Class Notes Winter 2009
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Cara Brumfield ’10 (left) and Christy Aponte ’09 converse on Commencement Day.
DEEPENING DIVERSITY
Looking at the Lafayette catalogue from, say, the early 1970s (and some of us obsessively hold on to such markers of college moments), you spot timeless scenes: the picture-postcard-perfect vantage point on South College, the Frisbee-flinging activity on the Quad, the snow-encased statute of the Marquis de Lafayette. But these images are also artifacts of a past reality. The surest sign of that: There’s barely a black or Asian face of color pictured.
And what’s the face of Lafayette today? A lot has changed in the College’s intellectual offerings, says government and law professor John McCartney, McCartney has run for political office in the Bahamas, written a book on American black power ideologies, and taught college courses on black political thought in the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In 2005, he organized a three-day conference at Lafayette on artist and activist Paul Robeson.
When he joined the faculty in 1986, Lafayette was just beginning an Africana studies minor. “What was a minor grew to a major in just a few years. It’s almost like a revolution compared with where we were,” he says. When he talks with minority candidates for faculty positions, he tells them that “we have a lively minority culture here” and that “minority intellectual interests are respected.” He points to a coalition of black faculty and staff members that advises academic departments on academic searches and acclimates newly recruited minority professors. And he highlights not just courses on the black experience, but also ethnically-oriented cultural events and January interim session courses—including Modern Sub-Saharan Africa and his own department’s Discovering West Indian Identities.
Professor John McCartney
Lafayette has a record of nurturing the young minority faculty members it attracts and of aspiring to build a lasting minority presence on the faculty, McCartney says. (Come this fall, the College will have 26 faculty members of color in a faculty of 204.) “The College is sensitive to diversity issues,” he adds, “which doesn’t mean that there aren’t ongoing challenges.” That assessment is largely echoed by Crystal Burey ’10, vice president of the Association of Black Collegians. “Lafayette has a way to go to consider itself diverse,” she says. “Granted, we have made leaps even within the last couple of years. But there is more work to be done.”
Lafayette provost Wendy Hill agrees that there is more work to be done. “Faculty diversity, retention, and development are all connected to our strategic-planning goals,” she says. She points to a yearlong mentoring program for new faculty members that aims to make the first year—and future years—successful. “I believe we can build on this program to ensure that we are doing all we can to support faculty of color.” She also mentions a faculty review of the curriculum, such as the Common Course of Study and initiatives associated with the strategic plan. “We need to be mindful about infusing diversity into our curriculum.”
Accomplishing that work is part of the agenda of Dr. Shirley Ramirez, who began in January as the College’s first vice president for institutional planning and community engagement. Ramirez was vice president for institutional planning and diversity at Middlebury College. Before that she was executive vice president of The Posse Foundation, which identifies student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams, or “posses.” Following an extensive recruitment and pre-college training program, the teams enroll at selective colleges. The expectation is that they’ll enjoy academic success and help promote cross-cultural communication. Lafayette has enrolled Posse Scholars for eight years from New York and for three years from Washington, D.C.
Shirley Ramirez, vice president for institutional planning and community engagement, with Nicholas Diaz ’09, co-chair of the 2009 Senior Class Gift Committee
“Lafayette finds itself at a time in its history when it needs to and wants to be bold in thinking about building community,” Ramirez says. “My appointment is a strategic way that the College is bringing diversity to its core functions and goals. I’m supporting the implementation of the strategic plan, institutional research, intercultural engagement, and community engagement, including the relationship of the College to the City of Easton and the Lehigh Valley.”
The reach of her role, she says, allows her—and the College—to treat diversity as central to every decision and not just as “some pocket of the College’s operation or some special category.” She adds, “This is very different from what other liberal-arts colleges are doing. Nationally, higher education has failed in many aspects of diversity. Diversity is typically treated as something that happens in the margins. It’s an add-on or it’s the subject of a special task force, something that, unlike a key academic program, is among the most vulnerable things at an institution and can be sacrificed from time to time. But transformative change happens when you bring diversity work to the core of the institution, when you have diversity as a value at the center rather than on the sidelines.
“As an institution, we’re not just talking the talk. We’re serious about walking the walk. That’s exciting to me, since my life’s work is about doing things, including reshaping how people think about diversity,” Ramirez says.
This spring, President Daniel H. Weiss, Hill, and Ramirez attended a forum on diversity held at Williams College. The meeting, the first of its kind to include college presidents with their chief diversity officers and chief academic officers, was co-organized by Ramirez and brought together nine top liberal-arts colleges.
“The discussions we had affirmed for us that we are at the forefront in thinking about how best to achieve our diversity goals,” Hill says. “I also came away with the view that liberal-arts colleges have important work to do in this realm. As we seek to educate students to be leaders and citizens in our global, interconnected world, it is imperative that they be knowledgeable about and confident dealing with diverse issues and problems.” Liberal-arts colleges, she adds, can take the lead in guiding higher education broadly to embrace “diversity and inclusiveness as a central component” of its mission.
Provost Wendy Hill
Ramirez and Hill already have been collaborating on a range of projects, including a new campus climate study. Through the support of a presidential grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lafayette will be working with Susan Rankin & Associates, a nationally known firm on diversity issues. Rankin’s work on campus will involve focus groups, a survey, and town-hall meetings. Among other things, the study aims to find how various groups perceive climate issues for students, and then what steps should be taken to meet the diversity aims of the strategic plan.
For students like Burey, a rising senior and a Posse Scholar, that community-wide rethinking can’t come fast enough. “Adjusting to campus life was definitely hard for me,” she says. Too few students of diverse backgrounds are attracted to Lafayette, in her view, in part because of longstanding social dynamics that promote sub-communities rather than a broader sense of campus community. “Despite being a Posse Scholar and having a support system of students and faculty mentors, I couldn’t get over how segregated I felt the campus was.” She also sees limits in the academic program. The Africana studies program has “plenty of interesting courses,” she says, “but few professors to teach them. If the College does not offer things to draw students, they won’t come.”
“The diversity on campus should at least reflect the diversity of the country,” Burey says. “How can we learn if we are surrounded by people just like us? Part of the higher learning process is breaking out of a shell and dismissing biases we’ve all grown up with. After all, isn’t that why we all go away for school? It is both the number of minorities and the vibrancy of the programming. Numbers alone don’t make a campus diverse; the environment and interaction between students of different backgrounds are important as well.”
In many ways, Burey is reinforcing the message of the College’s new strategic plan, which lists diversity as one of its main objectives. Diversity, according to the plan, is an educational imperative, because it helps students “pursue lives of significance in an increasingly interconnected, globalized world.” Diversity also helps the College fulfill its social mission by “furthering access to higher education for all.” And it enhances the College’s position as “an academically distinctive institution.”
It isn’t just minority students who are sensitive to the character of the campus. Christian Garelli ’09 says he appreciates his Lafayette education—but also struggled with its limitations. Garelli went to all-boys’ Loyola High School in downtown Los Angeles. Loyola is about half African American, Latino, or Asian, and half white.
“The mix was much different for me in high school, and the daily interactions really changed me. As time went on at Lafayette, I’d be asking myself, where is the exposure to different ideas, where is the exposure to different perspectives? This is not what the world is like. This is not what my experience will be after I graduate.”
QuEST “Gay? Fine By Me” event in the Farinon Student Center
The webpage for the admissions office, naturally enough, focuses on the college experience. It provides a prominent link to “The Lafayette Experience,” vignettes from a veritable rainbow of students from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Ghana and India—male, female, white, African American, Latino, Asian.
In fact, admissions statistics show that progress has been grinding. The Class of 2012 enrolled 30 African American students—up from 24 African Americans in the Class of ’95. (College officials point out that the size of the first-year class has varied considerably over time, so precise comparisons of student populations are difficult.) Lafayette’s Asian American student population is noticeably small compared with the nation’s best-known liberal arts colleges—31 in the Class of 2012. Some observers of the campus consider that surprising, given the College’s traditional strength in engineering and the sciences, disciplines that are often especially inducing to Asian students. Other observers, though, speculate that many of those students find the presence of a fraternity-sorority system off-putting.
“I’ve been in the admissions office for 25 years, and the desire to have a diverse student body is not a new goal. It’s something that Lafayette has always valued,” says Carol Rowlands ’81, director of admissions.
She says the admissions office has tried to reach out more assertively to guidance counselors and community organizations that work with underserved students. The Posse program has led admissions officers to inner-city high schools, including charter schools, where the College has not historically recruited. “I’m not sure we would have identified those schools on our own,” she says. “And that has helped us diversify our applicant pool.”
A big detriment to diversity is the perceived expense of attending the College, Rowlands says. In recent years, Lafayette has significantly upgraded its financial-aid program to guarantee that qualified students can enroll regardless of their ability to pay. Students from families with incomes of up to $100,000 will find the loan portions of their financial-aid packages eliminated or reduced. “It’s very difficult for a family that makes less money in a year than what a school like Lafayette costs” to fathom that Lafayette can be affordable, Rowlands says, “even though we explain it in as straightforward a way as possible.”
Transcendence
With the aim of explaining—and celebrating—dividends from diversity, last year the McDonogh Network was started, linking black alumni and students. Its start coincided with the College’s dedication of Transcendence, a sculpture commemorating the College’s first black graduate, David Kearney McDonogh, Class of 1844. McDonogh and his brother Washington were slaves when they were sent by their New Orleans-based owner to Lafayette in 1838; their story was mentioned in the inaugural address of President Weiss in 2005.
College archivist Diane Shaw notes that the McDonoghs were described at the time by Margaret Junkin Preston, the daughter of Lafayette president George Junkin, as having been “kept and taught wholly apart from the students, who would never have consented to their presence among them.” (Washington was later sent off to Liberia.) Shaw adds that the College had a “rather remarkable” early role in the education of blacks. Aaron O. Hoff, a local African American, was in the very first class of students, the Class of 1836. In the 1840s, the Presbyterian Board of Education sent three black candidates to Lafayette to train for the ministry. Around the same time, Lafayette also educated Native Americans.
Today the McDonogh Network’s website paints a reasonably robust picture of minority achievement, on and off campus. It includes news of black alumni in areas ranging from arts education to nonprofit management. It also spotlights a rich array of campus events—students and faculty members being honored for promoting diversity, an outside speaker on the theme of race relations in the Obama era, exhibitions at the Portlock Black Cultural Center, a benefit dance kicking off Black History Month, and much more.
One of the founders of the McDonogh Network, Riley Temple ’71, describes it as a constantly renewing resource for “enriching our understanding of the accomplishments of our alumni.” He also sees it as a device for bringing minority-group students and alumni closer to each other—and to the College—around interests like career development.
Temple is a trustee emeritus, former vice chair of the Board of Trustees, and the founder of a Washington-based telecommunications consulting firm. In 2001 he received the McDonogh Award from Lafayette’s Association of Black Collegians. He sees the institutionalizing of the Posse Scholars program and the appointment of Ramirez as positive signs. It’s been demoralizing for him to sit on the platform at graduation and look out at such a small minority representation, he adds. But Posse brings to the campus “a new paradigm for leadership”: Posse Scholars have engaged themselves in all aspects of campus life, and in that way they have “helped to change the culture of the institution.” Ramirez’s position, he says, is important substantively, because it weaves diversity more tightly into the College’s education program, and symbolically as well. “This is the first person of color to report directly to the president. That signals that diversity is a principal objective of the College.”
Diversity, Temple observes, extends beyond race-based definitions. That’s something that Chris Nial ’10 knows well. Nial is president of QuEST (Questioning Established Sexual Taboos), the campus group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Nial came out in the spring semester of his first year at Lafayette. Later, in his native Vermont, he worked with Outright Vermont, an organization that works with gay youths. One of QuEST’s highest-profile events at Lafayette is the distribution of “Gay? Fine By Me” T-shirts. The T-shirt project began in 2003 at Duke University and has since spread nationally; it’s meant to signal a campus stand against bigotry and in favor of equal treatment for all.
This spring at Lafayette, QuEST gave away 800 T-shirts in a single day. Events surrounding the distribution drew the sponsorship of more than 70 academic departments and student organizations, including the Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Council (though others declined, Nial notes). According to Nial, QuEST has also succeeded at embedding “safe zone” thinking—through which offices and student rooms display stickers announcing that they’re free from homophobia—in the campus culture.
Student reaction to the T-shirt giveaway and related events was “pretty much positive,” Nial says. Still, he mentions students readily slipping into a vernacular that is demeaning—the careless use of terms like “fag” and “faggot” and “gay” as insults. “The population of students who are out and who are comfortable on campus is extraordinarily small. I don’t know any students who are out and who feel this is really an accepting place overall. Still, they find places where they can be comfortable, where they can be themselves. We’re definitely having a positive impact on campus. We’re more and more visible, we’re finding more and more allies, and we’re heading in the right direction, even if we’re not yet there.”
Now and again, Nial will hear from a prospective student who is curious about Lafayette’s degree of gay-friendliness. “It is difficult to be here and to be out,” he tells them. “If you’re looking for an easier experience, you should go somewhere else. Here you may be fighting the odds, or fighting the mainstream. But you’re also likely to become a stronger person and better prepared for life after college, simply because you’re being challenged on these issues.”
Nial’s view is shared by Bryan Fox ’10, a rising senior and a Posse Scholar. Fox’s transition from female to male—which came from a decision he reached during his freshman year—was well-known on campus. He says he sees himself as an educator, a role in which he seems very comfortable. This spring he was featured in a well-attended brownbag luncheon on campus, complete with accompanying artwork and poetry. How did his College peers react to his story? At first much of the reaction was “kind of shock,” he recalls. “Homosexuality is rarely out in the open, and that’s even more the case with transgender issues. People may not have understood the process I went through. But by and large they respected my decision.” And from the avid questioning at the brownbag, he concluded that “people don’t want a lot of flowery, politically-correct talk. But they are willing to learn, even when you’re dealing with a controversial topic that they may never have been exposed to in their life.”
He adds, “The experience reminded me that you can’t generalize about the character of the whole campus. There are some bad apples. There are some who are willing to try to understand, even if they have a hard time understanding. And there are some who will be there for you no matter what.” One of his favorite comments came from a student who had, at first, come across as a skeptic: “You’re more of a man than a lot of men I’ve encountered in my life.”
The challenge of diversity has long been an interest of student leaders, according to Ashley Juavinett ’11, president of Student Government. Last spring, Student Government organized a town-hall meeting with themes that included what it means to be a diverse campus. Juavinett says some 200 members of the Lafayette community attended. “It felt like something we should be doing as a campus.”
Asked if she counts any minority students among her core group of college friends, she hesitates, then answers, probably not. “That’s another example of why we need this to be a campus where you’re constantly meeting people from completely different backgrounds,” she says. “That’s one of the best things about coming to college.”