Dear President Paxson,

We, the staff of the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service, appreciate the opportunity to comment on the draft Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion: An Action Plan for Brown University.  

The Swearer Center’s history and mission are rooted in social justice, equity, and active inclusion of diverse stakeholders, perspectives, and ways of knowing.  The omission of the Swearer Center from this draft plan, in addition to multiple conversations we have hosted with students as we develop our own strategic plan, make it clear that we, as a Center, have not yet fully risen to the challenges of inclusion and diversity.  In this letter, we commit to addressing our shortcomings and offer ways that the University might join us and strengthen its commitments in the Pathways plan.  

The work of creating a just and inclusive Brown community extends beyond campus. Over the Swearer Center’s nearly thirty year history, we have worked to connect the University with communities in Providence and elsewhere. We strongly believe that feedback from community members, whose diverse voices we greatly value, must be included in the Pathways plan. We are fortunate that Brown’s campus is inseparably rooted in Providence, one of this country’s most diverse cities; Brown’s plan can only be strengthened by inclusion of ideas and insights from the broader Providence community.

The Swearer Center staff convened a three-hour listening session focused on Pathways with community members on December 14th at our TRI-Lab space in Davol Square.  We also established and widely distributed an open online feedback response form to gather input on the plan from individuals and community organizations.  Invitations were extended to local organizations working in areas such as education, community development, arts, disabilities, criminal justice, homelessness and health, with representatives from several agencies attending the session and responding online. We are hosting additional community meetings to continue to listen and to respond actively to community members’ feedback regarding the plan. Many ideas articulated in this letter were proposed or validated by individuals through the December 14th listening session, the response form, or as part of continuing conversations with students and our community partners.  

We propose that the University engage the staff of the Swearer Center – as one of several possible conveners – to host multiple opportunities for community members to meet with administrators in open and thoughtful dialogue to address Brown’s engagement and actions related to issues of power, justice, diversity and equity in its work with Providence individuals, businesses and organizations.  

We commit to ongoing conversations with community members so that our own work – and the University’s work as a whole – is more fully and frequently informed by community input.  This both strengthens our partner relationships and models reciprocity in meaningful ways for Brown students.

CAMPUS COMMUNITY: Creating Inclusive Living and Learning Environments

Brown students both engage at and within community sites around the city and host members of the community on this campus.  Community members are our colleagues in the education of Brown students and the building of a just and peaceful community. We believe University leadership should address in the Pathways plan how community colleagues and guests can be welcome, active stakeholders in the life of the university, be present on campus free from unwarranted surveillance and policing, and be acknowledged as contributors to the life and success of Brown.

The new strategic plan of the Swearer Center commits the Swearer Center team to:

• Building a Providence Community Advisory Board to guide and inform our work;
• Convening our community partner network regularly;
• Retasking the current TRI-Lab space (at 10 Davol Square) as a community space for ongoing network coordination and professional development meetings; and
• Developing policy and resources to compensate community partners for their valued contributions to the education of Brown students and advancement of research and scholarship.

As we further develop and strengthen the ways that we solicit, listen to and incorporate community voices and perspectives in our work, we encourage the University and Corporation to:

• Convene a Providence Community Advisory Board to provide an independent, external perspective and serve as a liaison between the city and university;
• Add seats for Providence community members on the Campus Planning Advisory Board, the Diversity Advisory Board, and the Public Safety Oversight Committee;
• Review and expand Providence residents’ access to campus resources, including libraries, meeting spaces, forums, courses, recreational facilities and admissions;
• Engage community organizations with deep local expertise on issues of policing and diversity to provide training, such as the renowned Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence; and
• Include a link on Brown’s homepage, with translation options, that synthesizes activities available at the university for community members (for example, Brown Summer High School or events mailing lists) and specific contact information.

INVESTING IN PEOPLE: Building and Supporting a Diverse Community

As articulated in the Pathways plan, many students face a lack of financial support for basic expenses and/or enrichment experiences.  Students from low-income backgrounds and/or first generation students, who bring important assets and skills to the work and mission of the Swearer Center, disproportionately want to engage in our work yet need to offset the opportunity costs of their engagement.  In our strategic plan, the Swearer Center team commits to:

• Providing support for all students, with a particular emphasis on students from low-income backgrounds and/or first generation students. We believe that including this commitment from the Swearer Center team in Pathways will strengthen the University’s plan;
• Partnering with other advisors and mentors on campus to support these students; and
• Participating fully in the planning and activities of the proposed center for first-generation students.

In the Pathways plan, professional development workshops for faculty, graduate students, administration and staff are proposed, which will “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression” and will include a social justice retreat in January.  Based on feedback from our students and community partners, we strongly encourage an ongoing professional development process to address greater awareness around issues of power, privilege and positionality, with a particular focus on economic class.

Similar to the workshops described in Pathways, a key component of the Swearer Center’s strategic plan is a co-curriculum designed to provide students with a series of competency-based engagement workshops. We believe that students need significant guidance to understand, reflect upon, and respond to the dynamics of power and privilege present in our work. These workshops will be led by faculty, students, Swearer Center staff, community partners, alumni, or combinations thereof. Workshops will provide students with the knowledge and skills to understand and deconstruct institutional organizations’ structures of power so they can become active and engaged participants in the civic lives of the institution and community.  They will be designed to better prepare students entering community work in Providence and will be grounded in considerations of equity, positionality, privilege, and power. These issues are critical to understanding how communities and systems operate and to appropriately locating oneself within them.  

A proposal in the Pathways plan is that the University engage more deeply to form partnerships with “organizations that provide talented high school students with mentoring and assistance with college preparation.” We are excited about this call to expand upon an activity that we have been deeply engaged in for many years.  Since 2007, the Swearer Center has managed the College Advising Corps at Brown, which aims to increase the number of low-income, first-generation and underrepresented high school students entering and completing higher education by providing college application and financial aid guidance to those students and their families. In 2014-15, Brown’s College Advising Corps Advisors worked with 7,533 students across four grade levels, and of the 1,651 Rhode Island urban high school seniors who completed at least one college application with the help of our Advisors, 79% were accepted to a higher education institution.

Building on this success, the Swearer Center team strongly encourages the University to increase seats and financial support for Providence public high school students to attend tuition-based pre-college or summer programs at Brown.  It is of great concern to us and our community partners when Providence high school students must crowd-raise funds online to afford these programs; while we recognize that these summer offerings are important revenue generators, as part of becoming a more inclusive community we must do more to support local students financially.

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP: Creating Pathways for Knowledge and Success

The authors of the Pathways plan concede that Brown’s current curriculum, research, and learning opportunities do not provide adequate exposure to diverse perspectives or attention to matters of social equity. We have heard community partners’ perceptions that there is a “culture of non-participation in Providence” among Brown’s faculty, especially as compared to other Rhode Island universities. Furthermore, higher education research tells us that faculty from underrepresented groups are disproportionately interested in community engaged teaching and scholarship. Thus we believe our work at the Swearer Center will contribute to achieving the goal of diversifying the professoriate.  

Through the Swearer Center’s Engaged Scholars Program and as Swearer Center staff we commit to:

• Making more porous the boundary between the knowledge and assets that reside in the community and on campus, and championing the co-creation of knowledge in order to enhance excellence in teaching and learning on and off campus;
• Funding community-based courses and community-driven research;
• Developing and conducting a community engagement assessment to understand more fully the myriad ways that students, faculty, and staff already engage in and beyond the Providence community;
• Assisting faculty with navigating the demands of engaged work while meeting the demands of the professoriate;
• Promoting faculty fellowships and awards that recognize faculty and staff members’ contributions to communities and their often-unrecognized efforts to educate students on issues of equity, inclusion and positionality; and
• Advocating for the university to include consideration of engaged community work (in all three categories as appropriate: teaching, research, and service) in faculty tenure, promotion, and appointment decisions.

ACCOUNTABILITY

At a recent Swearer Center listening session, a student proposed that the Swearer Center team should not only write a diversity action plan, but also pledge to publicly report on our progress towards this plan every year for the next ten years.  We commit to honoring this student’s suggestion and propose that the University make a similar commitment to a specific accountability timeframe in its plan.

As part of holding ourselves accountable, we believe it is important for us to acknowledge that current Swearer staff do not reflect the diversity of race, ethnicity, background and/or orientation of the campus or the community. We will continue to address this in future hires and in our own engagement as a staff and as individuals with learning about and addressing systemic racism, and other forms of oppression. As a staff, we pledge not to place the onus of this work on the shoulders of unpaid students or colleagues whose understanding of these issues from personal experience may surpass our own.   

Additionally, to be accountable, we must address the current investment of the Swearer Center endowment.  When Howard Swearer, as Brown’s 15th president, founded the Center that now bears his name, he endowed our work to support it into the future. The Swearer Center’s endowment is pooled and invested with the rest of the University’s endowed funds.  We believe it is disingenuous for us to both support our students engaged in community work (for example, in prisons or around environmental education) while permitting our endowment to be invested in ventures that undermine the Swearer Center’s principles or are inconsistent with the intention of Swearer Center donors. We therefore request that the Swearer Center’s portion of the Brown endowment be moved to the social choice fund of the endowment established for donors in 2007 or into other socially responsible investment funds.

The University as a whole, the Swearer Center as a team, and each of us as individuals must own and engage in the ongoing work of diversity, equity and inclusion. We are well aware that there is much for us all to do to rise to these critical challenges.  As we re-envision the Swearer Center, we will continue to recommend the inclusion of our work as a core asset to meeting these challenges.  We will also continue to strongly advocate for the inclusion of our Providence colleagues as full partners in the work ahead.

Sincerely,

The staff of the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service, with important and appreciated input from students and community colleagues

If you are a Rhode Island resident or organization interested in participating in a future community conversation, please email [email protected]. We also welcome questions or thoughts on the letter above.