Nathaniel Bachelder
My project is finally getting ready to take off. I have a meeting this afternoon with Mike Madjic (IMC) and Denise Matthews to talk about the video. If any of you wouldn't mind being in it, I still need people to question on film! =)
My main goal is to finish the taping of the interviews by August 21st and the editing by August 27th. I guess a long-term goal would be for the video I produce to be copied and used throughout campus starting with the beginning of the school year. It is important that all people see it on campus: students, staff, faculty, and administration. My goal is for the video to be a 'trigger' video. This means that after people watch it, they will be all fired up to discuss issues that were raised in the video.
I would like to assist others of you with your projects if you could use help. I am not getting as many hours as I would like to be right now, so if there is something I can do, let me know.
Added update:
I had my meeting with Lynette, Mike, and Denise this afternoon. We are scheduling the shoot for the 25th and 26th of August with editing to follow shortly. I would like as many of you who would like to be involved to let me know. I have to pre-screen people and then we will film 12 brief interviews and then edit from there.
Dave, we need to meet to discuss the filming costs. I got an approximate cost from Mike Madjic today.
Jessica Billingslea
Since we last met I have had meetings with Wylie, Dave Hubin, and Dean Melnick and someone else whose name eludes me right now...
My meetings w/ pres. Wylie and Dave were concerning the MCC director position. Wylie and I (missy, huy) are trying to figure the logistics of this person's job - who will this person be directly under/accountable to, the funding, and balancing the student and administrative needs/interests etc. We're on our way though I’m glad to say. Dave gave me some good insight on creating a more long-term plan with this person and how to connect the MCC with the greater campus as a whole. It was suggested that I speak with Dan Williams about this subject, cuz the administrative funding would come from his side of the chart... so I will be meeting with him and Jan next week about this and the administrative stuff. I will also try meeting with Carla, and Troy and Stephanie concerning all this stuff.
(Unfortunately my next week will be cut short cuz I will be at the USSA national student congress for Tuesday, Thurs. and Fri.) But I can squeeze the meetings in.
Dean Melnick is just swell... he was real good at giving me the academic perspective and informing me of what is more practical and possible in my endeavors (sp?). He also gave ideas on how to connect the MCC and/with it new director more to the campus.
Spencer Hamlin
In Mongolia
Jason Mak
Most of my time has been dedicated to reading the endless pages of research
on the topic of R&R of students, faculty, and staff. My focus for the
week is refining my suggestions for the search process for
faculty. I talked with Troy and Dean Melnick. Dean Melnick is requiring
his department heads to submit a proposal for each search or else they
don't even have the authority to start one. I talked with him about some
of my ideas such as charging a member of the search committee with
recruiting minority canidates to apply and he liked the idea of holding
someone accountable. Also, each member would have the responsibility of
calling up contacts to ask for qualified canidates. We also discussed
the idea of having a pot of money available from both the Provost and each
dean to assist departments in funding their searches for minority
canidates. Such things as advertising in minority journals and attending
minority conferences are too costly for departments. These would be outlined
in the proposal that all searches would submit to the dean and
the provost. Call it economic incentive. Hence, we'll need to
find ways to fund these pots of monies. The dean and I also talked about
putting together a packet of recruitment and search strategies for finding
minority canidates. This would be done with the cooperation of all involved.
Each search committee member would get a copy.
The overall theme of our discussion was responsibility and accontablity from the Deans. They hold the power to hire.
Huy Ong
Student Diversity Training
Through some meetings I am able to come up with some ideas in terms
of Student Diversity Training. Its an ongoing list.
John Riordan
1. In two weeks I am meeting with Provost Mosely to discuss the potential
third full-time TEP staff position.
- Jack Rice and Georgeanne Cooper (both involved with TEP) mentioned
how busy the TEP staff (G. Cooper, and Michael (Sweet?)) are already. Rice
and Cooper both suggested that an additional person would make it more
feasible for TEP to address our diversity issues (no guarantees though).
- Lorraine Davis provided some insight on the situation, but I must
talk to Mosely to get a clear picture.
2. Julia Lassage gave me both some ideas about the video (which I will pass on to Nathaniel) and some workin-w/-faculty ideas also.
- one of her ideas was to depict or describe an explosive situation in the(one of the) video(s). Then, to demonstrate how constructively and sensitively addressing the situation with mediation/facilitation skills can lead to a more positive situation where the educational environment of the classroom is maintained.
3. Sidner Larson in English provided some good ideas. I am hoping to get in more detail his classroom plan for facilitating open dialogue on some sticky topics.
4. I continue to hear that it may be successful to approach the dialogue topic from the perspective that teachers may want better mediation/facilitation skills to be able to respond to a bad situation (discriminatory comments), or to be able to encourage discussions in class that often create a lot of hostility. I believe this may be a place to start from to then move to facilitated diversity dialogue. or maybe, each can be separate facilitated dialogues at the departmental level. I don't want the mediation skills idea to be an alternate to facilitated dialogue
that broadens faculty perspectives of their students.
5. I believe the Law school is going to an interesting situation. I met with one law prof, Caroline Forell, and will meet with Dom Vetri this Friday. The word from these folks is that the law school is doing quite well, relative to the UO at large. So, I plan to find out more clearly what characteristics are going well at the law school and how they got there. I also plan to talk with some law students on the issue.
6. I am scheduling meetings with the deans to discuss my topic, etc.
8. Meeting with Cris Cullinan next Wed. to begin to start bringing things together: making plans for recommendations: What still needs to be done, to support recommendations? In what direction are my findings, discussions leading me, etc?
9. I will meet soon with Carla to discuss the above.
Missy Rock
My biggest meeting of the week was with Dean McLucas of the Music School.
We had a good talk and she seems very interested in what we are doing and
how we can keep the Music school involved and connected.
(John) The Music school is split up into two blocks – music and dance. This is information for the possible facilitated diversity dialoge. They could be dialogued together, but they function somewhat seperately.
Dean McLucas suggested that the Pledge of Respect be put in the Student Handbook for everyone to read. Make it more institutional on a variety of levels.
(Jason) Dean McLucas was hoping to talk to someone specifically about how to go about R&R for both Students and Faculty. Interesting dynamics in the school and wants to have a more diverse student and faculty population.
She mentioned that we should present our finished proposal at the next Deans Council in the Fall. They meet 2X a month usually on Tuesday in the late afternoon.
Comment on the Steering Committee/ work that the interns are doing is that it should be implanted w/in the Admin & student relationships. And that it should be an on-going structure.
In other quasi-meetings (meaning I just ran into some folks), the suggestion was that we should take our act on the road… just kidding – we should also present our summer findings and suggestions to the OUS system board (I forget the formal name for it, but can easily find out) in the fall.
Oh yeah, and I’m still working on the web and compiling the history of articles on this past spring-current events. (I don’t have the most recent one where they interviewed a couple of ya interns… if anyone kept it- could I borrow it?)
Also, I recently put our intern updates on the Web as a link from the main intern page. It was neat going over them from the beginning to see what all we envisioned and etc… I think it would help us to each go back and maybe review some of the notes. (just an idea)
Jennifer Rosen
Not much new has gone on except that I have decided to tackle the course
evals at a departmental level. I found out this past week that both the general and department evaluations will be completely changed (the entire system of how they are done), but I figured that I would still talk to the department heads or deans and get some dialog going about asking certain questions about the courses and professors.
As for the course "advertisements" go I'm not quite sure what's going on with them. Fliers are very expensive and since I would have to list every course which meets the multicultural requirement (somewhere around 50 a term) it might be more than one page. As for an ad in the Emerald it would also be expensive because to list so many classes and maybe give a brief description of a few would require a full-page ad. I'm going to set up an appointment with the person in charge of the University's web page and see about getting a link to the multicultural courses available each term (of duck hunt). If anyone has any other suggestions I would appreciate it.
Hopefully by next week I will have a sample course syllabus and resource list typed up to show everyone. I will also do some research on the Pathways and see if that is an avenue that I should pursue.
Jessie Wofsy
Well my update is a bit short because I have been out of town etc. however I have put together the packet of various conduct code changes at other schools, constitutional cases on the subject, etc. and have put together proposals for possible tracks to take with the committee this fall. I am handing all of this over to Lisa Frankel tomorrow and Stephanie C. on Friday to get feedback. For the Bias response I had an interesting conversation with a woman from WSU concerning their team and she answered alot of questions and gave alot of great ideas. Otherwise, I am meeting with various other conduct code people in the next few days, Precilla Southwell and the new head of the committee who is coming in this week. On another note, Stephanie and I discussed the possibility for a kick off of the bias response team work with a "hate crimes awareness week" type of event, and one idea that came out of it was getting some of the Jschool ad classes to have hate crimes be their "subject of the term" and see what projects that can come up with. Any ideas, I am probably going to meet up with the few Jschool contacts I have gotten early next week. Otherwise, I am going to hand over the proposals for new reporting sheets to steph. soon.
Kathleen Workman
I met with Mia Tuan and Carla Gary on Monday. It looks as though the word "survey" ruffles some feathers, so let's call my project "Assessment of Campus Climate on Diversity". After speaking with Mia and based on her suggestion, it looks like the survey will take most of my time up and I need to let Spencer focus on the RI and the IntroDUCKtion and housing programs to reach middle majority are being handled by both Mia and at the same time by Huy...Mia's suggestion is to focus strictly on the survey...thoughts?
We have some good ideas for a quantitative/qualitative survey with some thoughts for the kinds of questions we need answers to. I called Patty Gwartney who leads up the Oregon Survey Research Labs and she is out of town until tomorrow (Thursday) -- I will get back to her and I have left voice mail for her to call me. In speaking with both Mia and Carla, I have realized that a survey of this nature and size will likely cost the Uni. quite a bit of $$$. What I suggest is putting the questions together, finding out how much it will cost to administer through Patty's office or having the Uni. hire Mia and a team of researchers to evaluate the results, and then proposing the project for funding though ??? somebody...I'm not sure how that will work exactly. It seems to me that if the Uni. is serious about this issue, they need to know what they are dealing with before they can move forward, and this is the only way I know of for them to know what they are dealing with...which goes without saying if they are serious about doing something, administration needs to fund this baby.
A list of questions to propose will be available for everybody to take home at the meeting, mull over, and add to for the next meeting. I think that's a better way of trying to generate questions than putting the questions we have come up with on this update.