Dear colleagues,

As we wrap up the semester, thank you again to all faculty and staff for extraordinary work over the past year, for learning new technologies, adapting, and supporting each other as we did everything possible to continue our educational programming, all the while in many cases juggling additional personal responsibilities. The challenges that were introduced by COVID-19 were unimaginable one year ago.

We are also aware that one of the forces that have emerged in the past year has been a long-overdue national racial reckoning. One positive development brought by this reckoning is that issues that we as a community have long cared about are now at the forefront of national conversations. And yet, the work towards creating an inclusive, equitable, and just world is neither easy, nor quick. We are well aware that much of this work internally takes the form of conversations around antiracism and affirming sexual orientation and gender identity. This happens in classrooms, research meetings, or in hallways (literally or virtually). We are also aware that these conversations can often be uncomfortable, and not infrequently quite difficult.

Aiming to continue our journey towards creating a community where these conversations can happen, productively, for all, towards our shared DEIJ goals, we are planning on hosting a series of faculty and staff facilitated conversations. The goal of these conversations is to help ensure that we all have the tools and skills to more effectively engage in and facilitate difficult conversations around these topics amongst ourselves and with our students. We also will host similar structured conversations with our students as part of Orientation and in the fall.

To start us off, we will host two conversations for both faculty and staff as follows:

May 19, 2–3:30 PM for faculty

May 27, 9–10:30 AM for staff

June 21, 10–11:30 AM for faculty

June 23, 1–2:30 PM for staff

There is no need for preparatory work for being a part of these conversations, but we would like those planning on attending to sign-up at the links provided above to ensure that we have a reasonable number of people in attendance. We are organizing these by faculty/staff as a first pass, recognizing that there are different needs for helping think through these issues largely around classroom engagement.

As an adjunct to these conversations, we will also, through our DEIJ committee, develop a statement of our commitment to ongoing and continued productive conversations to promote equity, inclusion, and justice in our community. When finalized, this statement can be added to syllabi and shared with classes, groups, and teams. The statement will reinforce our shared commitment to the ideals of antiracism and affirming sexual orientation and gender identity, and serve to hold us accountable, individually and collectively. In the statement, we also expect to acknowledge that we will all make mistakes, and we hope that we can each be patient with and forgiving of one another, and learn from our mistakes to better ourselves and our community.

As noted, we will also plan a similar series of structured conversations for students, both incoming and continuing.

The work of DEIJ is hard, it is evolving, and it is ongoing. It is also a journey, one on which we are on together, and will continue to be on for many years to come. Thank you for being along on that journey

We hope the semester wraps up smoothly.

Warmly,

Craig and Lisa

Craig Andrade
Associate Dean for Practice
candrade@bu.edu

Lisa Sullivan
Associate Dean for Education
lsull@bu.edu

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