New York Times interview with New Ithaca College President, Shirley Collado

New York Times publishes good article about our (Ithaca College) incoming president: At Ithaca College, a President Focused on Diversity.

Students at Ithaca College who sign up for intergroup dialogues in the coming semesters may have some interesting classmates: their professors. 

The discussion groups, where students, and now faculty and staff, come together to talk through challenging issues are among the many changes, big and small, that Shirley M. Collado, the incoming president of Ithaca College, has in mind as she sets out to usher in a new era at the institution. 

“Imagine an entire first-year class participating in an intergroup dialogue right as they come into town,” she said. “They’re living in the same residence hall, and they’re going to the first-year seminar, and they’re talking about religion and politics not just intellectually, but also in terms of their own lived experience, with people across roles.”

I like this idea. I teach a first year seminar, and last year, as a way for students to get to know each other better at the beginning of the semester, we did just this by exploring what "home" meant to all of the students. Home not just in the sense of the comfortable place they had all just come from to college, but also the conflicts between groups in their towns/cities and their high schools.

But as much as she leans on her studies to help her draft a new course for Ithaca College, the heart of Ms. Collado’s relationship with diversity lies in her life experience.

She is a first-generation college student, from Dominican parents, and grew up in a decidedly working-class home in Brooklyn. Her dad drove a yellow cab, her mom worked in a factory. College was never the assumed next step in life, like it is for so many who attend Ithaca College, but she was able to chart a path that began at Vanderbilt University as part of the inaugural class of the Posse Foundation. 

The pilot program grouped five students from mixed backgrounds in New York City together into a “posse,” offering them scholarships and introducing them even before their orientation, to help forge a sense of community from the start. Ms. Collado attributes a lot of her success to that experience, and she said it is a key element in how she personally looks at addressing diversity. 

Central to her diversity plan is just that: making diversity a core principle of how the college operates at every level, not just set apart into task forces and studies.

I also like this idea, and I'm very tired of task forces and studies on the topic. In two of my courses I have foregrounded "diversity" (I'm not so happy with the word - I'd rather say that I've foregrounded critical ways of thinking about race [as a constructed reality], religion, and political conflict].

A college cannot truly diversify until it has fully embraced all the aspects of diversity into its bloodstream, she said. Simply trying to recruit a diverse student body without centralizing the issue would just lead to the same diminishing returns many colleges have faced as they look for a more diverse student body. The faculty, staff and curriculum need to represent a diverse institution in order to bring about a truly diverse class. 

“You can’t change who’s coming in if you’re not willing to shift who you are,” Ms. Collado said.

I think she's right, and this was one of our problems - the college worked hard on diversifying the student body without thinking and doing very much about recruiting more diverse faculty and staff (although there were some initiatives in this direction).

She also sees a vast resource in partnerships with local community colleges to help usher in students with a wider array of life experiences. And right in downtown Ithaca is a branch of Tompkins Cortland Community College. “Community college students add a really interesting intergenerational component because they live different lives than the first-year students,” she said.

I've only had a few older students in my classes, and they have always added to the classroom experience. I hope that we will recruit more graduates of TC3 as well as other older students. I know that some college have special programs to bring in veterans - I think we should initiate a veterans' program at Ithaca College too. Perhaps it might also be a good idea to have IC becoming involved in the Posse program that our incoming president took part in. Another form of diversity that we have also really ignored is economic diversity - we need to recruit more working class and lower middle class students, and give them the opportunity to study at a great college. We shouldn't just be a college for 18-21 year olds from largely upper middle class families.