Current Issues

2005-06

In spring 2005, the Community Council completed three years of study on diversity and pluralism and submitted our report to the president.

We decided in fall 2005 to concentrate in 2005-06, and beyond as needed, on women at WPI, including women as students, faculty, administration and staff. Our first report may be found in the meeting summary for December 1, 2005.

2003-04

President Parrish has made understanding the importance of diversity and pluralism one of two university-wide objectives for Cabinet discussion and action in 2002-03 and 2003-04. Similarly, the Community Council elected to focus exclusively on diversity and pluralism in fall 2002, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Toward that end, the Community Council identified external consultants to help with strategic planning and to run workshops at WPI on diversity. These workshops (with very positive responses from participants) have been run for the Cabinet, select administrative staff, and academic department heads and other key faculty. The president and provost also presided over a follow-up luncheon leading to explicit definition of diversity action items.

As a result of the full-day retreat the Community Council had with the consulting team in November 2002, a major action item was a detailed inventory on the current status of policies and procedures and how they related to diversity issues on campus. Thirty-two assessment items were identified by the Community Council and delegated to the four vice-presidents, as requested by President Parrish. This assessment will conclude in fall 2003. Another aspect of this assessment was a racial climate survey distributed to students in spring 2003. These results indicated that the majority of our students do not think racism is a problem, nor have they even given the topic much consideration.

In an effort to raise awareness, the Community Council, with support from the president, also organized a speakers series on pluralism and diversity, including as featured presentations Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the widely-read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Dr. Allan Johnson, author of Privilege, Power and Difference. In April 2002, Academic Affairs also invited Dr. William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, to address the community on the crucial importance of diversity to the engineering profession.

The next Community Council sponsored talk on diversity will be on Wednesday, November 5, 2003, with Dr. Allan Fisher, co-author of Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computer Science. Dr. Fisher is a professor of computer science at CMU and has helped to increase the percentage of women undergraduate students in that field from 7% to 42% in five years time. His research and experiences apply to all of our academic departments where women are underrepresented (for a chart on representation of our women students, see the Athena Project Web site).

In addition to these tasks, the Community Council also has subcommittees working on search and selection procedures for new hires of faculty and staff, the retention of faculty and staff of color, and benchmarking data on cabinet-level positions on diversity and pluralism.

The slides below from a recent status report on the work of the Community Council provide additional information on current diversity issues before the Council.

Community Council Consortium presentation (PowerPoint)

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Last modified: Dec 14, 2005, 15:35 EST