By Derek Hawkins
After spending more than a year behind-the-scenes, a committee created by President Joseph Aoun to promote diversity and tolerance at Northeastern has begun to move toward playing a more active role on campus.
The Committee on Harmony, Inclusion and Justice, was created in December 2006 after an African-American Studies professor received a voicemail that contained threats and racial slurs. Despite scant public presence, the committee plans to increase programming, release research and host at least two lectures in coming months, committee members said.
“Part of the issue we faced was, ‘Do we do something immediate and splashy or do we think about the things that affect long-term climate change,'” said Dennis Cokely, a committee member and professor of American Sign Language. “The reality is, thinking long-term isn’t as showy and splashy as bringing a big speaker to campus.”
The committee is composed of faculty, staff and students and was given a starting budget of $20,000.
The News reported Monday that documentation was scarce on whether the committee had taken any formal action or spent any money. However, The News has since learned that since the committee’s inception, it has met on roughly a monthly basis, breaking into subcommittees to identify what issues the committee should address.
The committee is currently working with the Office of Affirmative Action and Diversity to conduct a survey of the diversity on campus. The committee plans to use the results of that survey, to be released in March, in a report it will be published at the end of the semester.
Donnie Perkins, a committee member and dean of the Office of Affirmative Action and Diversity, said the survey and report are part of a larger initiative to advance tolerance on campus.
“This is not just a response to the incident that happened to the faculty member,” he said. “What we’re really trying to do is lift the entire university so that all feel supported and have an avenue for response.”
The committee has also booked Jerlena Griffin-Desta, executive director of the Office of Student Development at the University of California-Berkeley, and professor Janie Ward of Simmons College to speak on campus this spring.
“We wanted to bring some last spring, but we found we were just too late,” said committee co-chair Mary Loeffelholz. “These folks are in really high demand and are booked months in advance. I’m sorry to say we weren’t able to do that.”
Loeffelholz said increasing the committee’s presence on campus and seeking greater cooperation with the Northeastern community will help make this year more successful. “It’s hard to change a campus culture working from outside,” she said. “It has to be part of everyday routine. It has to be what every chair does as chair, what every dean does as dean. It can’t be special anymore. It has to be everybody’s responsibility.”
Yet becoming more active hasn’t come without setbacks for the committee. When it was created, the committee was made up of 25 members, all hand-picked by Provost Ahmed Abdelal. In recent months, however, the committee’s numbers have dwindled to about a dozen. Many of the departures have been students, citing schedule conflicts, courseloads and graduation among their reasons for leaving. “They sort of petered out, frankly,” Cokely said. “And some of the issues we began to focus on were maybe of less importance or interest to them. There’s been a noticeable lack of their input.”
Several student committee members did not respond to requests for comment. Loeffelholz said she will solicit new student membership this semester, as well as input from the Student Government Association.
“We need to involve as many different people from the university as possible,” she said. “It’s easy to say, ‘Isn’t this the job of the Office of Affirmative Action?’ I say it’s everybody’s responsibility.”
