Diversity training funded with a $105,000 grant

The College received a $105,781 grant from the Hewlett Foundation last week to implement a project entitled "Common Ground: Education for Democracy." The program is intended to support multicultural affairs on campus and in the surrounding area. The grant is part of a cost-sharing project with the college in which the College will allocate $55,781 toward the project bringing the total budget to $161,562.

Assistant to the President, Diana Roose said, "We were very pleased to receive the grant. We are very excited about it. Clearly this has been on the college's list of things it would like to do for some time."

Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Julia Nieves from the MRC said, "From what I can tell, it's very positive and very exciting that we're getting some money to do things."

The grant proposal outlined a plan to begin a number of different programs on campus designed to bring traditionally separated groups closer together. "To date, Oberlin's efforts to encourage inter-cultural dialogue among students have often suffered for lack of a unifying agenda," the grant proposal stated.

This lack of unity was part of what the pluralism and unity theme of the grant proposed to improve.

According to Dan Gardner, director of the service for service and learning, the money will be allocated to various established programs on campus and start new ones.

"The funds do a number of things. They provide for faculty and staff training in issues of facilitating meaningful cooperation in student life and the classroom," Gardner said.

A series of new activities will be funded by the grant. According to the grant, they are designed to "train and engage a significant number of current and all new faculty and staff in encouraging dialogue and unity, integrate the curriculum and student life more effectively to foster the development of skills essential for productive multicultural interaction; and provide practical opportunities for students to use these skills in academically relevant and inclusive ways."

Among the practical opportunities for students is an orientation program that would be jointly run by the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) and the Center for Service and Learning. The new orientation program are designed to bring together individuals for different economic, ethnic, geographic, racial and social background.

Faculty and staff training is also included under the grant. "Faculty and administrators feel ill-equipped to address these problems and frustrated that this discord has grown out of Oberlin's multicultural environment," the grant stated.

In order to ameliorate this situation, each year over three years the College will hold a three day diversity and dialogue workshop for 20 faculty members. In addition, similar training seminars will be held for 20 staff members each year.

The grant stressed the importance of targeting new faculty for training because of the "graying" of the faculty. "The Hewlett initiative will coincide with an unusually high number of tenure-track appointments at Oberlin [because of the] retirement of a significant contingent of current faculty," the grant said.

The College plans to provide comprehensive multicultural pedagogy and dialogue training workshops for all new faculty in order to assure that the new faculty understand the importance of diversity at Oberlin.

On student involvement, the grant described a new Experimental College (ExCo) course that would be developed by the MRC for the 1998-99 academic year and would be targeted at first-year students. The ExCo will be a panel discussion series and faculty and MRC staff will serve as advisors.

According to the grant, a similar ExCo course will be offered for sophomores, juniors and seniors for the 1999-2000 academic year.

Two funds will be set up to aid current student organizations. The first, an education fund, will give money to a coalition of at least two different student groups who seek solutions to the challenges that area schools face surrounding the issues of pluralism.

The coalitions will be eligible for $1,500 with the estimated average award size at $1,000.

The second fund will fund campus coalitions to "gain practical experience in applying multicultural communication skills with the goal of increasing unity within a pluralistic environment," according to the grant proposal. The coalitions would be focused on campus.

In order to assess the effectiveness of the multicultural training, the College will add a new set of diversity questions to a survey they have of seniors every year.

The grant was drafted by the Office of Sponsored Programs.