What brought you to Hamilton?

A convergence of things. I was most recently at Salem State University. I’ve been doing diversity work for more than the last 13 to 15 years. As you know, a lot happened in the country with COVID and the murder of George Floyd, so it’s been a reflective moment for the country. It was personally a reflective moment for me as well. It’s a reflective moment for this work, working in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). I saw that this was an inaugural position for Hamilton, so it was exciting to be a part of starting some of the more detailed work at a new place. That doesn’t happen very often, where you get to come in, with all due respect to all of the work that people have been doing for a long time here, but to really start a new operation.

Can you share a little bit about your background and experience?

Most people are a little surprised that I actually started my undergraduate degree in engineering. The student experience is really important to me because I was a really engaged student leader in that engineering experience. That’s where a lot of the earliest diversity work has really started being done on campuses: student advocacy, student leadership and students engaging with faculty and administration around problem solving. I think at its core engineers are problem solvers. Over my career I started as an engineer, I worked at the Xerox Corporation, but I always did a lot of education volunteer work which eventually took me back to school, becoming an educator, getting my doctorate, working on college campuses. I just continue to be interested in how we make our campuses better and how they can be a better reflection of the country. Thinking like an engineer has always been sort of an asset; thinking about root causes, why our systems work, the way they work, what are things that we can do that are solution-oriented to really cut to some clarity and solutions.

My first higher education job was at Clarkson University, then I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was there for more than a decade before going over to Salem State University in Massachusetts and being their Vice President for Diversity and Community.

For those who might not know, what are the DEI initiatives, and how can students utilize their benefits?

The first thing that comes to mind for me in my three weeks at Hamilton has been learning about the work student leaders, ambassadors and the director of the Days-Massolo Center have been doing on campus. But they’re not the only ones. I think the creation of this office is an opportunity for Hamilton to bring together some work that people may have been doing in silence or obscurity or just not in a visual way. Clearly, the Days-Massolo Center is student facing, and there are trainings and programming and partnerships with student clubs and organizations on campus that I think can be really powerful. But there’s other work that’s being done on campus. There’s an ALANA Caucus that faculty have created.

There’s work that’s been done in our library and technology area to try and be more receptive and responsive and better stewards of diversity here on campus. There’s the clear focus that we have in our admissions process, members of that team and that community have been doing a lot of work that I’m learning more and more about with regards to being accessible in the recruitment and the admissions process and the retention process for students. So I think the work is happening all over the place, and there are people that are really passionate about it. I think the creation of my role is an opportunity to make that work more visible and to enhance the connections between the different people on campus that have been doing the work but might have a way to maybe amplify it, do more of it and to do it better.

What do you think is the most important way for us to promote DEI?

I think the first and most important thing is for us all to really think about what it means to us personally, what it means in our personal lives, like what does it mean to be uncomfortable? There’s something about DEI work that is about our comfort zone. So, what are the things that we are doing, no matter who we are, no matter what our backgrounds are, to challenge ourselves, to do things and learn about people in an uncomfortable way that doesn’t take for granted our answers that we’ve always known or that we’ve grown up with.

I think that’s a challenge that even I have as a person of color on this campus. Where are the spaces that I can go and I should go that I am going to feel a little bit uncomfortable? Because I think there’s a tremendous amount of learning that happens in those places. So being open and not closed and being willing to sort of just challenge ourselves, I think that’s the most important thing we can do.

Are there any changes you plan to implement at Hamilton now that you’ve started your position?

I think it is still a work in progress, I’m a work in progress, our office is a work in progress. So in the spirit of a comment about discomfort, when you start a new office that’s never existed before, it’s the discomfort of trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. I think my biggest challenge in the next month is to continue to sit down with people and…be really open minded and hear what people are doing. I feel I’m so new that to critique an area is almost being disrespectful to the work that people are doing there, so I’m really trying to take the time to learn what people are doing.

What I’ve noticed in our weeks here, and one that I’ve heard a lot of student voice around, was the issue of accessibility. At this moment, I’m trying to absorb as much as I can around the way we think about accessibility as a campus. I think that’s clearly an opportunity because it’s something that people are feeling, a lot of people are always passionate about it. But there’s a particular spotlight on it right now. So I’m trying to find out who I can partner with on campus to continue to be an ally, be a supporter of that work.

I want to make sure that what I do, especially as a new person on campus, is not coming to be a critic, but to really come in and really take the time to understand why things work the way they work in order to really have an informed opinion about what we need to “fix” in the near future.

I also have been following the conversations around retention of faculty and staff. I’m one of the new people on campus, but I joined a sea of new people on campus. How does that fit into sort of the national challenges of having vacancies? In my career, I don’t ever remember a time in history — in my lived history — where there were more vacancies, more opportunities for people to move around, everything from public school bus drivers to restaurants and manufacturing. There’s just a lot of holes. So where are the holes related to things we need to work on? Where are the holes that are related to sort of this larger national trend of having work short of a number of workers?