by Annabelle Shea ‘23
Staff Writer
“Mount Holyoke must be persistent and uncompromising in addressing the challenges that members of our community who identify as BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — have brought to our attention. We must identify and address all forms of implicit and explicit racism, bias and discrimination on our campus,” wrote President of the College Sonya Stephens in an Aug. 27 letter to Mount Holyoke community members.
The letter, written in response to recent national cases of police brutality, outlined Mount Holyoke’s new “Anti-Racism Action Plan.” In her statement, Stephens described the various components of the plan. She divided the action plan into several categories: “Faculty and Curricular Actions,” “Resources and Equity,” “Planning and Accountability,” “Understanding and Acknowledging College History” and “Education, Training and Professional Development.”
Each of these categories contain commitments by the College to institute “anti-racist” measures such as racial sensitivity training and faculty workshops.
Under the “Faculty and Curricular Actions” section of the plan, Stephens renewed the College’s commitment to creating a more diverse curriculum. This initiative is a continuation of the College’s efforts to include a Native and Indigeneous studies program — which was enabled by the grant awarded to the Five College Consortium by the Mellon Foundation in January. In her statement, Stephens announced that the search for a position in Native American History would commence in the fall 2022 semester.
In the meantime, the College created a new faculty grant program intended for the “development of courses, projects and collaborative research proposals that focus on race, racism and anti-racism.” According to Stephens’ statement, the grant will be open for application in October and has funds of up to $50,000 available.
For Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer Kijua Sanders-McMurtry, the College’s faculty grant program is a promising effort to further diversify curriculum. “Examples like the faculty grants program are a great manifestation of ongoing work,” she said. “We want to encourage more faculty to engage in this process. The grants, we believe, will allow for collaborative research between students and faculty particularly to engage topics of race and racism.”
The College has also committed to increasing the number of BIPOC faculty via the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, an initiative started by Gettysburg College. According to the CFD mission statement, “The Consortium was founded as an association of liberal arts colleges committed to strengthening the ethnic diversity of students and of faculty members at liberal arts colleges.”
In response to the College’s plan to diversify its faculty, Assistant Professor of Politics Ali Aslam said, “I think the initiatives to hire more BIPOC faculty and develop curriculum will result in meaningful differences for how we talk about racial injustice and white supremacy.”
“Educating faculty and having faculty whose experiences reflect those of BIPOC students will make these students feel less isolated on campus, which I believe will translate into those students taking up more space,” Aslam added.
The “Resources and Equity” section of the plan announced the increase of funds available through the Student Safety Net Fund, an initiative designed to assist students with unexpected financial needs. The section also states that the College will “further invest in cultural centers” by increasing staffing and “securing resources for capital improvements.”
Stephens also explained the College’s plan to increase the enrollment of students of color. “The Division of Enrollment Management has established an Admissions Diversity Working Group,” she wrote. “The group is focused on building anti-racist strategies to increase the enrollment of BIPOC students at the College.”
In “Planning and Accountability,” Stephens introduced the “Bias Education Response Team,” a group overseen by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion that will handle incident reports of acts of discrimination. Stephens also announced the creation of employee affinity-based dialogue groups and related programming for the fall 2020 semester.
In an attempt at reconciling the College’s past, in the “Understanding and Acknowledging College History” section of the plan, Stephens established the “History and Legacy Task Force.”
This task force will, in collaboration with the Archives and Special Collections, review the College’s past handling of racial discrimination and generate an annual report describing its findings.
Listed under the “Education, Training and Professional Development” section of the plan, Stephens described several initiatives, such as the incorporation of racial training into new employee orientation, the enhancement of programming for the First Gen Network, the hiring of an assistant director of campus diversity and the creation of a racial training module for new students.
The module, entitled “Race, Racism and Racial Oppression,” will be incorporated into new student orientation for the fall 2021 semester. This training was proposed by students and outlined in an online petition created by Lasya Priya Rao ’23.
In her petition, which received over 470 online signatures, Rao explained the necessity of racial education as a part of new student orientation. “Many students come from backgrounds where they have received very little to no education on these subjects [racial awareness.] Some students who have received education on these subjects may have received it from biased institutions.”
“Not knowing the right way to talk about race means even when you have the best of intentions, you might accidentally cause harm to the people you're talking to,” Rao elaborated in an additional statement.
On Instagram, the confessional account @bipocatmountholyoke released a response, saying that the Anti-Racism Plan is a start, but should not be the end of the College’s work on racial justice. “We are grateful but obviously a bit cynical about this plan, but at least it’s no longer just a plan to plan” they wrote. “Since at least the mid-2000s, Mount Holyoke has dedicated a portion of orientation to conversations about diversity and inclusion. However, these conversations were very surface level. They did not acknowledge white supremacy and orientation leaders were not equipped to help students understand their privilege. That is supposedly changing.”
For Rao, the creation of the “Race, Racism and Racial Oppression” module marks a new beginning for Mount Holyoke — one founded on the principle of social justice, “The new training is definitely a good first step, and I know they're planning on adding to it in the future,” she said.