Crystal A. Williams, associate vice president for strategic initiatives and professor of English at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 2013, has been appointed associate provost for diversity and inclusion at Boston University, effective October 2017.

Serving as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ chief diversity officer, Williams has led the strategic expansion of programs to support institution-wide diversity and inclusion efforts for students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and has overseen the Office of Equity and Diversity, the Office of Intercultural Education, and the Multifaith Chaplaincy.

Crystal Williams, associate vice president for strategic initiatives, chief diversity officer, and professor of English at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, has been appointed associate provost for diversity and inclusion at Boston University, effective October 2017. (Photograph by Brian Fitzgerald)

“Crystal has created strong institutional momentum toward fundamental, mission-driven goals. Her contributions at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ have touched many areas of college life, particularly the student experience and faculty hiring,â€� said President Clayton Spencer. “Crystal is remarkably talented in program design, and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will continue to benefit from the strategies and programs she has put in place. I am grateful for the vision and creativity with which she has approached this vitally important work.â€�

“I am proud of what ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has accomplished as we seek to ensure that our practices, policies, and programs support both our mission and our institutional goals,â€� Williams said. “Today, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is better able to provide members of our community with the tools they need to enact and embody the values that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ espouses.â€�

Williams added, “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is such a wonderful community. I have enjoyed working with our students, staff, faculty, alumni, and trustees. I have learned how very important relationships are in this community — important not only to the personal endeavor, but to the collective one, as well. It’s been an honor to work in collaboration with so many wonderful and loving people.â€�

Williams has led efforts to translate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ institutional vision and priorities into sustainable strategies for supporting and strengthening the college’s mission-based culture of inclusiveness.

In announcing Williams’ appointment to the newly created Boston University position, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Jean Morrison said, “I am thrilled that we have succeeded in recruiting Crystal Williams to Boston University. Crystal has demonstrated her ability to work collaboratively and effectively to develop significant offices that promote, support, and advance an institutional culture of inclusion.�

Among various constituencies, including faculty and students, Williams has led efforts to translate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ institutional vision and priorities into sustainable strategies for supporting and strengthening the college’s mission-based culture of inclusiveness. As a thought leader and adviser, Williams has worked closely with colleagues to develop principled structures, practices, and programs to foster inclusive campus communities.

In the student realm, Williams expanded and reorganized the staffing of the Office of Intercultural Education, which develops and oversees student programming focused on diversity and inclusion. In 2014, the OIE relocated from a building on the campus periphery to a newly renovated and more central space in Chase Hall.

In addition, Williams has been the driving force behind significant new programming that has measurably improved the student experience, including Bobcat First!, supporting students who are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. According to a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ survey, Bobcat First! has enhanced first-generation students’ overall sense of community and their ability to develop friendships, adjust to academic demands, and understand faculty expectations.

Other student programs developed under Williams’ tenure include The Dinner Table, a prompt-based dinner and storytelling program that also has yielded increased college satisfaction rates among students; Lingua Franca, a structured forum for exploring important social topics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½; SPARQ, peer mentoring, ally education, and targeted programming focused on specific LGBTQIA+ identities; and the Justice and Equity Reading Group.

Williams was part of the leadership group that conducted a major revision of new-student orientation programming, and she oversaw ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ Working Weekend, a collaboration between the Office of Equity and Diversity and the Purposeful Work initiative, which brought alumni to campus to meet, mentor, and network with students from predominantly underrepresented groups. She oversaw the creation of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Alumni Mosaic, which fosters stronger communities of alumni from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups and/or who are LGBTQIA+ identified and their allies.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students react to a storyteller during the December 2016 presentation of The Dinner Table, a prompt-based dinner program that helps students talk constructively across difference. (Andree Kehn for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

A noted leader in diversity in higher education, Williams has spoken about the imperative to diversify the professoriate at U.S. colleges. She played a pivotal role in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ decision to join the Creating Connections Consortium (C3), an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that includes partnerships between four liberal arts colleges and selected research universities. On behalf of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she served on the C3 Executive Committee, collaborating with senior leaders at other U.S. colleges and universities to develop innovative ways to address collective challenges.

In 2015, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ hosted the annual C3 Summit, attended by more than 250 participants from colleges and universities across the country, including a number of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students who were active in diversity and inclusion efforts on campus. She has served as co-chair for the Liberal Arts Diversity Officers, a consortium comprising senior diversity officers at 28 liberal arts colleges.

Williams’ leadership was instrumental in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ securing a $1 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Faculty Diversity and Renewal Grant that has supported new approaches to the hiring and retention of promising faculty from underrepresented groups. Since 2015, 13 of 25 newly hired tenure-track professors and long-term lecturers are from underrepresented groups.

The author of four volumes of poetry, Williams was one of 10 poets commissioned to write poems for the 2015 exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North at the Museum of Modern Art. A recognized thought leader on diversity in the arts, most recently Williams gave the opening keynote for the Maine Arts Commission’s annual conference, and participated in the 2016 Equity Series at the Museum of Modern Art with cultural critic Vinson Cunningham and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.

Before coming to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Williams was the inaugural dean for institutional diversity and a tenured faculty member at Reed College. Williams will continue in her role at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ through Aug. 17, 2017.

The college will undertake a search for Williams’ successor during the 2017–18 academic year. Beginning this summer and extending into the fall semester when students and faculty return, college leadership will seek input from members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community on the chief diversity officer role and parameters for the search. Meanwhile, the college is committed to ensuring continued progress and momentum on the issues and programs under Williams’ direction.

Gwen Lexow, director of Title IX and civil rights compliance in the President’s Office, will oversee the Office of Intercultural Education and the Office of Equity and Diversity for the 2017–18 academic year. Julisa De Los Santos, assistant dean in the Office of Intercultural Education, will serve as interim OIE director for the academic year, reporting to Lexow. Brittany Longsdorf, multifaith chaplain, will report to the president.

Kathy Low, interim vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, will take responsibility for the faculty-facing dimensions of the chief diversity officer role, working with colleagues to assign responsibility for active and inclusive searches, curriculum development, and oversight of the two Mellon Foundation grants relating to faculty diversity.

William Faulkner said a story must evoke “truths of the heart,” those being “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and grief.”

Each fall and winter, the semester-long Dinner Table program culminates in an evening of student storytelling that celebrates and honors those “truths of the heart.”

Sponsored by the Office of Equity and Diversity, The Dinner Table format is deceptively simple. Each Sunday evening during the semester, student participants share a meal and prompt-based conversation.

“It taps into one of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ enduring treasures: our value of community.”

Facilitated by fellow students and adults, the mealtime conversations help “students identify and discuss common themes and ideas,” says Professor of English Crystal Williams, an associate vice president for strategic initiatives who heads up the Office of Equity and Diversity.

Along the way, “they learn about ways in which they are connected to their peers that may not seem obvious at first glance.”

The program’s success — upwards of 100 students participate each semester — “suggests that it taps into one of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ enduring treasures: our value of community,” Williams says.

Below are selected stories from two recent Dinner Table storytelling evenings.

Chirayu Baral ’19 of Thane, India

Chirayu Baral grew up in Mumbai, India, a “strange and funny place where it is totally fine for a 45-year-old to live with his parents without someone cracking a joke about it.”

But Baral “wanted to do things differently,” and that meant ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Once Baral got to campus, his doting mom — who had offered to leave her job in order to spend more time with Baral before he left for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — began calling four to five times a day.

That bugged Baral. “I felt that my ship had long sailed from India, and my mom was trying to anchor it back to Mumbai.” Then one Sunday evening in Commons, Baral was looking for a place to sit but “could not find someone who knew me. I felt lost.”

Suddenly, he realized how his mom felt.

Nolan Burgos ’18 of Yonkers, N.Y.

“Have any of you ever felt alone? If you have, I feel you,” said Nolan Burgos as he began a story about friendship and heartache, and how he found comfort when it didn’t seem that anyone was there for him.

Burgos’ story centered on his best friend, Matt. The friends went out for lacrosse even though neither had ever played the sport.

“We were bad. Really bad,” Burgos said. “But it was great, because we were bad together. That motivated us.” Together, they got good. Together, they became co-captains.

Zoe Moss ’17 of Highland Park, Ill.

Zoe Moss told a study-abroad story about her and a friend’s well-planned trip from Morocco to Prague. Requiring a boat, two buses, a train, and two planes, the trip got derailed by the 2016 terrorist bombings in Brussels.

Grounded in Brussels, she noticed that her boyfriend back in the U.S. had suddenly stopped texting her.

Moss feared that he had, somehow, landed in jail, a suspicion that she shared with various ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ friends studying in various far-off locales. “So I got laughed at by people on three different continents,” she said.

Then she saw the mug shot.

Austin Sansone ’20 of New York, N.Y.

“Who here knows someone with a learning disability?” Austin Sansone asked his audience. “For those of you who don’t: Hello, I’m Austin Sansone.”

During high school, Sansone began to resent his dyslexia. When others got to learn a foreign language, he had to continue his sessions with a specialist. “Others learned Spanish. I was learning English.”

Friends would comment on how he got extra time on tests. “Without fail, they would always say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. I would do so much better if I had extra time.”

He hated it when he and the other “extra-time kids” had to leave a classroom to take their test elsewhere. But that changed in his senior year.

Nathan Dana ’17 of Boulder, Colo.

Nathan Dana got a call from his mom one day: His grandfather had cancer. “Which one? Papa, or Pop-Pop?” asked Dana.

As a boy, Dana gave his grandfathers mnemonic names. His paternal grandfather in Colorado was Papa in the Mountains. His maternal grandfather in rural Pennsylvania was Pop Pop in the Woods.

And it was Pop Pop in the Woods who had terminal cancer. During his final hospital stay, he had a picture of Dana, studying in China at the time, taped to the side of his wardrobe.

Half a world away, “that’s all I could be for him,” said Dana. “I couldn’t be anything more than a picture on a wall.”

Calvin Reedy ’17 of Wilton, Conn.

Calvin Reedy told his audience about the last day of his semester abroad. On an island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, he was sobbing.

Reedy was visiting Gorée Island, site of the House of Slaves memorial to the Atlantic slave trade. As he stood in the Door of No Return, through which slaves left the African continent, “I could not fathom the fact that I had been there after so much time,” said Reedy, the great-great-grandchild of slaves.

“Every single part of me realized that the blood that runs through my veins had gone through that door time and time again,” said Reedy. “My knees buckled, and I began to sob.”

Anna Mendonca ’18 of Lovettsville, Va.

Anna Mendonca got a laugh with her story about seeking a comfort animal. The college Health Center, she said, “does not consider loneliness adequate reasoning for getting a miniature pony as an emotional support animal.”

A pony was out, as was a dog, so “a fish was the next best thing,” she said.

She got a blue beta fish that she named Boaty McBoatfish, and despite her friends’ protests — Don’t get a fish! You’ll kill a fish! — her new pet helped fill a hole. “I liked having something to come home to.”

But then Boaty got sick.

Jesse Saffeir ’20 of Pownal, Maine

Jesse Saffeir began her story by saying that she lived in her car last year. She described sitting at an old gas station eating tuna fish and beans out of a can.

Then she went back to her childhood on a small Maine farm, “a little wooden house, next to a little wooden barn, surrounded by a lawn.” Beyond the lawn were woods. “I wondered what was out there. I had an urge to see what was in the rest of the world.”

She gave in to wanderlust as a teenager, but has since found that relentless travel has erased a traditional meaning of “home.” When someone asked, “Where do you live?” Saffeir didn’t know what to say, which was “troubling because home is central to one’s identity.”

Emily Bowen ’19 of Pasadena, Calif.

Emily Bowen took her audience back to the first day of school.

“You know what’s more awkward than peeing your pants or calling your teacher ‘Mom’ on the first day of school? Being called out for looking different than everybody around you,” said Bowen, describing a fourth-grade icebreaker that ended with Bowen’s race being noted as her unique quality.

In high school, Bowen threw herself into academics and extracurriculars, trying to create an identity that went beyond being one of her private school’s only African American students.

“And I got over that insecurity,” she said. And then came graduation.

Elle Mata ’17 of Salinas, Calif.

“I was facing one of the most difficult things I had ever faced,” Elle Mata told her audience. “Doing the laundry by myself.â€�

Mata talked humorously about taking on a maternal role in her family during her mother’s health crisis. Her mom is a woman “in constant movement. She does everything for us.” Suddenly, that responsibility became Mata’s.

When choosing a college, Mata struggled to explain that this decision was about what she wanted, not her family. She wanted to make a name for herself, even if it meant going to college all the way across the U.S.

And that didn’t sit well with her family.

Essence Hill ’17 of Chicago

As a child, Essence Hill loved ballet lessons but performing was terrifying.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she decided to give performing another shot, taking introductory ballet before progressing to an advanced modern dance course, which was intimidating.

“I’m like, you can’t do this, girl,” Hill said. But she stuck with it, and along the way has learned to embrace her own dance abilities, however imperfect.

“I have my days when I feel like the oddball out, but I just figure out how to move,” she said. “I can’t move like butter. That’s not going to happen. But I can move like jelly.â€�

Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Exeter, N.H.

The doctor took her height and weight, said Katharine Gaillard, and then showed her growth curve.

“My curve goes up like normal, then drops like a cliff,” Gaillard said. “And I realize what I’ve done to myself.”

High school had included some great experiences, including a semester at an outdoors-oriented school and a 30-day backpacking trip in Wyoming.

But as she tried to integrate all those experiences — along with trying to present herself through her college applications — Gaillard began to create a “perfect picture of Katharine Gaillard,” one partially defined by a perfect body image.

It was, she said, a “picture of a being that wouldn’t be able to exist.”

Morgan Leeson ’18 of Salem, Va.

“At age 10, my life changed, all because of some creep in a truck,� Morgan Leeson told her audience.

Morgan went through puberty at a relatively young age, which altered friendships and limited her independence, especially after two men in a pickup shouted lewd comments at her.

The neighborhood pool was “where I could always guarantee that all of my school friends would be.” But that changed, too. “Nothing puts your body on display or makes it a spectacle quite like the neighborhood pool.” It set her apart from her peers.

At age 10, “I had received this new set of rules for what felt like I had done nothing to deserve.â€�

Martin Harrison ’17 of Beachwood, Ohio

There were two Martin Harrisons, and one had to go, he told his audience.

As Harrison’s favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, once said, “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” “But I didn’t listen,” Harrison said.

When his family moved to the United Arab Emirates, Harrison decided to change his personality. He wanted to be cool. He made a list of things that cool kids did “that I did not do.”

And it worked out, sort of. “I had a great high school experience,” he said. But at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he tried the same gambit, but it didn’t work so well, and he realized that the two Martins in his head “hated each other.” So he set out to rid himself of one.

In 1901, Buffalo played host to fairgoers, stunts, and a presidential assassination — Christian Science Monitor

During the 1901 Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, anarchist assasinated President McKinley.

Professor of History Margaret Creighton grew up in Buffalo, yet “knew little about the exposition next door,” writes Christian Science Monitor staff writer Randy Dotinga. “No wonder. Almost all of the fair’s buildings have vanished, replaced by streets and elegant homes.”

Creighton fills the gap with her new book The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair.

She came up with the book idea after her students read Devil in the White City, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and asked her about other such fairs.

“Creighton’s curiosity about Buffalo’s past inspired her to dig into the fair and the epic tragedy that defined it,” Dotinga writes.

Creighton says that she soon learned “that an entire world surrounded this assassination, very rich and compelling and full of eccentric characters.â€�

Students and professors dig in deep for lessons on climate change — Portland Press Herald

The primary function of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conversation Area, writes Portland Press Herald staff writer Mary Pols, is “to serve as a research and educational laboratory for both ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students and professors.”

Case in point is Cailene Gunn ’16, whose research experiences at BMMCA with Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson led to Gunn’s job at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs.

Cailene Gunn ’16 of Granby, Conn., poses for a portrait in a marsh near ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain in August 2015. (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Pols explains that Johnson is an expert on how coastal ecosystems capture carbon emissions. These so-called blue carbon ecosystems “sequester roughly 15 times more carbon per unit area than the upland forests.”

Johnson is part of the international policy and scientific experts who come from universities, governments, and NGOs worldwide.

Our magnetic 5-year-old is not a threat to anyone — Washington Post

Over the summer, Vanessa Kalter-Long Ford ’02 and her husband Ron Ford shared their experiences, including a first-person , as parents of a young transgender child.

They did so after a May 2016 federal directive to public schools about accommodations for transgender students sparked backlash in some states.

“The national conversation about transgender people — about our daughter, Ellie — isn’t truly about bathrooms,” Vanessa and Ron write. “It is about discrimination.”

They write:

Our daughter, like thousands of transgender and gender non-conforming children, does not want special treatment. She wants to make friends, to learn, to participate in sports, to go trick-or-treating on Halloween and wear pretty dresses on her birthday.

 And, yes, she wants use the bathroom that matches her gender identity when she needs to pee. Not because that’s special treatment, but because that’s the same treatment everyone else receives. Our daughter wants to be included, just like everyone else.

10 questions with Val Smith, president of Swarthmore College — NBC10 Philadelphia

In a Q&A with NBC10 of Philadelphia, Val Smith ’75, now into her second year as president of Swarthmore College, was asked about the qualities of a good listener.

Good listening, she said, furthers the goal of making “every effort to respect the opinions and ideas of our interlocutors, even if we think we have nothing in common with them.”

There are time, she said candidly, “when I think I don’t want to listen to what other people have to say.” That’s the exact moment to “remind myself that however right I may think I am about a particular issue, there was usually always something I can learn if I let myself listen to what other people have to say.”

The result? “One’s deeply held opinion might change or be modified or gain nuance if one is able to enter into conversation with other people.”

Her poetry is much like the author herself: passionate and purposeful — Take Magazine

In a Q&A with Take Magazine, Crystal Williams talks about her work as the college’s chief diversity officer and associate vice president for strategic initiatives, then deftly switches to the meaning of a line of her poetry (she’s also a widely published poet and professor of English).

Crystal Williams is a professor of English, chief diversity officer, and associate vice president for strategic initiatives at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. (Photograph by Brian Fitzgerald)

The line is, “The heart is a beautiful monster; it nearly always survives its fate.”

Williams tells writer Alexa Harrison that “our hearts, or spirits, are our most robust qualities. They are from whence emerge our kindnesses and our travesties. So they can be both monstrous and beautiful and are often both — at once. This duality is what makes human beings, at least to me, so very interesting and compelling.”

In 2016, most students don’t have memories of 9/11 — Portland Press Herald

A Press Herald story published on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks quotes Associate Professor of English Eden Osucha, who has taught the course “Narrating 9/11 in Literature and Film.�

Associate Professor of English Eden Osucha. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The youngest ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students, barely 3 years old when 9/11 took place, “don’t have personal baggage” associated with the attacks, she tells reporter Edward Murphy.

But they do carry “cultural baggage”: the burden of comprehending all the stories of what happened that day.

At the same time, Murphy writes, “many don’t have a full understanding of the cultural landscape of America prior to the attacks because, understandably, the events of that day overshadowed the years that immediately preceded them.”

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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½?

And, in the context of student learning, why is this goal central to the mission of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and similar colleges?

The gathering is the , and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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: The Transformative Power of Race in the Academy.”

To ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, chairs the C3 Summit Planning Committee. (Leah Nash)

Q. Twenty-two percent of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students are U.S. underrepresented minorities. On the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty, 15.4 percent of 209 professors are underrepresented minorities. Is what C3 might do for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ (and other institutions) a numbers question — 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’re 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the intellectual endeavor is enriched when many different kinds of people are engaged in the production and investigation of knowledge. That’s 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 “inextricably 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.â€�

This statement emphasizes the role of a professor’s self-identity in the classroom. Has that changed in the last generation, how a professor’s “self� 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 — 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 — having to do with faculty availability during certain hours or days in relation to their larger selves — is important.

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

Q: A ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 — a person who was never on the “track� to college, let alone to graduate school and the professoriate — 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 — and all students, first-generation-to-college students as well as students who come from multiple generations of college graduates — 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 — 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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Beyond ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, they don’t hesitate, as managers, to hire people who look or speak very differently than they. As teachers, they don’t 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 — and willing to share her experience. In addition to her work in the classroom around whatever disciplinary questions she’s 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 “everybody feels good all of the time. And I’m 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.â€� Instead, you said, ‘success’ is when everyone feels respected, included, valued, and empowered enough in this “common endeavorâ€� to “speak up and help create changeâ€� when needed.

How does having a more diverse faculty specifically help to create this kind of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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’ve set for ourselves.

Crystal Williams

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Professor of English and poet Crystal Williams is featured in a PBS NewsHour story about a series of poetry readings that address and respond to paintings now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The paintings are The Migration Series, 60 small paintings by Jacob Lawrence that tell the story of the Great Migration of six million African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

Williams read her own poem, “Year After Year We Visited Alabama,â€� described by reporter Jeffrey Brown as a “gentle homage to her father.”

Williams also serves as an associate vice president at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and is the college’s chief diversity officer.

Jonathan Adler ’00

Jonathan Adler ’00

Jonathan Adler ’00, assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, continues to get media attention for his research that suggests that the way we tell our own stories — our narratives — affects our mental health.

“[Y]ou have a choice in how the narrative plays out,” he tells reporter Elizabeth Bernstein of The Wall Street Journal. “You tell the story and the story really matters.â€�

As Bernstein writes, “[P]eople who frame events in their lives — even negative ones — in positive ways have better mental health, and those who frame events in negative ways have poorer mental well-being.”

Adler also speaks about his work for a (at the 17:23 mark).

Ahmed Abdel Khalek ’16

Ahmed Abdel Khalek ’16

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ squash champion Ahmed Abdel Khalek ’16 appeared in the popular Sports Illustrated feature “Faces in the Crowd,” in the magazine’s April 6 issue.

Abdel Khalek, of Cairo, Egypt, won the College Squash Association men’s individual championship on March 1.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Theater

From left, Colette Girardin ’16 of East Moriches, N.Y., Ciaran Walsh ’15 of Washington, D.C., and Hanna Allerton ’15 of New York City perform in the play “The Summer in Gossensassâ€� in Gannett Theater. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The theater website On Stage says that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has one of the most underrated theater departments in New England.

“Aside from being one of the best liberal arts and science colleges in the country, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ offers a wonderful theatre program as well.”

Shirl Penney ’99

In a Forbes Q&A with Shirl Penney ’99, CEO and founder of Dynasty Financial Partners, reporter Dan Simon notes that Penney has developed “a game-changing integrated platform of technology and services for top independent financial advisors.”

Penney, whose personal story was told in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Magazine in 2005, left a major brokerage house five years ago to create Dynasty.

Describing the intensity of building a company, Penney tells Simon that “when you go out on your own, your business card has just your name on it. Period. And to a certain extent what you did in the past does not matter.”

“Raising capital, attracting people to make your vision theirs, convincing clients to come on board early, managing expectations at home, and not wavering on your belief in yourself can be difficult….Then, when you launch, it gets harder.”

Kristen Kelliher ’16

Kristen Kelliher ’16 of Norwich, Vt., has climbed all the highest peaks in the U.S., the last being Alaska’s Denali at age 18, making her the youngest female to “highpointâ€� all 50 states.

WCSH-TV’s 207 news magazine interviewed Kelliher earlier in May.

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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students received fellowships to spend most of summer 2014 living — and working — 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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, 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 (ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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’re trying to do,” says Crystal Williams, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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’s very difficult. But I learned that it’s doable,” says Bermudez, who is Hispanic. “We had to be very self-motivated.”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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:

•    conducted and presented research relating to their ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ majors, and assisted with research that their faculty and postdoc mentors were doing;
•    took courses in GRE prep and such topics as quantitative research;
•    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 — but the experience was just the opposite, thanks to Medina’s infectious enthusiasm for the work. “He’s 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 — an accelerated version of a course taken by first-year doctoral students — 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 — 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 — 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’s what makes it fun,” he says. “That’s 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. (Leah Nash)

“There’s 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 — Research 1 universities and liberal arts schools — 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ 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 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ contingent, including President Clayton Spencer and eight students, to a C3 summit at Connecticut College last spring.)

Still fresh in the collective ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ consciousness is the term “beautiful cycle,” which Commencement speaker Tommy Holmberg ’13 used to describe how generations of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students perpetuate the best of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

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’s a holistically beneficial project,” says Williams.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 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’s 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’s so much to explore.”

Crystal Williams, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ chief diversity officer and an associate vice president and English professor, is an award-winning poet.

The author of four collections of poems, Crystal Williams reads from her work in a Language Arts Live event at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the English department, Language Arts Live readings are open to the public at no cost. Williams’ books will be available for purchase and for signing by the poet following the reading. For more information, please call 207-786-6326.

Williams’ most recent collection is Detroit as Barn, published in May by the University of Washington Press. The book was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Cleveland State Open Book Prize.

Her third collection, Troubled Tongues (Lotus Press, 2009), was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award.

Widely anthologized, Williams’ poems appear in such journals and publications as The American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Northwest Review, 5AM, The Sun, Ms. Magazine, The Indiana Review, Court Green and Callaloo, among others.

Raised in Detroit and in Madrid, Spain, Williams holds degrees from New York University and Cornell University, and has received numerous fellowships, grants and honors, including a 2010 appointment as the Mary Rogers Field Distinguished University Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University and a 2012 appointment to the Oregon Arts Commission by Gov. John Kitzhaber.

She served on the faculty of Reed College for 11 years before being appointed Reed’s inaugural dean for institutional diversity. In 2013 she was appointed associate vice president, chief diversity officer and professor of English at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

A few months ago, Annakay Wright ’17 was touring a Chase Hall space that was dingy and unremarkable — except for the fact that it was going to be the Office of Intercultural Education’s new campus home.

“I walked around this space, and, well, it was kind of horrible,” she recalls with a laugh. “I thought, ‘How are we going to fit the OIE in here?'”

Guests attends the Sept. 3 reception for the opening of newly renovated space in Chase Hall for the college’s Office of Intercultural Education. Down the corridor seen at top right is another set of spaces. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Once part of dining Commons, the 4,300-square-foot space had been left fallow when the dining operation left Chase for new Commons in 2008.

As Wright, who’s from Brooklyn, N.Y., walked through the raw space with a group of students, staff and architects, she came to a row of windows overlooking a busy patch of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ earth.

“I looked through these dusty windows and saw the Library Quad,� she recalls.

Suddenly, imagination took over, as Wright saw her future self in the space, hanging out with friends while looking out the windows.

She imagined “seeing people on the Quad. I wanted people to look into this space from outside and see life, and I wanted to look out and see life. I wanted people to see the lights on and things going on, and then want to come in hang out.”

Nolwazi Ngwenyama ’16 of Mbabane, Swaziland, listens to a speaker at the reception for the opening of the Office of Intercultural Education’s new home in Chase Hall. She’s an OIE Fellow for 2014-15. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Since then, a complete makeover has transformed the once-humble Chase space. What Wright and others imagined that day — a neighborly, see-and-be-seen aesthetic — was on full display at a gala reception last month to celebrate the Office of Intercultural Education’s new digs.

At that reception, the rhetoric, both from college leaders like President Clayton Spencer and Chief Diversity Officer Crystal Williams as well as from students, spoke of a new resolve for the college’s work on diversity and inclusion.

“A quintessentially active, flexible space.â€�

To President Clayton Spencer, the new space feels hip and fizzy like the offices of a Silicon Valley startup. (With all that exposed Lewiston brick, we prefer “East Coast startup.�)

“And what is that kind of space about?� she asked the reception crowd rhetorically. “Creativity. It’s about energy, it’s about who happens by and throws their energy and ideas into the mix. It’s about being welcoming and porous. It’s a quintessentially active, flexible space.�

Sleek yet inviting, the new space was designed by Canal 5, the firm that reworked the Bobcat Den a couple years ago. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, project manager Paul Farnsworth oversaw the undertaking.

Depending on your ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ era, you may recall the old space as the low-ceiling or small room in Commons. Or, the space — part of a 1978 addition to the building — may predate you altogether.

Mostly facing the Gray Athletic Building, it runs nearly the length of Chase’s east side. Some of it, as Wright noticed, overlooks the Library Quad.

Julisa De Los Santos, an assistant dean in the Office of Intercultural Education, reacts to a speaker during the reception celebrating OIE's new home in Chase Hall. That's Crystal Williams, chief diversity officer, behind De Los Santos. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Guests attend the Sept. 3 reception for the reception celebrating the new home of the Office of Intercultural Education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Loring Danforth, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology, greets a friend at the Sept. 3 reception celebrating the new home of the Office of Intercultural Education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Students hang out near the "study bar" that overlooks the Library Quad during the reception celebrating the new home of the Office of Intercultural Education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Guests attend the Sept. 3 reception celebrating the new home of the Office of Intercultural Education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The new layout features four offices for the professional staff and three meeting rooms, two small and one large. There are two large social spaces connected by a wide hallway, one being the “study barâ€� that Wright envisioned overlooking the Library Quad, and the other a family-style social space. This being food-crazed ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, there’s a kitchen. And along a new access corridor into the office are three new prayer rooms.

“Surrounded by amazing people.”

Several students, including Teddy Poneman ’15 of Larchmont, N.Y., past co-coordinator of OUTFront, spoke at the reception.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Ponemon says he’s been “surrounded by amazing people who have transformed me. This space will continue that across the campus in macro ways: to engage the entire community to take action around our mission statement — ‘the transformative power of our differences.’â€�

Charged with supporting and strengthening diversity and inclusion efforts, the OIE’s success, as you can imagine, might depend as much on having the right space as the right programming and staff.

“Catalyze areas and people on the campus.”

Regarding the latter, the office is headed by Crystal Williams, the college’s chief diversity officer as well as an associate vice president and professor of English. She’s been joined by a professional staff of four.

Williams told the gathering that with the opening of its headquarters, the OIE is ready to do some hard work. Specifically, her team will set out to “catalyze areas and people on the campus who have not felt that the work [of diversity and inclusion] is their work.

“Our intention is to help build a culture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ that suggests that not only is the work of ensuring that everyone feels included, valued and served being done here, but that this is an institutional norm. It is the standard, and that anything outside of that is the exception. That is the work that we are setting for ourselves.â€�

Josh McIntosh is the college’s dean of students and vice president for student affairs, and after Williams gave him a tour of the new space, he saw how architecture could “facilitate progress” in diversity and inclusion.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ need spaces, he says, to foster community for “students who have been on the margin of nearly every educational system in this country.” ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ needs to support student success, especially for first-generation and low-income students. And then there’s the imperative to “educate the community about why diversity and inclusion matters.â€�

In the new OIE spaces, he saw a spectrum of potential student experiences, from “study, focus, academics, don’t do Facebook” and family-room living to “reflection, deep-thought and learning work.”

“I’ve never seen it, and that’s not an overstatement or hyperbole.”

The OIE’s prior home was a wood-frame building on Campus Avenue that was razed over the summer, along with several other buildings, to make way for two new student residence halls.

The coming infusion of student life right across the street from OIE headquarters makes its location even more student-friendly.

Jalen Baker ’16 of Lancaster, Texas, talks with Dean of Students Josh McIntosh during the reception celebrating the new home of the Office of Intercultural Education. President Spencer is in the background. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

For Williams’ part, she says she’s “never in all my travels seen an intercultural center in the middle of campus, one with study space, social space, learning and office space, and open space. I’ve never seen it, and that’s not an overstatement or hyperbole.�

The singular nature of the space, she said, indicates Spencer’s “commitment to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ values and principles with regard to inclusion and diversity.â€�

The event’s final insight was lofty, and it came from Jalen Baker ’16 of Lancaster, Texas, a member of the OIE’s student staff and officer in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Christian Fellowship.

The OIE’s work, he said, helps “students to leave ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ not only with world-class talents, but also as world-class people who contribute to the betterment of their communities so we can all live in a better world.â€�