University Administration Building. Photo by Jason Oh.
To oversee the nascent Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) and create new campus initiatives starting this spring, the Division of Campus Life assembled a new advisory council of 21 students, faculty and staff, according to Senior Vice President and Dean of Campus Life Ajay Nair.
The CDI Advisory Council will also help carry out the goals of a report sent to Nair in December 2012, which recommended ways of making Emory’s campus more open-minded and inclusive.
The formation of the council was, in part, fueled by a reaction to incidents of bias and anti-Semitism that occurred last semester, according to Nair.
“Last semester, many administrators found themselves in conversations with students who wanted to leverage their love of the Emory community” to prevent such incidents from happening, he said.
In terms of responding to such events, Nair added, “we want to shift from being reactive to being more proactive.”
Rather than carrying out educational programs to promote inclusiveness, however, the group’s purpose will be to solely study the need for and create campus initiatives, leaving the job of enacting those initiatives to other campus organizations, according to Michael Shutt, director of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Life and the interim director of the CDI.
“If they come up with an initiative, they’re not going to be the ones that do it,” Shutt said. “If a [bias] incident were to come up on campus, the bias reporting group would be the first to respond – the council would be there to say, in the long-term, what we need to do.”
He added that the council will start with the 2012 report to “see what has been achieved fully and partially.” Then, he said, they will examine a study compiled by a University of Georgia graduate, who is working at the CDI to gather information on campus inclusiveness. (Shutt did not provide the name of the UGA graduate, as he has hardly begun his research.)
Nair listed renovations at the Dobbs University Center, follow-up orientation groups for sophomore and junior students and raising awareness of the bias incident reporting system as several potential areas where the council could advise improvement.
According to Shutt, the advisory council will also help to organize the CDI, which Campus Life created at the end of the summer to serve as an umbrella group for minority offices, such as the Center for Women, the Office of LGBT Life and the Office of Multicultural Programs and Services (OMPS).
“They will help determine what the CDI will look like, how we organize ourselves,” Shutt said.
He said members of the Emory community should begin to notice the effects of the council’s short-term policies – which have yet to be determined – by the summer.
The six undergraduate students, seven graduate students, one alumnus, four faculty and three staff were chosen from a pool of 75 applicants by a separate council of seven students organized to help with the selection process.
The CDI emailed their acceptance notifications about a week ago, and they will have their first meeting in the coming week. (Shutt did not provide the names of the council members, as they had yet to convene before press time.)
Kimberly Herard, a College senior and one of the seven students who chose the CDI Advisory Council members, wrote in an email to the Wheel that the decision was very difficult, as every applicant was “very qualified and would have brought a great viewpoint to the council.”
When asked about the council’s purely directorial purpose, she wrote that “we will all work together to continue to serve Emory students to the best of Emory’s capabilities.”
– By Lydia O’Neal, Asst. News Editor
A College senior studying economics and French, Lydia O’Neal has written for The Morning Call, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Consumer Reports Magazine and USA Today College. She began writing for the News section during her freshman year and began illustrating for the Wheel in the spring of her junior year. Lydia is studying in Paris for the fall 2015 semester.
