equity at every institutional level.

The Achieving the Dream and USC Race and Equity Center Racial Equity Leadership Academy will engage selected Achieving the Dream Network community college leadership teams in a year-long facilitated exploration of tools and tactics to scrutinize and dismantle structures and policies that hamper racially equitable student outcomes, through a deep focus on designing effective strategies and projects to articulate principles of racial equity into an actionable framework. “Columbus State is ready to make our next leap forward in racial equity change work as a leading Achieving the Dream member college,” said Dr. David T. Harrison, president. “We are honored at ATD’s selection of our team to build upon our organizational commitment and progress advancing racially equitable student success outcomes, and intend to leverage this experience as a key means of our integrated efforts to measurably improve diversity, equity and inclusion in everything that we do.”

Columbus State’s engagement in the Academy will conclude in early 2022, culminating in a comprehensive, prioritized racial equity action plan aligned with the College’s student success and strategic plans. The College will share the lessons learned during its year-long journey at the 2022 national Achieving the Dream Network DREAM conference.

“We are proud to welcome Columbus State into the inaugural cohort of the Racial Equity Leadership Academy,” said Dr. Karen A. Stoudt, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream. “Achieving the Dream believes that a commitment to equity is tantamount to institutional transformation that leads to greater student outcomes. Columbus State’s commitment to embed anti-racism and racial equity into their campus culture exemplifies the systematic approach necessary to bring about change and builds on their strong student success work that was recognized with the Leah Meyer Austin Award in 2019.”

Columbus State first joined the Achieving the Dream Network in 2012, becoming a Leader College in 2015, the Leah Meyer Austin Award winner in 2019, and a Leader College of Distinction in 2020. The Leah Meyer Austin Award is Achieving the Dream’s highest honor and recognized Columbus State’s double-digit improvement in student completion outcomes with an emphasis on lifting achievement rates among AfricanAmerican and low-income students.