The second year of my tenure as Institute Community and Equity Officer began with a somber set of events nationally with the shooting unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The resulting protests nationally spread quickly to college campuses through the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Just before freshman orientation, on August 29, my office organized a community gathering Transformative Conversations: Responding to Ferguson with a keynote by former MIT Mel King Community Fellow Malia Lazu. The more than 100 community members attending included faculty, staff, current students, alumni, and parents of an incoming freshman. At the time, we did not know that this kind of (relatively) rapid response to national events would become the new normal. The efforts helped generate a sense of shared community and commitment to diversity and inclusion.
On December 10, following additional shootings of unarmed black men by police around the nation, more than 100 MIT community members including students, postdocs, staff, and faculty, participated in a silent protest outside the end-of-semester Winterfest activity. MIT President Reif greeted the protesters with his wife Christine and acknowledged the pain expressed by the demonstrators. That evening, more than 400 MIT community members participated in a dialogue on race organized by the ICEO along with the Black Students’ Union, Black Women’s Alliance, and Black Graduate Student Association. Participants felt validated by the participation of a large, diverse group and by President Reif’s acknowledgement of the impact societal issues had at MIT.
The annual MLK Celebration followed a new course February 5, 2015 not only by moving from breakfast to lunch, but also by replacing the outside keynote speaker by MIT students (a choice forced by the heavy snowfall that month). The students powerfully described their sometimes fraught experiences navigating the topics of race and diversity at MIT.
On January 29 and February 12, 2015, MIT hosted the Institute Diversity Summit. The first day featured a keynote by the ICEO. The second day featured a keynote by Prof. Renée Richardson Gosline and a panel discussion with the provost, chancellor, and executive vice president and treasurer. In addition, community members organized a series of parallel workshops both afternoons.
In February, 2015, the ICEO publicly released a report and strategic plan as requested by the provost in 2013. The 132-page report examines MIT’s past and present understanding of diversity and inclusion through the lenses of community, culture, and values. It presents a mission statement,
- To advance a respectful and caring community that embraces diversity and empowers everyone to learn and do their best at MIT.
Additionally, the ICEO report provides a set of 17 major recommendations and dozens of minor recommendations. Major themes in the report include the relevance of distinct cultures at MIT, the different and sometimes inequitable experiences had by different groups, and the need to use data to inform decision-making, including climate data. The report’s top three recommendations were
- Writing a MIT Compact – a brief statement of what we aspire to as a community and what we expect of one another as MIT community members
- Educating all community members about unconscious bias
- Developing a Community and Equity Dashboard presenting demographic data and information on progress toward implementation of the report’s goals
During a comment period following the release of the report, nearly 50 individuals and groups responded, and overwhelmingly they affirmed the major recommendations, particularly the emphasis given to the top three. Faculty and student perspectives on the report were published in the March/April 2015 Faculty Newsletter.
This year marked an increase in campus activism calling for MIT to advance equity and inclusion, much of it student-led. Working with the ICEO, graduate students organized You Are Not Alone: A Community Dialogue on Mental Wellness at MIT held April 15, 2015. This event brought more than 50 community members together to hear from MIT students and to help the community understand the pressure facing students and others. On April 23, undergraduate students organized a similar panel event, The MIT We Don’t See: A conversation about MIT Culture. On April 24, the ICEO and staff from the Sloan School of Management hosted Stand Against Racism, an event organized nationally by the YWCA to raise awareness and empower action toward eliminating racism. On May 7, the Black Students’ Union and the MIT Ombuds hosted a dialogue event with MIT and Cambridge Police, with the goal of increasing understanding and decreasing the tensions and mistrust that result from stereotyping. In total, 63 events were featured during FY2015 in the ICEO events calendar, most of them organized by other offices.
During the academic year the ICEO relaunched the MIT diversity website diversity.mit.edu and launched the new websites mlkscholars.mit.edu and iceoblog.mit.edu.
In collaboration with staff in various staff- and student-serving offices, the ICEO represented MIT in the Leading for Change Higher Education Diversity Consortium. This is a voluntary collaboration of higher education institutions in Massachusetts and New England committed to identifying student and employee diversity best practices through uniform and transparent use of data, institutional benchmarks and reflective practice.
This year MIT hosted seven MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars:
- Coco Fusco, hosted by the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Section
- Prof. Malika Jeffries-EL (Iowa State), hosted by the Chemistry Department
- Dr. Calestous Juma (Harvard), hosted by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
- Dr. James Mickens (Microsoft Research), hosted by the EECS Department
- Prof. Hakeem Oluseyi (Florida Institute of Technology), hosted by the Physics Department
- Prof. André Taylor (Yale), hosted by the Mechanical Engineering Department
- Prof. Kimani Toussaint (UIUC), hosted by the Mechanical Engineering Department
Each Visiting Professor or Scholar gave a public presentation and they built a lively community on campus.
The ICEO participated in the following additional activities during FY2015:
- New faculty orientation
- Freshman diversity orientation
- First Generation Program for undergraduate students
- Alumni Leadership Conference
- Keynote speaker at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory MLK Breakfast
- Challenging Technical Privilege: How Race and Gender Matter, a workshop co-organized with the Office of Minority Education, October 2014
- Hosted the MIT-9 meeting of vice provosts for faculty development and diversity, October 2014
- Spoke about diversity and inclusion at several universities and national conferences
This academic year was both a year of activism and a very active year of community building at MIT.