Academic year 2015-16 was a busy time for community and equity at MIT, with major efforts made to advance two of the main recommendations of the ICEO report: the MIT Compact and unconscious bias workshops. It was also a year of community conversations and of student activism leading to an unusual collab

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 #Bl

What is an ICEO and why does MIT have one? The Institute Community and Equity Officer (ICEO) was established in July 2014, with the appointment of Professor Edmund Bertschinger. The new position replaced the previous dual position of Associate Provosts for Faculty Equity. It is intended to help MIT to m

The top recommendation of the ICEO Report was that MIT prepare a brief statement of what we aspire to as a community and what we expect of one another as community members. This MIT Compact was to be written by a fully representative working group and not imposed from the top. The rationale behind the C

One of the major recommendations made by many groups at MIT over the past several years is that all community members be offered information about unconscious bias, which is the automatic reliance on a stereotype while making judgments or decisions. Psychologists and neuroscientists have for many years