Students React to Issues of Diversity

On Wednesday, Feb. 27, Dean of the College and Chief Diversity Officer Shirley Collado sent an all-student email announcing the College’s participation in the Diverse Learning Environments (DLE) survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Collado sent a link to the survey itself to students on March 1.

In the first email, Collado wrote that the survey is “part of the College’s ongoing efforts to review and assess our campus climate as it relates to issues of diversity and inclusion” and that the goals of the survey are to “better understand how students are engaging across differences and finding community, understand students’ experiences in selecting majors and improve classroom dynamics and campus life.”

The “ongoing efforts” of the College to review diversity come after a recommendation from the 2006 Human Relations Committee (HRC), which was charged by President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz with the job of evaluating diversity at the College. Special Assistant to the Dean of the College and Senior Advisor for Diversity Jennifer Herrera explained that based on the committee’s evaluation, the College has agreed to review diversity on campus every five years.

Herrera also said that in her 10 years working at the College, “a more comprehensive survey [ ... that] focused on the climate of diversity and inclusion on campus” has not been administered. Collado agreed, saying this was the first campus climate survey administered at the College of which she was aware.

Collado said that the College felt “it was time” for a survey addressing campus life. She also stressed the hope that there will be a high student response rate for the survey.

“Every student has something very valuable to say on the survey,” said Collado. “This is not a survey for a specific subset of students or students with particular interests.”

Some of the questions on the survey address students’ interactions with faculty and staff, their experiences in the classroom and in residence halls and whether or not they have experienced any sort of discrimination or harassment based on their race, gender, sexuality, disability or spiritual affiliation.

Emma Ashby ’13, a co-chair of Middlebury Open Queer Alliance (MOQA), discussed the gap between the College’s aim to address queer diversity through the survey and its practices on campus. She discussed in particular the idea of using affirmative action in admissions not just for race, but also for queer students.

“If [being queer is] going to be part of your identity,” said Ashby, “and you’re going to have surveys about it and talk about how you can foster it and support it, you should probably also talk about how you can attract it and attract people who are going to be a part of that vibrant community.

“If the College recognizes that you can be discriminated against for [being queer], why are we not in recruitment trying to reach out to people?”

Tim Garcia ’14, a hispanic student and co-president of Distinguished Men of Color (DMC), felt that the questions on the survey addressed issues of diversity on campus, but that the survey also should have asked if the respondent was affiliated with Posse, as he believes it is important to acknowledge that many students of color on campus are Posse Scholars.

Garcia expressed deep concerns with diversity on campus. He cited the dilemma of why students of color take longer to finish their undergraduate degree relative to their peers as one issue the College needs to address.

“The Middlebury campus is diverse when it comes to student experiences (i.e. educational background, geographic diversity, academic or extracurricular activities),” wrote Garcia in an email, “but when it comes to race, I have observed a dangerous commodification of individuals of color.”

Garcia explained that his experience of diversity at the College is significantly different than that of high school or outside of campus.

“Contrary to my experience in high school, diversity at Middlebury for a person of color has come to mean a sense of obligation to represent the entirety of the race.

“The fear of being criminalized and exoticized, which I must cope with as a man of color on a normal basis in the real world, is exacerbated because I am in the microcosm that is Middlebury College,” wrote Garcia.

The welcome screen to the survey boasts HERI’s dedication to conducting over 40 years of research on the college student experience. Vice President for Planning and Assessment and Professor of Psychology Susan Baldridge explained the benefits of using a national survey as opposed to a Middlebury-generated one.

“We benefit from the survey construction and validation expertise that HERI has,” wrote Baldridge in an email. “We also get access not only to reports of the responses of our own students, but to comparison data from students at other institutions who take the same survey. [...] This helps us understand our own findings in a broader context.”

HERI also sponsors the first-year student survey that the College administers to incoming students each fall.

The survey will be open for students to complete until the beginning of April.