Since the implementation of President Jill Tiefenthaler’s strategic plan in 2013, Colorado College has actively committed itself to promoting a more diverse and inclusive campus.
In November 2014, as a part of this goal, the college released its final “Diversity Commitment,” which had previously been divided into three individual commitment documents.
The statement reads that the college’s goal is to create a “fruitful climate for intellectual and scholarly growth, meaningful interaction, and common endeavors.” It continues on to explain that successful liberal arts institutions must value diversity and inclusion.
Goals of Colorado College’s Diversity Commitment
• Create a campus community that is broadly accessible to individuals of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations. We will identify and draw on the talents and promise of local, national and global populations in our admission of students and our hiring of faculty and staff.
• Foster an equitable intellectual and social climate that is inclusive, and respectful of human dignity. We acknowledge that categories of difference are fluid and not necessarily fixed. We respect individual rights to self-identification and expression, and we encourage activities, gatherings, and conversations in which individuals from all walks of life are able and eager to fully participate.
• Promote full engagement in courses, curricula, co-curricular programs, and projects. We will provide resources and space for distinctive projects that further our diversity goals and our shared interests and ideals.
So far, the college has some data to present to students, parents, alumni, prospective students, and the public concerning its advancement towards a more diverse campus. For example, in 2014, 24.7 percent of students identified as American ethnic minorities as opposed to the 14.3 percent in 2004.
But what about the inclusion aspect of this commitment? Has CC effectively enacted hard policies and promoted a community that breeds a culture of inclusion? If so, what sort of data does the school have to indicate its progress, if they can do so in a quantitative way? If not, where is CC now, and how can it get there?
What is the role of Title IX?
Under U.S. law, all institutions that receive financial assistance from the USDE must adhere to the Title IX statute, which states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Institutions across the country falling under this statute must thereby operate in a non-discriminatory manner. Institutions that fall into this category include 16,500 local school districts and 7,000 post-secondary institutions, as well as museums, charter schools, for-profit schools, and libraries.
Institutions falling under Title IX, including CC, have obligations in a number of issue areas, including athletics, financial aid, discipline, and recruitment, among others.
However, despite the differences between these issues, the overarching theme is that the institution must provide students or occupants with an environment in which they have full access to their rights.
Due to the intentionally vague language of Title IX, access to a full education expands beyond these usual branches and can dip into supporting the idea of a “safe space.”
“Title IX is one sentence, officially, and it just says that everyone is entitled to all of the benefits of, and access to, an education, regardless of gender, sexuality, all of the gender-related elements,” said Associate Professor of Sociology and Title IX Coordinator Gail Murphy-Geiss. “So if a space was considered unsafe based on those categories, and people thought, therefore, that they couldn’t access the fullness of their CC education, Title IX would come into play.”
Addressing the conversation
With words like “politically correct,” “safe spaces,” “micro-aggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and the like more and more frequently surfacing on campus, questions of just how inclusive in practice CC and its students really are continue to hinder the college’s values.
Some of the dialogue has been positive and productive, some negative and polarizing. The latter is oftentimes perceived as aggressive due to the ambiguity of the root of the conversation.
Most commonly, the ‘minority’ in the conversation can feel attacked because of their differences and the lack of recognition the general public has for those differences. The voice of the ‘majority’ also can feel attacked due to their sheer lack of information.
“There’s this idea of calling out versus calling in,” said Slocum Residential Life Coordinator Krystal Schiffelbein. “I can see the conversations as being aggressive and creating this culture of ‘You did this wrong and you’re a bad person.’ Sometimes that’s the initial reaction of anger and exhaustion that builds up after someone’s gender, for example, is misidentified day after day, which is frustrating for that person.”
Since joining the CC community this year, the new Director of Residential Life and Campus Activities Yolany Gonell has actively pursued the advancement of inclusion.
“The bottom line is that, as a director and an advocate in social justice issues that I’m proximate to, I need to work to align the university and its values around diversity and inclusion,” said Gonell, who identifies as a queer Latino woman. “It takes us from the talk that we love about community and diversity and puts it into practice.”
Gonell stresses the importance of alignment and transformation, as opposed to assimilation, in order to ensure that students receive the dignity and respect they are entitled to at CC. A substantial portion of this alignment, she argues, is the creation of safe spaces.
What really is a safe space?
The phrase “safe space” has stirred debate beyond CC and at colleges throughout the country, particularly after a controversial New York Times published an op-ed by contributing writer Judith Shulevitz in March, 2015. The article decried safe spaces on college campuses, arguing that safe spaces shielded students from any potentially disconcerting viewpoints.
Shulevitz used an example from Brown University, a fellow liberal arts institution, albeit a drastically different culture than CC. Brown hosted a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, the editor of ifeminists.net.
McElroy was predicted to criticize the term “rape culture” in her arguments during the debate, prompting students to organize a safe space for anyone who found the debate too unsettling. Students adorned a room nearby the debate with plates of cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies; students trained to deal with trauma were available for consolation.
McElroy primarily blamed students for the influx of such spaces, arguing that students have begun holding their college’s accountable for ensuring such spaces and sensitivity. The implication of this, she says, is that every other space is unsafe and that students will not be prepared for climates off-campus that hit students “social and intellectual headwinds.”
Phoebe Maltz Bovy of The New Republic and a professor at New York University responded to the article, arguing that although colleges should not actively ensure comfort for students, they also should not make “them uncomfortable for discomfort’s sake.” She also sought to distinguish McElroy’s examples of safe spaces and microaggressions as extreme cases and not reflective of the broader discourse.
Not all examples of safe spaces and microggressions in colleges are as extreme as that at Brown, but they might have the same, or at least similar, implications.
According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s articlee “The Coddling of the American Mind” published in The Atlantic in Sept. 2015, deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty-leader-training sessions with examples of mircroaggressions.
The list included “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and even colloquial phrases like “America is the land of opportunity.”
Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the overwhelming sensitivity of students and the colleges’ willingness to adapt to that sensitivity improperly prepares students for professional life, can promote engendered patterns of thought that parallel those of depression and anxiety, and promotes mental filtering, which dismisses any negative detail in a situation.
So, where does CC fit in?
Gonell defined safe spaces more along the lines of Maltz Bovy. She explained that safe spaces are not about a community agreeing completely on certain issues or even looking the same.
Rather, safe spaces must be a place where power dynamics and differences are recognized and where people hold themselves accountable to their mistakes.
“It’s uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it’s part of the learning,” said Gonell. “If what you say or do hurts or marginalizes a group or person, that matters, even if it means a portion of your freedom. It doesn’t have to be about conformity, but we should be striving for this dignity and respect for people.”
As of now, neither CC nor its students has gone to the lengths of creating a designated space in response to a particular event as students at Brown did; however, the school has taken action to prevent unwelcoming environments, particularly in the underclassman dorms.
Before New Student Orientation week this year, Gonell decided to walk through the buildings to assess if and how Residential Advisors designed their halls in a manner that would effectively build a community.
Although Gonell found that most RAs had done so mindfully, she had issue with other halls.
She recalled the door decorations on two floors in Slocum: one that used pictures of Kayne West sleeping with Kim Kardashian and another that featured a black woman from The Office saying, “I talk too much that sometimes I have to draw myself back.”
“If a student or parent were to come into that hall, and it was their first experience at Colorado College, would they feel that door decoration speaks of inclusion or fosters a conversation around community?” Gonell said. “If the answer is, ‘It doesn’t,’ then we need to consider changing it. Those were instances where it needed to be changed.”
Schiffelbein, although not a player in the door decoration editing process, acknowledged the importance of Gonell’s actions.
“We have to ask if a door decoration is in any way a [manner] of pre-defining someone before [they were] able to define themselves at CC,” Schiffelbein said. “It’s really about making sure that we are serving every student.”
Beyond Residential Life, The Butler Center also offers Safe Zone Trainings that are intended to give students, staff, and faculty a basic understanding of LGBTQIA+ ally-ship.
The training teaches participants basic queer terminology, the unique challenges this community can face, and the tools to help prepare an inclusive environment open to all students.*
* Attempts to contact Coordinator of Gender and Leadership Programs Brett Grey to talk about the Safe Zone Trainings were unsuccessful. Attempts to contact CrossROADS Special Interest Community RA and Student Advocate for SOSS junior Spencer Spotts were made and were also unsuccessful.
Moving forward
With the acknowledgment that CC has yet to fully enact its written value statement regarding diversity into practice, the question now for students, faculty, and staff is not only how the community can change to properly align itself but also to what extent it should.
For Gonell, that avenue is through policies such as gender-neutral housing. A gender-neutral housing policy would allow students of any gender to live together in dorms. As of now, gender-neutral housing is a soft guideline but not a hard policy.
“My job isn’t to change peoples’ minds,” Gonell said. “My job is to raise consciousness about these issues, to ask the hard questions, and to mobilize people to do things with policy.”
A key element while policies wait for passage is the continuance of critical conversations.
“[Our part is] encouraging our students to learn about the world that they are in, ensuring that we are good stewards,” said Schiffelbein. “It’s so that we can have a conversation, not just ‘That was wrong, don’t do it,’ but how can that impact someone.”