NMH Magazine : Spring 2007

Leading Lines

Diversity Is Not Enough

Ten years ago, when I was director of diversity and associate dean of students at Deerfield Academy, I attended a summer diversity institute at NMH sponsored by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS).

I went to the institute for three summers and found myself engaged in the most meaningful personal growth of my life. That first summer, I learned three critical things: 1) to make true progress, schools must understand the difference between diversity and multicultural education; 2) becoming a more multicultural, equitable school must begin at the top, with authentic investment from the head of school and board of trustees; and 3) to gain students’ trust as a person on this journey too, you must teach who you are.

Having started my boarding school career in admission at Deerfield, I felt I had a pretty firm grasp on diversity. Every year we’d count the students of color who were graduating and set enrollment targets to replace that number. We also loved the applicant from Alaska or Iowa, and we traveled to places like Bermuda and Hong Kong to keep up our international numbers. This is diversity—a quantitative measurement of variety within a community.

Multicultural education, on the other hand, is a much deeper endeavor. Professor emerita at UMass-Amherst Sonia Nieto defines it as “a process of comprehensive school reform and basic education for all students. It challenges and rejects racism and other forms of discrimination in schools and society and affirms the pluralism that students, their communities, and teachers represent.”

NMH is a diverse place, to be sure, but we do not settle for just that. I began working here in 2003, at the same time Tom Sturtevant started as assistant head of school. In our first fall together, someone scratched a racial epithet on the wall of a campus bus stop, an event that traumatized the school and created a racially charged atmosphere. Then Head of School Richard Mueller ’62, Tom, and I worked with students to hold a school meeting and follow-up discussions in response. It was a pivotal time as we established ourselves as administrators who were serious about issues of equity and social justice.

Since then, the senior staff and board of trustees have worked intensively to place multicultural education at the core of what we do. In the fall of 2005, however, a group of African American students told us we weren’t doing enough. They coordinated a day of silence on campus to bring attention to their concerns. In response, all senior staff members attended a major diversity conference, and each is now affiliated with an affinity group. The entire faculty engaged in a professional development exercise that included watching the movie Crash and taking part in student-led discussions. The NMH Board of Trustees formed a working group to better understand the culture of NMH around issues of diversity and equity.

This February six students who attended the student diversity leadership conference in Seattle led the entire school in exploring what makes us members of majority or minority groups in this community. Additionally, a student came out this fall as transgender, provoking us to consider how we define gender; another student challenged the school to be more inclusive of conservative voices.

The third lesson I learned at the diversity institute—to teach who you are—keeps me fully present and honest in my relationships with students. My advisees, seven young women ranging from local students to New Yorkers to a native of Taiwan, have grown in remarkable ways, and I’ve changed with them. We talk about our views and experiences on matters of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and religion. They share everything (well, almost) with me, including their vulnerabilities, and allow me to do the same.

This is what boarding school is all about. We have the oppor­tunity to create a diverse community through our admission policies—and, more important, we have the obligation to follow the highest ideals of multicultural education.

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