With the beginning of a new year comes another chance to reevaluate Smith’s inclusion and diversity initiatives. However, before we discuss what is to come, we must revisit what came before. First, let me introduce myself: I’m Claudia. I wrote a piece about last year’s Inclusion in Action conference based on my experience on the planning committee. It seemed to me that the conference, in the end, all came down to data. The administration kept track of who attended what events and how much people promoted the conference on social media, likely as a way to target certain initiatives or justify leaving some behind. When I originally decided to write this article, I tried to find out where that data went and what it is currently being used for. However, after I found out that my contact from the conference’s planning committee has since left Smith and after several attempts to contact OIDE (Office of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity), I realized that the information the administration managed to gather is currently incredibly inaccessible.
In an email sent on Sept. 5, 2019, President McCartney released a timeline for intended commitments in regards to inclusion. When looking at this timeline, one bulleted item in particular caught my attention:
“Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Floyd Cheung is chairing a working group charged with analyzing data from the April 2019 Inclusion in Action conference. The group is distilling themes from the data and creating action teams to explore each theme. The action teams will develop recommendations to share with the campus community and with President McCartney.”
Basically, the data is what truly matters. In addition to what they gathered from Inclusion in Action, the administration is also using the results of the “Your Voice Matters” survey. The aforementioned ‘themes’ were announced at the beginning of the fall 2019 semester, as follows: Identity/Representation, Education/Learning, Communication, Engagement and Justice. The five themes boil down to this: Smith promises to be inclusive, Smith will learn how to be inclusive, Smith will tell us how it is being inclusive, Smith will listen to us as we tell it to be more inclusive and Smith will actually attempt to be inclusive. But how are they defining ‘inclusion’, and, more importantly, who has the privilege to decide what that definition is?
Smith College is an institution of privilege, no matter how many ‘inclusive’ initiatives try to cover up this truth. It is still a place where many students, including myself, struggle to pay for the privilege to go here, and many more are accepted here but lose that privilege because there is no way they can pay such a price, and countless more are not accepted here and are never granted such privilege because they were not given the opportunities to build their resumes in a way that admissions officers appreciate. It is still a place designed for the wealthy, the Caucasian, the cisgendered, the able-bodied, where anyone who doesn’t fit that mold must eek out an existence within this privileged landscape.
Though I want to applaud Smith’s recent attempts at ‘inclusion’, I fear that by doing so, I’ll be inadvertently ignoring what needs to be done. I know this because I see what is missing from these initiatives: the students. Looking back on the hidden data, the working groups and action teams, the timelines and emails and forums and meetings, I see how boxed in by bureaucracy we really are. I don’t want to discredit the recently hired Vice President of OIDE Floyd Cheung’s work. However, I want him, and the rest of the administration, to give us some credit too. I don’t believe that most of the improvements listed in the timeline would have happened if Inclusion in Action came and went without a hitch. It was because of the student protests, the list of demands, the palpable passion that the student body has towards social justice that made real change.
Now, in a post-timeline world, I realize that our work is by no means over. There are still demands that have not been met after last year’s protest, many of which were remnants of protests from years past. There are still so many students in marginalized communities that are being overlooked in the face of ‘inclusion’. So, I believe that we, as Smithies, should do as we do best: work hard. We must continue to make the changes we want to see, or if we can’t make them ourselves, we must demand that they be made. We must facilitate community and make space for those who need it most. We may not have data, but we do have drive, a keen sense of what needs to be improved and a shared commitment towards real, genuine inclusion.
