VICE PRESIDENT FOR DEI, AND DMC DIRECTOR

Greetings, All!

I AM HONORED TO PROVIDE this introduction to the Days-Massolo Center’s current status report. When I joined Hamilton College in August of 2022, one of my inaugural challenges was to get to know this campus. As you can imagine, attempting to catch up with Hamilton’s 200-hundred-year history remains a daunting task, but I am making progress. Like many new employees, I started with Professor Maurice Isserman’s On the Hill and widened my scope with the assistance of Hamilton’s librarians and archivist. What have I learned so far and how might that inform your review of this report?

Among other things, I learned the community we experience at Hamilton College today has roots in the aspirations of leaders who believed in a shared academic experience between the Oneida Nation and settlers. They leveraged their inclusive beliefs to found the Hamilton-Oneida Academy. While the Academy ultimately failed, its successor, Hamilton College, enrolled its first Chinese student (Chan Laison) in 1846 and produced its first African American graduate in 1889 (Joseph Spurlarke). Further, as early as 1920, Hamilton College admitted cohorts of African American men and by the 1970s invested in a model to expand beyond a men’s college with the creation of Kirkland College.

The record confirms that none of those transitions was easy. There were failures, moments of contention, and incidents where members of the Hamilton-Kirkland community did not feel welcome or experienced isolation. However, leaders persisted and Hamilton College is better today because of the trustees, faculty, staff, and students who led.

The vision of alumni and trustees, including Drew Days ’63 and Art Massolo ’64, follow a long-standing tradition of thinking independently, embracing difference, and engaging issues ethically and creatively. This report provides insights into the intense work and expansive community that are the lifeblood of the DaysMassolo Center. For more than a decade, the DMC’s directors and student leaders have served as catalysts for change. The diversity of our community continues to grow, but no matter where you call home away from the Hill, the DMC is a place where all cultures are welcomed to learn, share, and grow. You belong here.

SEAN BENNETT Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

THROUGHOUT THE LAST FOUR YEARS, we’ve had the opportunity to connect and rebuild relationships that have advanced the mission and vision of the Days-Massolo Center. Our mission is challenging but one we strive to live out everyday.

The Days-Massolo Center enhances the academic, intellectual, social, cultural, and leadership dimensions of the Hamilton community. Through forums, panels, lectures, and other programming developed in cooperation with students, faculty, and staff, the Days-Massolo Center serves as a central resource for exploring intersections among gender, race, culture, religion, sexuality, ability, socioeconomic class, and other facets of human difference.

We hope to be the living legacy of the student group, the Social Justice Initiative, who advocated and protested for a cultural education center; and to our namesakes, the late Drew Days ’63 and Art Massolo ’64, who have supported the center, mission, and programs.

The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted lives, plans, and intentions of rebuilding the Days-Massolo Center that was supported for four years by interim director and Higher Education Opportunity Program Director Phyllis Breland ’80. Despite the disruption, the team made up of Days-Massolo Center student ambassadors trusted and persevered as we pivoted operations and reimagined how to live out our purpose. We embraced the ambiguity of the virtual environment, and created new community spaces, and found ways to cultivate meaningful connection and exchange. This report highlights the four-year journey of rebuilding the Days-Massolo Center, the impact story of what we do and why it matters, and an invitation and call to join the center in the work. The Days-Massolo Center is one of the few spaces on campus that collaborates with every area of College life, with partnerships in academic affairs, admission and financial aid, alumni engagement, athletics, college events, facilities management, student affairs, and more. We welcome every opportunity for meaningful collaboration “to be a catalyst for social change and a resource for shared experience at Hamilton College.”

It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the students, the College, and the greater Hamilton community. I am grateful for the opportunity and confidence entrusted to me to lead and cultivate community. I hope by reading this impact report you will learn more about and choose to engage, champion the work, and support. There’s great potential and great need, and for the impact and reach of the center to continue, it needs all benefactors to lock arms with the team. This may be in lending logistical ad programmatic support or in stewarding resources so we may engage more students and generate more transformational experiences.

Will you join the Days-Massolo Center as it enters into a new era, as the paradigm of our world has shifted? Will you engage in connecting across and because of our differences for a holistic, values based, inclusive campus experience?

PAOLA LOPEZ Days-Massolo Center, Director 2019-23