The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has released a report detailing initiatives to increase professional development, faculty awareness and learning about diversity, and diversity within Brandeis faculty and student populations. The report describes multiple ongoing and completed projects for the academic year of 2018 under a variety of offices, including the president’s office and admissions.
The Brandeis Hoot spoke with Chief Diversity Officer Mark Brimhall-Vargas, who highlighted the progress on the Ford Hall 2015 agreements, training and development efforts by Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Dr. Allyson Livingstone, work on equity compliance—or the protection of students, faculty and staff from discrimination through complaint processes—and the hiring of more Brandeis Counseling Center (BCC) embedded counselors.
Brimhall-Vargas emphasized the structural changes in the complaint processes for equity compliance, which refers to the processes that protect people from bias harassment and discrimination. The newly-created Office of Equal Opportunity, when the structural changes are complete, will handle intake and investigations and will report to Brimhall-Vargas.
The office is expected to be up and running by January or February of 2019, according to Brimhall-Vargas. However, he is also working to expedite the timeline. A search has begun for the director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and space for the office itself.
Once this office is up and running, students can use the office as a “one stop shop” to file complaints, according to Brimhall-Vargas. Until the office is complete, students can report incidents ranging from sexual harassment to academic integrity from a link on the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s website, which redirects the user to a reporting page on Brandeis University’s website.
As part of an effort to educate faculty on issues of diversity, Brimhall-Vargas worked with the Brandeis Center for Teaching and Learning, which engages faculty to the development of learning, to create a monthly faculty engagement and learning series, where faculty read and discussed scholarly articles on topics including privilege, rankism, microaggressions and colorism. Faculty have also received training from Livingstone on hiring best practices and search and selection.
“I think faculty really appreciated the fact that our approach to these scholarly works was a critical one,” said Brimhall-Vargas. “Understanding its strengths and weaknesses, exploring them with other faculty members to really think about the depth of the issue that is being discussed. I thought that the conversations were really strong and smart.”
Another initiative involves the Brandeis Counseling Center (BCC). Some of the new hires at the BCC will be embedded counselors; one has already been stationed in the Intercultural Center and another, who is in the hiring process as of publication, will be stationed in the gender and sexuality center. “There is recognition that the counseling center needs more resources, but we also have to be thinking of ways to more effectively deploy those resources to reach more people,” said Brimhall-Vargas.
Brimhall-Vargas spoke about the Ford Hall agreements, hoping that regularly publishing the update would provide more transparency to the students. “I certainly want to make sure that where possible we are being transparent about the progress that the administration and students reached in 2015. They should know where we are with respect to those agreements.”
Ford hall 2015 was an 11-day occupation of the administrative center to protest a lack of diversity at Brandeis. Student protestors made 13 demands, such as the creation of curriculum to increase racial awareness, yearly diversity workshops for all faculty, additional staff of color for the counseling center, an Ombuds office to investigate complaints against faculty and staff and an increase in black faculty by 10 percent. The protest and was followed by support from faculty at Brandeis.
The report details progress from the office on the Ford Hall demands and many other initiatives.
The university has hired on-call and half-time ombuds, to create a “confidential place for students to discuss academic issues and concerns,” according to the report. The Ombuds Office does not provide formal grievance procedures or legal advice. There are also efforts to recruit and retain more faculty of color, and plans to double the full-time faculty of color by 2021.
The Office of Admissions is currently reviewing a plan to increase outreach to undergraduate students of color, and increase their enrollment. More funding has been allocated to the Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program (MKTYP) and the POSSE Program, two scholarship programs that emphasize supporting students and provide support for students entering Brandeis.
Finally, Brandeis has also established a minimum wage of $15.05 per hour for full time Brandeis employees and $11.00 per hour for part time employees, provided both types of employees are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement. This wage increase was announced in 2015.
