The Chronicles of Race Relations
- A new forum for conversation about issues of community
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- By Winston Smith
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- Smith College, like any mainstream institution in America, is not immune
from incidents of racism. But Smith also has at its helm President Ruth
Simmons, the first black woman to head any of the Seven Sisters colleges.
It is her initiative, the Campus Climate Working Group (CCWG), that represents
the most recent administrative effort to encourage dialogue on campus regarding
race relations and diversity.
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- "The working group was created as a forum for conversation about
issues of community and race relations because it seemed to me there was
no regular forum for people who care immensely about these issues,"
Simmons says. "So everyone who comes is dedicated to improving the
way different groups communicate on campus." She attributes the success
of the group so far to the willingness of participants to "abandon
their rigid agendas in the interest of new ways of seeing community."
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- Since its inception in April of 1996, besides sponsoring bimonthly
meetings at which faculty, staff and students air their views about issues
of concern to them, the CCWG has brought special guest lecturers to campus,
including author Toni Morrison, Clinton administration official Dennis
Hayashi, journalist Molly Ivins, Israeli parliament member Yossi Beilin
and Palestinian academic Khalil Shikaki, as well as Harvard professors
Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates. The committee also sponsored a forum
on immigration.
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- Simmons says she has enjoyed the outside community's response to the
lectures. "This has been quite a boon to the community," she
says.
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- The CCWG, although an informally structured group, is an official body
facilitated by Carmen Santana-Melgoza, director of institutional diversity.
Simmons says she has instructed Santana-Melgoza to submit ideas from the
group as part of Smith's self-study, an industrious effort for which the
Smith community is being encouraged to craft proposals that set priorities
for the 21st century.
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- Simmons says she finds the group a more effective clearinghouse for
ideas than a committee would be. "I especially did not want this to
be a committee where ideas can be harangued to death, but a working group,"
she says.
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- Besides inviting well-known speakers to campus, subsets of the working
group have planned conferences, discussed the recruitment of minority students
and pored over course guides at other institutions with an eye to beefing
up ethnic, gender and sexuality studies at Smith.
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- Santana-Melgoza says she would like to bring other controversial speakers
to campus to lend their voices to discussion of the vital issues of the
day. She cites Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, as an example
of someone from the other side of the ideological spectrum she would like
to have present his views on class, race and intelligence.
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- But the real key to improving the climate at Smith is the hiring and
retention of more minority faculty and staff, as well as the recruitment
of minority students, says Santana-Melgoza. In order to bring about these
changes, she says, the very culture of the college needs to be altered
to make it more receptive to people's ideas and views outside of the mainstream
society.
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- Several group participants indicate this is already taking place because
the staff, faculty and student populations have an equal voice in the deliberations.
"I think that the CCWG is very effective," says Marjorie Richardson,
assistant dean for minority affairs. "We have such a large representation
of different people who don't normally come together. Their discussions
are very crucial to what people think ought to be going on."
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- Casey Clark, science outreach coordinator, says that by attending CCWG
meetings she has gained additional insight on how to work well with students
of color in a number of different programs. Clark finds many aspects of
the meetings useful. "I think overall there is always a piece from
the discussions that's relevant to what I'm doing," she says. "But
I may not act on it right away. Also, how people in the administration
speak their minds is most interesting. These are people in a position to
make changes and they're listening, too. That's very powerful."
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- Yadira Castellanos '98, who is the co-chair of Nosotras, a Latina campus
organization, also finds the presence of administrators important to the
group discussions. "I've come to understand the administration more
and how it works," she says. "I think that's really important."
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- Castellanos says that staff and faculty tended to dominate the discussions
at the initial meetings of the CCWG last fall. So students got together
with the president of the Student Government Association to come up with
a plan that would give students more of a chance to be heard. "We're
shifting the discussions more toward the student perspective," Castellanos
says. "In the more recent meetings, I think there has been a lot more
student participation."
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- She points out that she was one of a group of about a dozen students
prompted to "put pressure on the administration" to form an organization
like the CCWG after a racist incident occurred in her house last spring.
"We wanted to have a space open to discuss issues like race or whatever
came up on campus," says Castellanos.
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- Santana-Melgoza insists that while the group was born from crisis,
she doesn't expect it to share the same fate as similar organizations that
have preceded it, because the CCWG is viable and dynamic.
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- Still, the question remains whether the group is not an example of
déjà vu all over again. After all, since the 1980s, several
organizations, such as the Society Organized Against Racism, the Affirmative
Action Advisory Committee and the Otelia Cromwell Day Advisory Committee,
have sprung up to tackle the very issues the CCWG addresses. Yet the incidents
of intolerance continue to crop up.
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- Just last semester, offensive messages, one racist, the other homophobic,
were posted on two students' doors. The culprits were never caught, but
Dean of the College Maureen Mahoney and Santana-Melgoza organized forums
to address both situations.
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- Santana-Melgoza, who in crisis sees opportunity, points out that having
more controversy, not less, will be a sort of barometer of the progress
she is making in nudging Smith toward diversity in hiring and retaining
minority staff, students and faculty.
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