Monday Sept. 22, Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Sean Bennett announced the Hamilton Unity Groups (HUGs) initiative to help students organize cultural events as a part of continued efforts from the DEI Office. In his email, Bennett stated that the program aims to create a feeling of community and belonging amongst students. By filling out the form sent in his email, students can show interest in a specific topic or cultural event, which the DEI Office then uses to connect them to other students and organizations with similar interests.
Bennett gave a brief overview of the purpose of HUGs alongside the form to get into contact with the DEI Office in the email. It read: “Through Hamilton Unity Groups registration, any individual or organization can welcome the campus into their special cultural celebrations or events. Additionally, the Hamilton Unity Group form is a place where anyone can express a desire to support and explore cultures and traditions outside of their own.”
The form allows students to express interest in being involved in cultural events on campus. This involvement can involve either the planning of a cultural event or just a request for future involvement in supporting members of the community. Students do not need to be a part of the cultural group they declare interest in to be connected to HUGs.
“As campuses became more diverse, there was this gap in communication, intention versus perception. So I’ve been playing with the idea for a little while, but the real intent of it was to organically create a way for members of our community to come together in support of cultural identity events as well as providing an opportunity for groups to, in an intentional, structured way, say, ‘this isn’t just something for our faculty staff organization. This is something we would really want to share of our experience, our culture, identity with others,’” Bennett gave as his reason for starting the HUGs initiative.
Bennett continued, “I think it’s an extension of the idea that diversity, equity and inclusion is everyone’s responsibility. What this provides an opportunity to do is provide intentional connections across places: silos on campus that might not see their connection to see their work as the work of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The HUGs initiative will act as a central hub for students and organizations to receive help from the college to organize their events according to Bennett. He said, “Me and my team on this front end, when you go into the form and create it, we begin to pull the groups together so we can start the communication. So we will serve a facilitative role in bringing people together and communicating with members of the community who say, ‘I’d like to be part of learning more about what’s going on on campus, but I’ve never really done it and never figured out how I could connect to the organizations and individuals that [hold these events].’”
Bennett has already received responses from students expressing interest in being a part of the initiative. He said, “So right now, as soon as a form comes in, I get flagged, and responses thus far have fitted primarily into two categories. ‘Here’s something that has been really important to me, and I found it difficult…to get a conversation going around it. This is going to be happening in early 2026’…Some people have just emailed me and said, ‘I think this is a wonderful idea and please let me know how I can be helpful to a community on campus related to whatever the cultural event or gathering [is].’”
Bennett’s introduction of the iniative come as federal sanctions are placed on DEI action in federally funded institutions. DEI offices in prominent colleges and universities, such as Cornell and Columbia, have closed. With the executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunity,” federal grantees, such as Hamilton College, are required to end any DEI programs that “violate the Nation’s civil rights laws.”
Failure to comply with federal regulations can result in the federal government freezing funds, as has happened to Harvard University. The initial freeze, which totalled $2.2 billion, has since been struck down, but the university is still in conversations to get their funding reinstated. Potential repercussions for violating new federal regulations enforcement of these regulations remains unclear.
When asked about the legal status of DEI at Hamilton, Bennett said, “I think the current legal landscape has drawn a cleaner line between things that are ‘owned,’ quote unquote, by the university, and things that are owned by members of the university…When the university owns a cultural heritage month or a gender identity month, it’s being seen as discriminatory.”
Rather than the college directly organizing the events and owning them, the HUGs initiative preserves student ownership of events. The role of the DEI Office is just to facilitate the organisation of the student event on campus and connect interested students of any identity group to the event. Bennett describes this as being able to “invite members of the community into your event.”
In response to criticism against DEI and the federal sanctioning of DEI programs, Bennett said, “To create HUGs as an initiative is counter to the critique that campuses pick and choose which identity months and cultural months to celebrate…This is not about Hamilton choosing any month or event that Hamilton College believes is important. This is about Hamilton College responding to opportunities to connect people who share identities, who want to share their experiences, who don’t want to block people off from learning more about their experience and identities.”
“We are in a moment where people have the freedom to be critical and find the holes in anything we might want to do. My hope is just, as the acronym, a welcome hug won’t be seen as a bias,” Bennett said.
Giving his final comments, Bennett told The Spectator, “What I’m saying is, if you want to share [a part] of yourself, I am deeply interested in you, in your culture and your identity, and I welcome the opportunity to embrace the learning that happens in the intersection between what you know deeply and what I know nothing about. I think there’s always risk in anything we do. I don’t believe we’re breaking the law, but there are always critics…I’m excited about being a part of a community where anyone can join the table.”