Develop a more robust approach to diversity and inclusion. Productive citizenship in a globalized world requires understanding and working across difference. While Haverford is a significantly more diverse community than in the past, our commitment to inclusion requires constant attention and critical reassessment.
As this strategic planning process comes to conclusion, we recognize that we are just beginning to articulate an agenda to try to make our community work for all its members. To continue this work, we will convene a presidential task force that will develop a more coherent and effective institutional strategy to address issues of diversity and inclusion, with particular attention to (1) campus climate; (2) academic initiatives that deepen and extend students’ bodies of knowledge; and (3) attracting and supporting diverse populations of students, faculty, and staff.
Pursue the possibility of a diversity council or other structure tasked with creating and overseeing a range of structures and programs that will engage the community in what it means to celebrate and grapple with the various dimensions of diversity on a small college campus; create a campus network of diversity support, programming, and consultation.
Ensure that pathways to internships and other opportunities are open to all student
Identify and address policies and practices on campus that disadvantage students with fewer financial resources, for example programs posing transportation or other incidental costs, or that conflict with students’ needs to hold paying jobs.
Continue work to ensure that all students with disabilities have access to Haverford’s physical, educational, and programmatic resources and opportunities as well as the support needed to utilize them.
Examine the role, scope and resources of the current Office of Multicultural Affairs to develop strategies that would permit this office to continue to provide support to individual students, affinity groups and diversity-related programming while also contributing to the academic program and leadership initiatives; consider new administrative relationships with other offices to offer greater flexibility for small staff. Provide additional staff and funding to the OMA to enable it to continue its current initiatives and expand in order to fulfill its mission.
Improve residential resources on campus. As a residential college, Haverford recognizes that a vibrant and productive experience outside the classroom provides a fundamental contribution to students’ intellectual and social growth, and it deepens students’ understanding of the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship and communal life.
Make available more 24/7 student spaces on campus for study, meetings, group work, and socializing, as plans for renovated Library and Old Gym begin to do. Provide easy scheduling of such spaces, adequate support services, and whenever possible empower students with ownership and control of them.
Reassess the current utilization of Whitehead Campus Center to better serve the student community.
Ensure that adequate spaces are available for religious practice and quiet reflection.
Provide high-quality dining and meal plan options that are aligned with students’ dietary needs, lifestyles, and budgets. Address lack of food options on evenings and weekends.
Ensure that residence halls adequately support safe, healthy, productive, sustainable student lifestyles through core services including housekeeping, maintenance, network access, laundry facilities, recycling, and conservation measures.
Enhance and coordinate leadership development opportunities. Haverford’s tradition of student self-governance creates significant opportunities for students to play leadership roles on campus and to hone the intellectual, reflective, and ethical habits of mind that will serve them as leaders throughout their lives.
Recognizing the many different ways in which students develop as leaders, ensure that students have access to a wide range of leadership roles throughout their time at Haverford; focus particular attention on how to support students whose circumstances make taking on leadership roles challenging.
Further develop and fund a leadership institute that would advance the skills and capacities required for leadership and ethical engagement. The institute would coordinate and promote existing support for student leadership of current programs, as well as offer explicit training in the skills that leaders need while at Haverford and beyond; establish a framework that both sustains current initiatives (such as the Rufus M. Jones Leadership Institute, Customs training, athletics leadership development, and OAR workshops) and coordinate efforts and offerings by these programs and their supporting offices to reduce duplication and make explicit leadership development opportunities.
Emphasize and integrate engagement with the community and the world. In conjunction with efforts to enhance curricular and co-curricular resources around Civic Engagement and Social Responsibility (see 3.B.), we will make student engagement with outside communities more visible and more integrated into student life programming.
Service and volunteer opportunities. Reposition and enhance the volunteer center (8th Dimension) and establish a more robust and explicit role for the exploration of engagement opportunities during Customs. Work with students to provide a wider array of volunteer opportunities that connect to more diverse populations. Consider including the MAST program and other currently-autonomous activities with service components into this new framework.
Leadership development. Ensure that the leadership institute focuses centrally on the importance of engagement, drawing on existing work of the OMA and the Multicultural Leadership Institute, and is closely integrated with the Ethical Leadership initiative (see 3.C.).
Strengthen and centralize the international dimension. Consider bringing together international functions into a centralized office that would coordinate administratively, oversee risk management concerns, and serve as a focal point for faculty discussion and program development; coordinate the area-studies focus of the academic enrichment plan with international opportunities of all kinds that are currently scattered across campus (study abroad, internships, volunteer activities, visiting scholars, community outreach). Ensure in particular that the international academic initiatives as described in Section I are administratively supported as well as coordinated with financial and staff resources dedicated to student and faculty research and travel. Ensure that international students and faculty at Haverford are adequately supported and fully able to participate in and contribute to the life of the College.
