Maddi O’Neill
Editor-in-Chief
After persistent speculation about the future of the Center for Diversity and Global Engagement (CDGE), President Grant Cornwell emailed the campus community with his final decisions for the organization earlier this month. The CDGE will see a number of changes implemented in time for the 2015-16 academic year.
The changes, listed in Cornwell’s email, will include filling the position of assistant dean for multicultural student affairs and creating a new staff position for sexual and gender diversity, placing the Office of Interfaith Campus Ministries under the purview of the CDGE, and launching a Diversity and Inclusion Coordinating Council, to be made up of students, faculty and administrators.
The CDGE will also be renamed the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, to reflect what Cornwell called “its refined mission.”
According to a 2012 CDGE self-study, the Center opened its doors in 2009, and was a major priority for Cornwell after he was inaugurated in 2007. It has, however, faced organizational struggles since its inception.
Last semester’s Diversity and Inclusion Listening Study found that the CDGE’s goals, while sincere, were not being achieved due to its ambiguous mission.
“For some, while the foundational vision for the Center was laudable, it was conceptualized at a theoretical level with no clear sense of what the operation would look like on the ground or in day-to-day operation,” the study committee found. “This pragmatic or operational model has still not been realized.” The study committee also reported that the CDGE provided too little support for students.
Cornwell said in the email that the upcoming changes to the CDGE were in part spurred by these findings; he also indicated that while more work remains to be done, the upcoming presidential transition period made it impractical to “strike out in bold new directions.”
For now, the CDGE’s organizational structure will be altered to ensure clarity.
“We have tried some complicated reporting structures in the CDGE, all designed to break down barriers and organizational silos,” said Cornwell of previous years’ organizational strategies, “but in the end I would say that these well-intentioned efforts, while [laudable] in theory, have been less than effective in practice. The model for next year has a much more coherent and normal vertical reporting structure.”
Outgoing CDGE Director Nancy Grace, who will end her term in June, said of the changes, “in terms of refining the mission of the Center, we are much more sharply focused on social justice education and advocacy, which still includes many aspects of globalism.”
Under Grace’s tenure as director, the CDGE achieved many diversity-oriented goals, including introducing cultural competency training for staff and faculty, implementing Safe Zone Ally Training, organizing MLK Day activities, and renovating the CDGE’s office spaces on the first floor of Babcock Hall, among many others.
Grace proposed other possible changes for the future of the Center, including the acquisition of a “major diversity officer [at the] cabinet level.”
Yorgun Marcel, currently an assistant dean of students and the director of international student affairs, will succeed Grace as director this June, although his official title is still undecided.
To craft his goals for the Center, Marcel plans to “…involve the various student groups affiliated with the Center programs in these discussions so that we can determine which initiatives would have the most buy in, and can realistically be implemented given our existing resources.”
Further details about the other changes to the Center have yet to be decided. At this time, it appears that the staff position for sexual and gender diversity will make up a one-person Office of Sexual and Gender Diversity that will fall under the Center’s purview.
Specifics about the Diversity and Inclusion Coordinating Council are also sparse.
“The mission [of the council] will be to provide regular occasions for those closest to the work and emerging issues of diversity and inclusion to meet with senior administrators, including the President,” said Cornwell.
Additional details about how members of the council will be chosen and what its specific goals will be have yet to be decided by the President’s Cabinet, made up of high-level administrators.
The Cabinet is also still in deliberation about whether other changes should be made based on the conclusions of the Diversity and Inclusion Listening Study, the findings of which were broad-reaching into many areas of campus.
“We still have more to do here,” said Cornwell of the study.