Last week in his blog, Provost Robert Groves tackled the issue of diversity, pledging to work on bringing more diversity and unity to Georgetown’s campus. He mentioned the release of the Student Commission for Unity report in 2009 which launched President John J. DeGioia’s Initiative on Diversity and Inclusiveness.

Noting progress in areas such as hiring more diverse faculty, larger and more diverse applicant pools, and the creation of a Diversity Fellows program, Groves applauded Georgetown’s previous efforts in the area.

However, he stated that more could still be done and said at the end of his post: “a great university’s work is never done in this domain. We must work together and continually renew and recommit ourselves to these efforts.”

The Provost’s blog is just one way in which Groves hopes to have student input during his time at the university. Last week students received an email from the Provost’s office inviting them to apply to the Provost’s Student Advisory Committee, where students will meet with the Provost once every month or so to discuss issues facing the university.

Many students in their comments on the blog have commended this choice, and from the responses on the blog, it appears that the Provost will have many students interested in discussing issues such as diversity with him.

While commenters on the post were in favor of bringing more diversity to campus, they pointed out that the progress that the Provost mentioned was not actually very successful.

As student Antony López commented, “The recommendations from the SCU reports are far from being accomplished, much less initiated.”

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In an email sent to the Georgetown community on Tuesday, President John DeGioia and Provost James O’Donnell gave some updates about the University’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Initiative.

Last year, faculty, student, and staff working groups recommended a variety of methods to increase diversity on campus, which the University began to adopt during the spring semester. This most recent email outlines Georgetown’s plan to continue promoting “community in diversity.”

After the jump, we’ve listed their updates and the full email.

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Georgetown’s Diversity Initiative working groups have made their verdicts—change should come to the Hilltop.

Last night, Provost James O’Donnell sent out an e-mail that listed the recommendations of the Academic, Student Life, Admissions and Recruitment working groups. This year, the three groups were tasked by President John DeGioia to “develop recommendations about how Georgetown can strength our approach to creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive undergraduate community.”

Out of all the suggestions, highlights include the establishment of an oft-debated diversity requirement, offering a major in African-American studies, a “Diversity Fellows” program, and a push to hire more minority faculty members.

Below, Vox has the complete rundown.

The Academic Working Group suggests:

• Creating a diversity requirement “as part of the General Education requirements for all undergraduates.”
• “[Increasing] the numbers of minority faculty throughout the University,” specifically targeting expansion within the departments of African-American studies, Hispanic/Latino studies, and Asian-American studies.
• Establishing an African-American studies major, to be “followed by” the development of Asian-American and Hispanic/Latino programs.
• A year-long colloquium that brings together “distinguished academics and intellectuals from within and outside our University to discuss and debate current best practices in the study of race, ethnicity, and culture.”
• Focus on “inclusive teaching and learning” by promoting current academic programs and opportunity within the University, such as the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship

The Student Life Working Group suggests:

• Creating a Diversity Fellows program that would offer paid positions to student who are interested in “leading diversity and inclusion efforts in key administrative departments and student initiatives.”
• Expanding the “A Different Dialogue” program, which began in Spring 2010.
• Building a “diversity portal” on the University’s web page to provide the Georgetown community about diversity-related events and information.

After the jump, read the Admission Working Group’s recommendations, plus the complete e-mail.

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As debate surrounding the proposals of the Academic Life Working Group picks up, Provost James O’Donnell, left, met with student press on Thursday to discuss the progress all three working working groups have made this school year.

“At the end of the day,” he said, the initiatives are about “helping Georgetown line up with its own best image of itself …. To get us where we want to be, and aren’t always as good as being as we ought to be.”

He and President John DeGioia, he said, accepted the recommendations of the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group. First and foremost, Georgetown is “really ramping up its campaign for more financial aid dollars.” One third of Georgetown’s ongoing Capital Campaign, he said, will go to create more need-based scholarships. The University is not yet publicizing how much it has taken in through the Capital Campaign but O’Donnell said, “It’s gonna be a bunch more than we took in last time.”

“Last time, we took in billion. So my official statement is, this one will be a billion and a bunch.”

The University can begin to implement some of the suggestions of the three working groups right away. He said that a desire diversity will be a part of the faculty hiring process for next school year. Others, however, will take more time and resources.

“Developing the African American Studies major probably requires a reallocation of resources or new resources, preferably news resources. Faculty hiring and curriculum changes can be added through existing resources, but we could always have more.”

When asked whether the University was still considering an Asian-American Studies program or Latino Studies program, he said, “I think that there’s just no question that we need to do better in African American Studies. That’s somewhere where we’re way behind our peer schools. Beyond that, it becomes a question of, how much effort do you put into further individual ethnic communities, or do you study ethnic communities theoretically? …. We are already better at thinking about, studying every single other part of the world except America …. We should be thinking about how our American studies about African American, Asian, Latino groups can draw on our larger understanding of the world.”

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About one year ago, Georgetown University’s Media Board issued five sanctions against The Hoya for its 2009 April Fools’ Issue. One of the sanctions directed The Hoya to pay for a third-party review of the newspaper by someone with a background in professional journalism, whom the Media Board would select. (Another sanction notably halted The Hoya‘s independence process by another school year, and for financial reasons, The Hoya will continue to remain a part of the University for the next school year, Voice news has reported.)

Media Board selected Dr. Byron P. White, the associate vice president community engagement of Xavier University, who was at one time the senior manager of community relations for the Chicago Tribune, editor of the Tribune‘s Urban Affairs Team, and a member of its editorial board, to review The Hoya‘s situation after the April Fools’ Issue.

This January, he submitted his conclusions, along with 18 suggestions for the improvement of the paper, to the administration, including suggestions to “broaden the pool of candidates for senior editor consideration beyond The Hoya staff”; “create an editor exchange program with publications that have more diverse staffs”; “assign editorial staff to routinely explore the ‘campus vibe’”; and “create an editorial advisory board” made up of faculty and student leaders who would meet with key editors twice a semester to discuss The Hoya‘s coverage of campus issues.

His recommendations, Hoya Editor-in-Chief Marissa Amedolia (COL ’11) said, also include many things that The Hoya was already trying to do to increase its staff’s diversity and improve its coverage of campus issues. (Read more in this week’s Voice News).

“We never dismissed any of his recommendations,” she said.

Chair of the Board Kevin Barber (COL ’11) added, “Nothing’s off the table.”

However, The Hoya seems unlikely to implement some of White’s more surprising recommendations, like his recommendation that the Editor in Chief be selected from outside The Hoya, or by a board independent of The Hoya.

“With the perspective of being on staff, knowing the history of the paper, and what works best for us,” she said, they probably will not implement those changes. She and Barber stressed again, however, that nothing was off the table, and that some of these more surprising recommendations had sparked some of the best discussions their staff had about White’s recommendations.

Writing, “The April Fool’s issue did tremendous damage to The Hoya’s credibility and exposed several underlying organizational weaknesses,” White concluded that “deliberate and sweeping steps must be taken to overcome these shortcomings. [M]any already have been initiated by The Hoya staff, Georgetown’s administration, and the university’s student body.”

After the jump is an abridged version of each of White’s recommendations, along with a full copy of the report he submitted to the University about the effects of the April Fools’ Issue.

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The Academic Working Group, one of the three working groups formed by President John DeGioia for the University’s Diversity Initiative, held an open forum Thursday evening to present the draft of its review of diversity in Georgetown academics, and its recommendations. Attending the forum were members of the working group, faculty, and students, some of whom had worked to help create the draft.

The draft report outlined areas where it felt the University failed to expose students academically to diversity and pluralism. It met some criticism from present faculty.

“Where Georgetown appears to fall short is in providing its students with a sense of the diversity… of contemporary U.S. society,” the report read.

Members of the working group said they had carefully examined Georgetown’s curriculum, which Eusebio Mujal-León, a co-chair of the working group, called “the central core of the university.”

One of the recommendations the working group presented in their report was the implementation of a diversity requirement, under which students would be required to take two “diversity requirement” classes, one examining issues pertaining to diversity on the national level, and other examining diversity issues on the international level. This requirement would be an “overlay requirement,” meaning it would not add to the number of courses students are required to take. Rather, certain classes that are already considered requirements by the university could also count towards filling the diversity requirement.

The proposal of a diversity requirement met some resistance among faculty.

“There are many more ways to encourage diversity on campus, to encourage sensitivity to issues… many ways of encouraging [that], but seeing the curriculum as the vehicle to do this, we open ourselves up to all kinds of problems,” Professor Charles King, from the government department, said.

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Later this month, the Academics Working Group plans to release its first proposals for how Georgetown can improve diversity in its curriculum. The group, one of three diversity working groups formed by President DeGioia last spring after The Hoya‘s April Fools’ Issues prompted a broad discussion of diversity at Georgetown, is geared toward determining what Georgetown is lacking in its course offerings with regards to diversity. Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs of the group, said its recommendations will probably include recommendations for new course requirements.

The group has been working to examine how Georgetown’s curriculum offerings compare to peer schools’ and form suggestions for how Georgetown can improve their requirements in ethnic studies since the Spring of 2009. Over the summer, they compared the curriculum at Georgetown to that of schools with similar rankings to determine where Georgetown needed to enhance diversity in its course offerings.

The group is co-chaired by Veronica Salles Reese, the Director for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Professor Eusebio Mujal-Leon of the Government Department and began as small discussion groups among students that were loosely overseen by Provost James O’Donnell. Duyen Bui (SFS ’10), who acts as a facilitator for student discussions and Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs, were the two students mainly responsible for gathering student input on how to increase diversity in the curriculum.

The graphs above show the results of their research. Points were allotted to Georgetown and its peer institutions based on their course offerings. The University of Maryland-College Park was one of the institutions with a model curriculum for ethnic studies. They examined their top institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, finding that each has a much more diverse curriculum than Georgetown. As the graph shows, Georgetown is at the bottom compared to its peers, and is the only school that offers only a minor in African American studies with no general education requirements or majors in any of the three diversity areas.

Bui said that based on these findings, one question became obvious to the whole group: “If we’re one of the top international institutions, why are we so behind?”

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Georgetown isn’t the alone among area schools concerned about its levels of diversity. Last Friday, University President Steven Knapp announced two efforts to increase the number of non-Caucasian students at George Washington University: a President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion, and the creation of a senior administrative position to improve minority access to education and diversity among university faculty, the associate provost for diversity and inclusion.

Interestingly, when Knapp made this announcement before the board of trustees, he said that the goal of these new initiatives was to respond to the demographic shift among American students by way of increasing diversity at GWU.

“The way demographics in the United States are developing right now, if you’re not reaching out to all parts of America then you’re really not going to have the kind of students, the kind of experiences and the kind of talents you need to be a successful institution,” the GW Hatchet reported Knapp said.

At Georgetown, meanwhile, diversity initiatives are not just a response to low rates of enrollment by minority students, but to concerns that Georgetown’s demographic breakdown has created an unwelcoming and divided environment at Georgetown.

The ethnic breakdown of Georgetown and GWU are fairly comparable. The most recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that 65 percent of Georgetown students were white, 6 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 7 percent were Black/African-American, and 9 percent were Asian, Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. Five percent did not list an ethnicity and 9 percent were non-residents of the U.S.

At GWU, data showed that 58 percent of its students were white, 7 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 7 percent were Black/African-American, and 10 percent were Asian, Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. Thirteen percent did not list an ethnicity and 6 percent were non-residents of the U.S.

The turnout was terrible, but the content was great.

That was Admissions and Recruitment Working Group Co-Chair Ryan Wilson’s (COL ’12) assessment of today’s open meeting about the recommendations that his working group released last week.

Just ten people attended, most of whom were already involved in the working group’s endeavors, but a few outsiders provided helpful critiques of the working group’s draft of recommendations to the University. (The draft includes suggestions such as adding a diversity-oriented option to the Georgetown application’s essay question and diversifying campus groups like Blue and Gray and GAAP).

Katerina Kulagina (GRD ’09), for example, the Associate Director of Admissions for the MSB’s Executive Degree Programs, asked about diversity of Georgetown’s own undergraduate admissions staff. Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jaime Briseno replied that of the 15 or so people working in admissions, he and Assistant Director Kamilah Holder (SFS ’02) were the only two non-white staff members.

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The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO

In a campuswide e-mail yesterday evening, the Office of the Provost announced that the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group has put together a draft proposal for changes to Georgetown’s recruitment process.

The changes, which are meant to encourage a more diverse student body, are not official, and the “plan for implementation” of any changes will not arrive until January 2010, after community comment. However, the e-mail, signed by Provost James O’Donnell and Vice President for Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny, did indicate that the suggestions would be “immensely helpful” to the University’s ongoing recruitment of the Class of 2014.

Suggestions for altering the admissions and recruitment process, according to the nineteen-page working group report (PDF) provided by link in the e-mail, include, among other things:

• Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
• Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
• Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
• Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
• Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.

These proposed changes are aimed at increasing campus diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The report notes that relative to peer universities, Georgetown has a very low attendance yield among its accepted minority applicants.

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