A college and university consortium that advances diversity in higher education has received a $5.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The , which 乐播传媒 College joined as a lead institution in 2015, will use the five-year grant to accelerate efforts to diversify the faculties at its participating colleges and universities.

Nina Hagel is a lecturer in politics and one of 乐播传媒’ four C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

The grant from the New York City-based foundation will also broaden C3鈥檚 reach beyond its lead liberal arts colleges 鈥� Middlebury, 乐播传媒, Connecticut, and Williams 鈥� and its partner research universities, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, and the University of Chicago.

鈥淛ust a few years into our association with C3, we鈥檙e seeing tangible benefits from this innovative program,鈥� said 乐播传媒 President Clayton Spencer.

鈥溊植ゴ� students from underrepresented groups have gotten a taste of graduate-level academics thanks to C3 fellowships. The consortium has introduced us to bright young teacher-scholars from diverse backgrounds whose experiences and perspectives make our faculty even more creative.

鈥淎nd, of course, the exchange of ideas and forging of relationships with our C3 partners has been invaluable. We are convinced at 乐播传媒 of the formative value of diversity at every level, and our participation in C3 is a powerful tool for advancing diversity.鈥�

“We are convinced at 乐播传媒 of the formative value of diversity at every level, and our participation in C3 is a powerful tool for advancing diversity.”

Reaching both students and faculty from backgrounds underrepresented on U.S. campuses, C3 bases its work, in part, on strengthening ties between small liberal arts colleges like 乐播传媒 and the partner universities, which are so-called Research I (R1) schools. This benefits both students from the small schools who are considering university postgraduate programs, and university postdocs drawn to teaching in the liberal arts environment.

鈥淭he mutual exposure between the universities and the liberal arts schools has presented a terrific opportunity for all concerned,鈥� says Kathryn Low, interim vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at 乐播传媒. With a particular need to enhance faculty diversity at those small schools, Low says, C3 helps introduce the residential liberal arts model 鈥� with its opportunities for strong student-faculty relationships and for involvement across the breadth of academic life 鈥� to scholars steeped in the R1 environment.

Kathryn Graff Low is acting dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs during 2017-18. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

For students, the C3 Undergraduate Fellowship Program benefits rising juniors and seniors who attend any of the 28 colleges and universities in the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers Consortium. (LADO co-founded C3 with the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School.) Since 2014, nine 乐播传媒 students have received C3 fellowships, supporting academic experiences at the partner universities.

Meanwhile, C3 funding and programming have steered young postdocs to faculty positions at the LADO schools (although that programming is about to change, as explained below). At 乐播传媒 there are four C3 Postdoctoral Fellows. Coming to the college after attaining their terminal degrees at partner universities, they are Nina Hagel, of the politics department, and Hoang Tran, education, both from Berkeley; and from Columbia, Ian Shin, history, and Rohan Sud, philosophy.

Shown with his dog Archie, Rohan Sud is a member of the philosophy faculty and one of four C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at 乐播传媒 in 2016鈥�17. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

鈥淭he C3 postdocs have brought exciting new areas of inquiry to the curriculum, such as Asian American history and the politics of authenticity,鈥� says Kerry O鈥橞rien, assistant dean of the faculty. 鈥淎nd the nature of the post-doc position has given them time to teach, advise thesis writers and other students, but also to pursue their own research.鈥�

乐播传媒 began participating in LADO in 2013. C3 is one of a variety of avenues 乐播传媒 uses to enrich diversity: For instance, Mellon funding also supports the college鈥檚 Diversity and Faculty Renewal Program, which supports young postdocs through a year of curriculum development, research, advising and teaching, after which they鈥檙e promoted to a tenure-track position.

Both the Mellon Diversity and the C3 fellows are 鈥渕entored, and learn the liberal arts and the way we work at 乐播传媒,鈥� Low explains. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been good to have these superb scholars on board. It has further diversified our faculty, and students have found these postdocs wonderful to work with.鈥�

鈥淥ne thing that has truly impressed me is how thoughtful they are about their research and teaching,鈥� Krista Aronson agrees. An associate professor of psychology, Aronson mentors the C3 fellows.

鈥淭hey put a lot of care into developing their classes and related student work, such as thesis advising. They also bring a rich array of topics, classes and perspectives to campus that we otherwise wouldn’t have.鈥�

Through the new Mellon grant, the Postdoctoral Fellowships will be replaced with C3 Professorships that support up to two years of tenure-track positions in the humanities. With a minimum of 16 such positions to be allocated across all of the LADO colleges, two C3 professors will come to 乐播传媒 and to each of the three other lead liberal arts schools.

A 2016 symposium on Early Modern literature that brought new scholars from underrepresented backgrounds to campus was part of 乐播传媒’s New Scholars series, which C3 is adapting in conjunction with the Mellon grant. Jose Villagrana, second panelist from right, is now a Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Fellow at 乐播传媒. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College).

By putting recipients directly onto the tenure track, Low explains, the new approach gives a sense of security to both the C3 beneficiaries and the institutions that take them on. 鈥淚f you can offer these talented graduate students or recent grads a permanent position right up front, that鈥檚 better for them. And it鈥檚 better for us institutionally, because we鈥檙e more likely to have this person permanently.

鈥淚n terms of diversifying the liberal arts colleges, I think C3 felt that hiring someone right into a tenure-track line would be more successful.鈥�

In other changes related to the grant, graduates of any institution 鈥� not just the four partner universities 鈥� will now be eligible for C3-supported positions at LADO colleges.

Based on a model pioneered by 乐播传媒, C3 is also introducing a New Scholar Series to fund opportunities to bring emerging underrepresented scholars to campus for talks or symposia that speak to dynamic areas of their disciplines. The 乐播传媒 series, which began in 2016 with the symposium “New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture,” puts visiting scholars together with 乐播传媒 faculty and students in a variety of academic activities.

That series joins a slate of opportunities聽鈥� as the name of the consortium states聽鈥� to create connections among undergrads, faculty and graduate students at the LADO schools and the four research universities. Highlighting its programming are C3 Summits that bring together undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty members, diversity officers, deans, and presidents to focus on the program鈥檚 mission and goals.

In 2015, 乐播传媒 hosted the second C3 Summit, designed to bring together underrepresented students from LADO institutions and graduate students from the partner universities. Williams hosted the 2017 event and Middlebury will host the next in the series in November 2018.

C3, Low says, 鈥渉as been very productive for 乐播传媒 in many ways. It has been a success here.鈥�

The consortium was launched in 2012 with funding from the Mellon Foundation. The new grant, which began Oct. 1 and supports the program through 2022, will bring the foundation鈥檚 commitment to the program to $10.9 million over a decade.

When talk turns to achieving greater access to U.S. higher education, the question is often framed as how more students can get a college degree.

This weekend at 乐播传媒, a national conference will look at a different access point and ask different questions.

Questions such as: How can higher-ed institutions help aspiring young scholars from underrepresented groups gain access to the professoriate at U.S. colleges like 乐播传媒?

And, in the context of student learning, why is this goal central to the mission of 乐播传媒 and similar colleges?

The gathering is the , and 乐播传媒 is hosting the event as a lead member of C3, whose other members are Connecticut, Middlebury, and Williams colleges and Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley.

The three-day program will draw some 200 U.S. undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and senior college administrators to tackle the theme “Practicing Communities:聽The Transformative Power of Race in the Academy.”

To 乐播传媒, they’ll bring their collective best efforts to address race and the pursuit of graduate school; at the same time, the summit will create real-time mentoring and networking opportunities for the younger participants.

Crystal Williams, the chair of this year’s C3 Summit Planning Committee, is an associate vice president and chief diversity officer at 乐播传媒, as well as a professor of English and noted poet.

Since her arrival in 2013, Williams and her staff in the Office of Intercultural Education have deployed new programs to support diversity and inclusion at 乐播传媒, many of which are student-facing.

And if those programs support the student experience, it seems appropriate on the eve of the C3 Summit to talk with Williams about how a more diverse faculty helps to advance student learning.

To support that goal at 乐播传媒, the college received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and received another Mellon grant of $400,000 in the college’s capacity as a lead C3 college.

Crystal Williams, associate vice president and chief diversity officer at 乐播传媒, chairs the C3 Summit Planning Committee. (Leah Nash)

Q. Twenty-two percent of 乐播传媒 students are U.S. underrepresented minorities. On the 乐播传媒 faculty, 15.4 percent of 209 professors are underrepresented minorities. Is what C3 might do for 乐播传媒 (and other institutions) a numbers question 鈥� making the number of faculty of color at least comparable to student representation? Or is that too simplistic?

A: That 1:1 argument is both far too simplistic and it is dangerous. It very quickly leads us to a question of quotas. And quotas are absolutely not what we鈥檙e focused on, what we aspire to achieve, or what aligns to the historic mission of the institution.

The importance of racial, cultural, and social diversity within any group of people, and especially any institution of higher education, has to do with the very definition of excellence.

At a college like 乐播传媒, the intellectual endeavor is enriched when many different kinds of people are engaged in the production and investigation of knowledge. That鈥檚 the first point.

“The true power of difference is that we learn we can and should learn from everyone.”

It is also true that faculty and staff are role models 鈥� for every student. And, as it is important for students from underrepresented groups to have regular and substantive interaction with people who share similar backgrounds and experiences, it is also important that they have regular and substantive interaction with people who do not share those backgrounds and experiences.

This is also true for white students, first-generation-to-college students, LGBTQ+ identified students聽鈥� all students. The true power of difference is that we learn we can and should learn from everyone.

So, though the 1:1 equation is easy to make, it points us to an incomplete and overly simple view of why diversity is important 鈥� and to whom it is important. The mission and history of this institution, in particular, suggest that we should be at the vanguard of this particular effort.

Q: You have said, in outlining the goals of C3, that when professors and students answer questions together, those questions and answers are 鈥渋nextricably linked to our cultural, social, gendered, racialized selves…. The more diverse the people are who ask those questions, the more complete, exciting and dynamic the resulting knowledge is.鈥�

This statement emphasizes the role of a professor鈥檚 self-identity in the classroom. Has that changed in the last generation, how a professor鈥檚 鈥渟elf鈥� supports learning and teaching?

A: Yes. In many ways we are still working towards the acknowledgement of the whole person as professor.

There are disciplines that actively train scholars to attempt to divorce their personal selves/histories/cultures from their intellectual selves, which has always seemed counterintuitive to me 鈥� and impossible, in many ways.

Increasingly, however, institutions are thinking about the whole student, the whole person, and the contingencies related to whole personhood must also be reflected in how we think about, serve, and support our faculty.

For instance, we have begun to think and act collectively in support of faculty with families, which is a whole-person concern. So while we have many improvements to make in this regard, that the question arises 鈥� having to do with faculty availability during certain hours or days in relation to their larger selves 鈥� is important.

In this effort, we have a long way to go.

Q: A 乐播传媒 professor recently talked about her path to the professoriate. In high school, she was told she was not college material. She graduated in the bottom three of her high school class (not the bottom third, bottom three!).

This kind of diversity (socio-economic / first generation) . Do you see something distinctive about what a professor who occupies this definition of diversity 鈥� a person who was never on the 鈥渢rack鈥� to college, let alone to graduate school and the professoriate 鈥� can give to students?

“When people understand that there are no identity-based strictures for what they or other people can accomplish, they become strong advocates for a kind of fundamental and automatic inclusion.”

A: Yes. Absolutely. As I said before, it is important that students 鈥� and all students, first-generation-to-college students as well as students who come from multiple generations of college graduates 鈥� understand that people who are in the professoriate come from many types of backgrounds. That is the normative frame that we would be wise to use because it is this frame that opens all students to the idea of possibility 鈥� both for themselves and for others.

When people understand that there are no identity-based strictures for what they or other people can accomplish, they become strong advocates for a kind of fundamental and automatic inclusion.

Students should “understand that people who are in the professoriate come from many types of backgrounds,” Williams says. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

Beyond 乐播传媒, they don鈥檛 hesitate, as managers, to hire people who look or speak very differently than they. As teachers, they don鈥檛 hesitate to require the best from each of their students. In boardrooms, they advocate the kind of rigorous inquiry that requires diversity of thought and experience.

In short, their belief that our differences are a source of mutual power has an incredible impact on their lives and on our collective.

So, yes, it is important that she is among us 鈥� and willing to share her experience. In addition to her work in the classroom around whatever disciplinary questions she鈥檚 training students to ask, she is also doing a different, deeply important type of teaching that has the ability to transform any host of endeavors her students undertake.

as not when 鈥渆verybody feels good all of the time. And I鈥檓 not particularly interested in trying to make a community in which everybody says the right thing all of the time, or in which everybody has the ‘right’ answer.鈥� Instead, you said, 鈥榮uccess鈥� is when everyone feels respected, included, valued, and empowered enough in this 鈥渃ommon endeavor鈥� to 鈥渟peak up and help create change鈥� when needed.

How does having a more diverse faculty specifically help to create this kind of 乐播传媒 community?

A. When there exists diversity of experience and thought, so too exists differences of opinion.

“A diverse faculty helps the institution continue to push forward, ask difficult questions, and not rest on its laurels.”

Engaging in productive dialog and action with people of differing opinions towards a common endeavor provides a very important model for students. And, in the world we live in, we need more models of civil discourse, productive disagreement, and collective action.

But also, a diverse faculty helps the institution continue to push forward, ask difficult questions, and not rest on its laurels. Again, diversity of thought and experience is a catalyst for creating, nurturing, and sustaining a community of people who must work together towards, if nothing else, the educational goals we鈥檝e set for ourselves.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 乐播传媒 looks forward to advancing broad diversity among its faculty. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

How do students benefit from a college faculty that represents a broad diversity of experiences and perspectives?

Crystal Williams, chief diversity officer at 乐播传媒 College, suggests that one answer lies in an essential role of the teacher. Faculty members ask questions, she says 鈥� questions whose answers the professors and students explore together.

Those questions “are inextricably linked to our cultural, social, gendered, racialized selves,” Williams explains. “The more diverse the people are who ask those questions, the more complete, exciting and dynamic the resulting knowledge is.

Crystal Williams, associate vice president and chief diversity officer at 乐播传媒. (Leah Nash)

“So diversifying the faculty is imperative to ensure that we remain as excellent a faculty in the 21st century as we were in the 20th, and doing so requires that we include as many voices and as many questions as possible.”

乐播传媒 recently received two grants, totaling more than $1.4 million, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance faculty diversity, both on 乐播传媒’ own campus and as part of a collaborative effort with other institutions. The Mellon Foundation defines diversity broadly, including first-generation college students and those who have overcome adversity to launch a college career.

“These grants position 乐播传媒 to transform its faculty and ensure that we become a leader in the liberal arts sector with regard to faculty diversification,” says Williams.

The five-year, $1 million Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal grant will support a four-part strategy to put more promising candidates from underrepresented groups on the tenure track at 乐播传媒 during the next five years, as well as to build the college’s long-term capacity for recruiting superior faculty from all walks of life.

Emerging as 乐播传媒 anticipates the retirements of a substantial proportion of its current faculty 鈥� about a third during the next decade 鈥� this initiative explicitly links the recruiting of diverse candidates for tenure-track positions to faculty retirements.

An additional $419,360 comes to 乐播传媒 from Mellon as the college becomes a leadership institution in the Creating Connections Consortium, a national partnership designed to advance faculty diversity. C3 brings together undergrads, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty and administrators to create mentoring and research relationships, and to better prepare young scholars for careers in liberal arts colleges.

Matt Auer, dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs at 乐播传媒. (Sarah Crosby/乐播传媒 College)

乐播传媒 is the fourth liberal arts college, and sixth lead institution overall, in C3. It joins Connecticut, Middlebury and Williams colleges and two research institutions, the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University.

Among other initiatives, the consortium provides fellowships intended to give young scholars from underrepresented groups a feel for the possibilities in academe. Undergraduate fellowships support students 鈥� three from 乐播传媒 in 2014 and two in 2015 鈥� through a summer of graduate-level studies at Berkeley or Columbia.

A second C3 fellowship program enables postdoctoral fellows, aka “postdocs,” from Columbia and Berkeley to teach and do research at C3’s liberal arts colleges, exposing them to the rewards of working in an academic setting distinctly different from the research university. 乐播传媒 will host two or three postdocs in 2016 and 2017.

“Part of the idea is for us to deepen our understanding about diverse groups of postdocs in particular fields, and have the experience of working with them here,” says Matt Auer, the college’s dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs. “At the same time, another part is to get the postdocs, who are coming from great institutions, to recognize the value of a career at a liberal arts college.”

C3 also holds a yearly summit, a national gathering of students, faculty and leaders of the consortium institutions, that 乐播传媒 will host in November.

Receiving Mellon grants that are “focused right on the bull’s-eye of diversity and inclusiveness,” Auer says, “is very much in keeping with 乐播传媒’ basic mission, which is to learn from our differences and derive strength from that.”

Eileen Lam ’15 of New York City is shown at Columbia University. A fellowship from the Creating Connections Consortium enabled Lam to spend summer 2014 experiencing graduate-level work at Columbia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

The Mellon Foundation specifically supports initiatives involving the humanities and the “humanistic social sciences” (that is, social and behavioral disciplines that explore the human experience through methods akin to the humanities, rather than the scientific method).

Through these grants, 乐播传媒 seeks to encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented groups including African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, Asian Americans; first-generation college students; individuals who have followed nontraditional pathways to college owing to exceptional talent and motivation in the face of adversity; and individuals with a demonstrated commitment to incorporating diverse backgrounds and perspectives to learning, scholarship, service and academic leadership.

More about the Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Program

The program will, first, make 乐播传媒 more attractive to strong candidates and, second, better enable existing faculty to find and recruit candidates. Here’s a summary of the four strategies supported by the grant:

• Recruitment of up to six postdocs through one- or two-year postdoctoral teaching and research fellowships attached to tenure-track positions;
• Creation of a Diversity Advocate Team to help build capacity among faculty to more effectively recruit and retain a broadly diverse faculty. This faculty team will undertake programming tailored to subject areas, and will assist or serve on search committees. This element of the program is designed to have an impact across disciplines;
• Outreach and travel to develop recruiting networks through attending appropriate meetings, conferences, etc.;
• A New Scholars Program engaging young academics from underrepresented groups through academic programming at 乐播传媒, such as dialogues and symposia.

Students benefit from a college faculty that represents a broad diversity of experiences and perspectives. Here, 乐播传媒 junior advisers and residence coordinators participate in a mediation training session in August 2014. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

Thanks to the Faculty Diversity and Renewal Program, the college can offer “a postdoctoral experience where they’ll get to know the institution, won’t have as high a teaching load and can get quite a bit of scholarship done, which is hard when you’re in your first couple of years as a tenure-track faculty member,” Auer explains.

These postdocs, he adds, will “experience a superb liberal arts college that takes scholarship seriously 鈥� and where students are part of the intellectual environment. Students are collaborators and are steeped in the faculty’s own research. That’s a model that the postdocs will frankly be hard-pressed to find at many research universities.”

The Diversity Advocate Team, meanwhile, will enable departments to become “more strategic in how they think about diversity in their fields, and how they can scout a more diverse candidate pool well in advance of actually trying to recruit those candidates,” Auer says.

“The work of building the faculty should be strategic and aggressive” when it comes to broadly representing humanity, Williams says. “We can no longer just sit back patiently and wait for the applications to come in without regard to best practices in the field.

“If you want an extraordinary faculty comprised of the nation’s most diversely cast thinkers and creators, we have to develop much more active recruitment models. And we have to activate the faculty in new and exciting ways.”

“I can’t wait to see what our faculty looks like in five years,” Williams adds. “What lies ahead of us is incredibly exciting.”

Eileen Lam ’15 of New York City is shown at Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library. A fellowship from the Creating Connections Consortium enabled Lam to spend the summer experiencing graduate-level work at Columbia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

Eileen Lam ’15 always thought that graduate school would be hard, and so it is.

But she now knows that it’s manageable. And what she didn’t expect was how much she’d enjoy one of the harder challenges she encountered doing graduate-level work at Columbia University: statistical analysis.

Lam, a Chinese and politics double major from New York City, did not need a time machine to experience academe, graduate-style. Instead, she and two other 乐播传媒 students received fellowships to spend most of summer 2014 living 鈥� and working 鈥� the way grad students do.

Providing the fellowships was the Creating Connections Consortium, a group of colleges and universities striving to increase faculty diversity at private liberal arts institutions. The consortium, aka C3, seeks to encourage students, particularly from groups underrepresented in academe, to take the educational journey that can lead to a faculty career.

“I wanted to see what it would be like to be a graduate student, in all ways,” says Lam, whose Columbia experience included research, which she designed, into political participation among Asian Americans.

The C3 Undergraduate Fellowship, she says, “really helped me see that I like research and I have what it takes to be a Ph.D. candidate.”

Nicole Bermudez ’16 of Lake Forest, Calif., worked with a professor and grad students in Columbia University’s political science department. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

Middlebury, Williams and Connecticut colleges launched C3 in 2012 on the strength of a $4.7 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Today, C3 comprises those three schools and 18 more, including 乐播传媒, belonging to the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers consortium (LADO); and two research universities, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley.

C3 initiatives enable postdoctoral researchers, as well as undergrads, to encounter the possibilities up close and personal. In a program complementing the undergraduate fellowships, C3 fellowships enable cohorts of emerging scholars from Columbia and Berkeley to teach and do research as postdocs at the three lead colleges, plus a fourth LADO school to be named in early 2015 (乐播传媒 has applied).

C3 “is thinking about communities of people who have traditionally been on the periphery of the academy, and about more deeply embedding them in the very heart of what we鈥檙e trying to do,” says Crystal Williams, 乐播传媒’ chief diversity officer and a member of the consortium’s executive committee.

“Part of the goal is to introduce our undergraduates to graduate school and to the idea of the professoriate. And part is to get graduate students really thinking about the liberal arts model as a place where they can be highly effective teachers, scholars and change agents.”

The need to draw more faculty from diverse backgrounds is pressing. According to U.S. Department of Education figures, of the roughly 750,000 full-time teaching faculty at all categories of U.S. colleges and universities in fall 2011, 79 percent were white (and of those, 44 percent were men).

The 乐播传媒 trio was the largest contingent from a single institution to receive C3 Undergraduate Fellowships last summer. Also attending Columbia was a second politics major, Nicole Bermudez ’16 of Lake Forest, Calif. She investigated shifting perspectives on party politics among indigenous populations in Ecuador.

Like Lam, Bermudez ended her summer with a new sense of possibility. “Definitely, receiving a Ph.D. requires a lot of work and it鈥檚 very difficult. But I learned that it鈥檚 doable,” says Bermudez, who is Hispanic. “We had to be very self-motivated.”

乐播传媒’ third C3 fellow was Elliott Evers ’15, a math major from Helena, Mont., who did research in numerical analysis at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

乐播传媒’ third C3 fellow was Elliott Evers ’15, a math major from Helena, Mont. Evers, who is Native American, did research in numerical analysis at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, on the Berkeley campus. Generously supported by C3, the fellows enjoyed a jam-packed eight weeks as they:

鈥⒙犅� 聽conducted and presented research relating to their 乐播传媒 majors, and assisted with research that their faculty and postdoc mentors were doing;
鈥⒙犅� 聽took courses in GRE prep and such topics as quantitative research;
鈥⒙犅� 聽and attended workshops exploring how to get into, and succeed in, grad school, including sessions with multicultural graduate students who shared their own experiences.

For all three, the robust mentoring from faculty, graduate students and even C3 officers was one of the most valuable aspects of the experience. Working with mentor Loyola Marymount math professor Herbert Medina, Evers initially worried that he might be a burden 鈥� but the experience was just the opposite, thanks to Medina’s infectious enthusiasm for the work. “He鈥檚 a great mentor,” says Evers. “He really cared.”

Lam’s faculty mentor was Robert Y. Shapiro, a prominent political scientist. “We study his books in class,” she says. She was impressed by the attention he gave to the mentees’ work. “He would read these 25-page papers multiple times to make sure that we were going in the right direction and to point us toward areas we should look at.”

At Columbia, the C3 fellows in politics worked closely with Amber Spry, a doctoral candidate in American politics and designated mentor. With Shapiro, Spry taught the “Principles of Quantitative Research” course 鈥� an accelerated version of a course taken by first-year doctoral students 鈥� and was a valuable counselor.

“She was a great resource for all questions I had, whether they were related to the project or just more broadly about the lifestyle of an academic,” says Lam. “Amber is a true inspiration.”

“Relationships are an important element in scholarly growth,” says Spry. “My best teachers did more than provide classroom instruction 鈥� they helped me find the tools I needed to reach my goals, and taught me how to learn well along the way. I like to believe that I’m modeling something similar for my students.”

The fellows’ summer takeaways included practical insights 鈥� for instance, in picking a graduate program, the importance of finding not just the right institution but the right professor.

But Lam, Bermudez and Evers experienced deeper inspirations as well. Evers savored the opportunity to do theoretical research. “If you’re at a place for two months working on a single problem, and you find something interesting and you want to explore it further, that鈥檚 what makes it fun,” he says. “That鈥檚 what academe is all about.

The Creating Connections Consortium is “a holistically beneficial project,” says Crystal Williams, associate vice president and chief diversity officer at 乐播传媒. (Leah Nash)

“There鈥檚 no algorithm to answer these problems. You’ve got to be creative.”

Beyond the C3-specific mentoring relationships with faculty and grad students, there were ample opportunities for the all-important networking, thanks in large part to the symposia that ended the experiences.

“We made a lot of connections with people who did different things with their Ph.D.’s,” says Lam. “That was cool.”

If The Leadership Alliance and other programs share C3’s goals, Williams points out that the consortium’s structure and approach are distinctive. In particular, the linkage between two disparate educational segments 鈥� Research 1 universities and liberal arts schools 鈥� is unusual and, as Williams says, exciting.

The R1s hope that their Ph.D.’s will find teaching positions at rigorous and rewarding institutions. And with a tidal demographic shift looming as baby boomer professors approach retirement, liberal arts schools like 乐播传媒 are determined that their successors be as diverse as the society their students will graduate into.

Both intellectually and ethically, with its founding emphasis on inclusion, 乐播传媒 is a good fit for C3, says Williams, who first became involved with the LADO as dean for institutional diversity at Reed College, and now represents the consortium on the C3 executive board. (She brought a 乐播传媒 contingent, including President Clayton Spencer and eight students, to a C3 summit at Connecticut College last spring.)

Still fresh in the collective 乐播传媒 consciousness is the term “beautiful cycle,” which Commencement speaker Tommy Holmberg ’13 used to describe how generations of 乐播传媒 students perpetuate the best of 乐播传媒.

But the term suits the Creating Connections Consortium just as nicely, as it equips undergrads for grad school, postdocs to teach undergrads and, hopefully, campuses large and small to be better support diversity. “It鈥檚 a holistically beneficial project,” says Williams.

乐播传媒’ C3 fellows are still pondering their post-graduation options, but all three came away convinced that graduate school would work for them. Convinced, too, of the fellowship’s potential for widening access to grad school and the professoriate.

“This program really does show that it鈥檚 not as difficult as you would imagine,” says Lam. “I think a lot of people are frightened. They say, ‘Five to seven more years of schooling? What could you possibly be doing?’

“But there鈥檚 so much to explore.”