December 18, 2015 Dear Members of Ethos, BlackOUT, Black Women’s Ministry, Wellesley African Students Association, Wellesley for Caribbean Development, and Wellesley Minority Association of Premedical Students: Thank you for your letter from December 8. We share your concerns and your commitment to addressing them—and we welcome your partnership in moving forward. We also believe that the issues you have raised are systemic and institutional and must be approached systematically and institutionally. Real progress will require broad engagement. The entire faculty, for example, has an important role to play in creating a campus climate that promotes equity. At the same time, we must hear the voices and engage the energies of all people of color and others from underrepresented groups who are members of our community, in all roles, including people of African descent. To continue this dialogue and collaboration with you, we propose a meeting with you at the start of next semester. President Bottomly and Dean Wolfson will be reaching out to you very soon to set dates. As a next step, this letter describes some of our ongoing efforts, as well as additional actions we plan to take, and suggests a way for us to work with you and other student groups to develop a plan of action. Together, we can make a difference for the future of Wellesley. Faculty Hiring It is essential that Wellesley hire additional faculty of color, including additional faculty members of African descent, and we believe that we can be successful in this area by continuing and expanding the initiatives that we have undertaken over the past several years. For example, we have expanded our recruitment networks through the Compact for Faculty Diversity and our collaboration with the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers. Every faculty search is also now guided by a member of the committee designated as a “diversity liaison.” As a result of these efforts, the Wellesley faculty has become more diverse over time, so that the assistant professor and associate professor ranks are significantly more diverse than the full professor rank. To be clear, we agree that the goals you stated for hiring faculty of African descent outside the Africana Studies department are desirable and attainable. In relation to the history position within Africana Studies, the Provost’s Office has been working closely with the department, and we are confident that a search to fill the position will take place in 2016-17. Recruitment is a first step; we must also strengthen faculty retention. Provost Shennan has previously met—and will continue to meet—with students at Harambee House to talk about the tenure and promotion process, and how students can contribute to that process. Faculty must become increasingly aware of how they can improve the experiences of new colleagues and strengthen the rate of success at which we retain and successfully promote faculty from underrepresented groups. Members of the Committee on Faculty Appointments (CFA) have participated in training to understand the impact of
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unconscious bias on their evaluation of SEQs or recommendation letters. Such training should extend to all faculty who participate in the mentoring and review of junior colleagues. If we are to be successful in the long-term recruitment of more scholars of color for tenure track positions at Wellesley, our efforts must also focus on increasing the number of students of color entering doctoral programs in a greater number of fields, including STEM. Wellesley has been contributing significantly to this effort through our Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which aims to increase the diversity among underrepresented faculty in higher education by encouraging undergraduate students to develop their academic interests, and pursue and complete their doctoral training. There is much more to do and we have near-term and longer-term initiatives in progress. Student Recruitment We are working strategically to address the challenges to building a more diverse applicant pool and enhancing our competitive advantage in enrolling underrepresented groups of students at Wellesley. Over the last few years, we have increased efforts to recruit and enroll underrepresented students of color with programs designed to have an impact on attracting more applicants and encouraging them to select Wellesley. For example, we developed a new method for building our prospective applicant pool of Black, Latina, and Native American students using the College Board’s PSAT Search. We significantly increased the budget to make it possible for more Black, Latina, Native American, first-generation-college, QuestBridge, and other students to travel to Wellesley to attend our fall open campus program because we know students who attend this program are more likely to apply to Wellesley. In addition, we have piloted a program in which alumnae of African descent and Latina alumnae reach out to the parents of admitted Black and Latina students. We believe this work helped bring more Black and Latina students to Wellesley for the Class of 2019. We have also worked to strengthen the Board of Admission’s assessment of our increasingly diverse pool of prospective students. The Admission Office recently revised its application reader training to help readers better evaluate the applications of, and make decisions about, students from historically underrepresented groups. This new training includes understanding racial and socioeconomic disparities in standardized test results, as well as unconscious bias training for admission committee chairs. Wellesley is a strong partner with (and the only liberal arts college nationwide that has been given the opportunity to participate in) the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program, a $500 million, 10-year initiative to educate and prepare for leadership young people from economically disadvantaged communities. The Program has allowed us to provide full-tuition and additional support to nine students from Africa. We also just received word last week that the MasterCard Foundation will be funding 14 more students from Africa to come to Wellesley over the next four years. Although we recognize that our recruitment of African students cannot and should not be limited to the MasterCard Foundation Program, Wellesley’s partnership with the Foundation is an important first step in expanding Wellesley’s pipeline of African applicants and
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enhancing the pool of grant and gift funds to support students from Africa and the Caribbean. We are committed to increasing our funding pool. Future steps being considered to enhance student recruitment include expanding summer program opportunities for prospective students, as well as ensuring that the membership of the Board of Admission (particularly the student membership) is reflective of our diverse community. We look forward to continuing our collaborative work with students, faculty, staff, and alumnae to optimize our recruitment and yield efforts for underrepresented student populations. CERE We recognize the importance of ensuring that all members of our community, especially students, are well informed about the critical work of the President’s Commission on Ethnicity, Race, and Equity (CERE), and that the membership of the Commission is reflective of our diverse community. We will better communicate the progress that CERE has made over the past year in matters of race and inclusion on our campus. The Chair of the Commission, Professor Michael Jeffries, will issue a report to the community next week, and he looks forward to meeting with you early in the next semester to give you an update on the work of the Commission, including our specific goals for the spring and fall semesters. Moving forward, CERE will be establishing a regular reporting schedule to provide updates to the community. Following up on your request, we will be appointing a student of African descent to the Commission. Your partnership and ongoing input are essential to the Commission’s work and success. Training Based on current work in the field and our assessment of what would be most meaningful at Wellesley, next semester we will begin offering programs to help faculty and staff understand the nature of unconscious biases—how they influence our assumptions and behaviors and how they affect our interactions with members of our community—and to present practices for reducing and minimizing the effects of bias. The initial sessions will be offered with a special emphasis on chairs of academic departments and leaders of academic centers on campus. The senior staff, members of CERE, and the trustees have all asked to and will participate in the initial sessions as well. We recognize the importance of having a mechanism for students to voice their concerns when the actions of a member of our community demonstrate racial insensitivity or other inappropriate conduct. To that end, we will be expanding a reporting process that has been in place through the Provost’s Office for many years. These enhancements will include: developing a central and secure web presence where students can safely voice their concerns; ensuring that those concerns are followed up in a timely manner; and educating students and the community about this process. Student Life Personnel We recognize that students’ mental health and overall well-being are directly affected when they experience micro-aggressions or are made to feel like outsiders in our
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community. Students who feel disconnected or misunderstood will not thrive at Wellesley and require the appropriate counseling resources to address these feelings. To this end, we are committed to hiring professional staff from diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences. Our counseling staff currently includes an African American psychologist, a Latina social worker, an Asian American psychologist, an LGBTQ psychologist, and a Cape Verdean office manager. We work with our Human Resources Office to advertise job openings in places where there is likely a diverse pool of candidates. With every position, we aim to increase the diversity of the counseling staff so that it will reflect the diversity of the student population. With that in mind, we will explore ways to broaden our networks to identify and bring additional counselors of color, including those of African descent, to Wellesley. Our counseling staff are engaged in professional development and training, and we will redouble our efforts to ensure that our Stone Center staff continue to seek opportunities that will enhance their ability to serve students of color and other students from underrepresented groups. We likewise appreciate your concern regarding administrative support for Dr. Tracey Cameron. We will review administrative support provided to members of the Office of Intercultural Education (OICE) team, including the Dean and Cultural Advisors. We will ensure that departments and offices across campus, including the Stone Center and OICE, have the staffing and resources needed to best serve our students, including students of color. While the College has taken proactive steps to address many of the points you have raised, we must do even more because we recognize that this work is far from complete. It is impossible to capture everything that needs to be done, or how we might do it, in a single letter. You have come to us in a spirit of collaboration and in good faith, and with the understanding that these issues require thoughtful solutions. We look forward to working with you on these critical issues, beginning with a meeting early next semester. In closing, we want to be clear that we are committed to achieving tangible results. We wish you and your families a wonderful holiday season and New Year. Sincerely, President Bottomly, Provost Shennan, Dean St. John, and Dean Wolfson
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