Our Ongoing Work on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Bowdoin has worked steadily since the middle of the twentieth century to improve representational diversity among students and employees. Efforts to bring international students to the College after World War II, the recruitment of Black students from the southern United States in the 1960s, and the introduction of coeducation in the 1970s all speak to how the campus has worked to expand access and diversify the community. These efforts accelerated in the 1990s and especially in the 2000s, as the percentage of enrolled women moved from 43 percent in 1980 to 51.6 percent in 2022, and students of color moved from 7.5 percent in 1988 to 13 percent in 1995 to an enrollment today that is 38 percent students of color, including 43 percent of this year’s entering class, the Class of 2026. We have also expanded socioeconomic diversity by increasing the number of students representing low-income and middle-income families who receive aid from the College (from 39 percent in 2001–2002 to 47.5 percent in 2022–2023). Bowdoin has also nearly doubled the number of students who are first generation to college, with 9 percent of first­-year students in 2001–2002 and 17 percent of first-year students in 2022–2023 being first generation. The percentage of Bowdoin students eligible for Pell Grants (awarded to students with exceptional financial need) has risen from 10 percent in 2001–2002 to 16.2 percent in 2022–2023. Further, in 2008–2009, Bowdoin replaced loans in its aid packages with grants paid by the College, ensuring that low- and middle-income students are not burdened with loans from the institution when they graduate.
 
Racial diversity in tenure and tenure-track faculty has more than doubled in the last twenty years, and women now comprise the majority of tenured and tenure-track faculty, moving from 34 percent in 1996–1997 to 53.8 percent in 2022–2023. The College’s senior staff is the most diverse ever in terms of race and gender. Meanwhile, since 2015, the proportion of women on the board of trustees has increased from a third to nearly half, and the proportion of people of color on the board has doubled from 12 to 24 percent.

Beyond the Numbers

These efforts to increase representational diversity at Bowdoin continue, but that is only part of the challenge in creating an inclusive campus community where everyone has the opportunity for an equal experience and a solid sense of belonging. In December 2015, President Rose asked Camille Charles (University of Pennsylvania) and Rory Kramer (Villanova University) to help the College move beyond the percentages and better understand how to create a more inclusive community, with a particular focus on our students and on race and ethnicity. The Charles/Kramer Report on Diversity and Inclusion was taken up in 2016 by an Ad Hoc Committee on Inclusion chaired by Olufemi Vaughan, the Geoffrey Canada Professor of Africana Studies and History, and the committee recommended in 2017 that Bowdoin implement an “Inclusive Excellence”[1] (IE) model and appoint a senior officer to lead a new office of institutional diversity and inclusion. Both recommendations were adopted.
 
Another important initiative, the creation of the Resource Center for Sexuality and Gender Diversity (now the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center), has helped to support the increasing number of students who identify as LGBTQIA. The work of the center, partnering with several offices on campus, led in 2019 to the Lived Name Initiative, which formalizes the College’s support for each member of the Bowdoin community having their lived name as a part of their experience on campus from day one.
 
The work to make Bowdoin more accessible in the past few years, which is led by the Accessibility Task Force, has created a testing center for students who need accommodations and created one full-time and three part-time student-facing staff positions focused on accessibility and disability culture. The Accessibility Task Force has also worked to increase our community’s understanding of digital and physical accessibility—including helping shape how buildings are built and renovated—and they continue to enhance our understanding of the ways we can be more inclusive of the different needs of those who access our website and other services.

From “The Work Ahead” to the Here and Now

In the fall of 2020, following community reflection after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd along with the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor, we moved our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts into the next chapter of the work. In particular, we launched an ongoing effort to better understand Bowdoin’s history with respect to race, beginning with an examination of our relationship to Black and Indigenous peoples, while not losing sight of the need to continue our work regarding other identities, including gender and sexual orientation, ability, among others. Each division of the College created a “work ahead” plan intended to help make meaningful progress on our commitment to create a community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni who are generous in spirit and embody our ethos of serving the common good.
 
We cannot do diversity, equity, and inclusion work independent of the challenges of the larger world—we recognize and understand that these challenges are also very much present on our campus. Few institutions have clear systems in place to respond to racism, sexism, and homophobia, and we know we have a responsibility to enhance and streamline ours. We need a clear process to respond to reports or complaints of discrimination, a strong system to investigate those complaints, and a support network for students and employees who experience such discrimination.
 
We also know that doing the work of inclusion is not possible without profound collaboration across the College—it is the responsibility of everyone at Bowdoin to understand diversity, equity, and inclusion work and commit to it.

An extraordinary student experience is the very reason we are here. From classrooms and labs to residential spaces and athletic venues, everything we do at Bowdoin impacts how students navigate this place and shape their time here.
 
What follows are some of the recent specific institutional efforts we have put into place to help students to connect with the College upon arrival and to learn and develop here over their time as a student and they take on a variety of roles in the community.

• In the spring of 2021, the faculty approved a change to the tenure review and promotion process that requires scholars to be evaluated based on whether they can demonstrate “IE in teaching.” To help move this momentous work forward we will:
  • introduce and emphasize the importance of IE in teaching during new faculty orientation;
  • include the concept of IE in the “Preparing to Teach at Bowdoin” mini course;
  • host faculty workshops specifically on IE in teaching;
  • include a discussion on IE in all third-year reviews for tenure-track faculty; and
  • foster ongoing discussion of IE with all deans in academic affairs and with department chairs.
• The Division of Student Affairs will continue the work of integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion education in the first-year experience, starting with Orientation. This includes using new modalities of training for students before they arrive on campus, once they are on campus, and throughout their first year. For example, in Fall 2022 the Division of Student Affairs launched the EdGE program, resulting in a 99 percent completion rate by the first-year class, with additional programming to continue in Spring 2023.
• We will incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion education into all student leadership training to implement a common knowledge base with students, and we will formally assess their learning and skill development. In spring of 2023, for example, we will pilot a new program for athletic team captains and coaches to help them apply some of what they and their teams have learned about diversity, equity, and inclusion since the fall 2020.
• We will continue to create meaningful programs to help expose students to a variety of career opportunities that have historically been less available to them based on race, class, and gender, including finance and investment management, the arts, the tech sector, and others. In addition to the daily work of Career Exploration and Development, the College will host a number of trips meant to provide exposure to and grounding in some of these career fields. In spring the of 2023, following the success of the WestTrek trip to Silicon Valley, we will pilot InvesTrek and ArtsTrek in New York City.

Every employee at Bowdoin should be student-focused even if they are not student-facing. We are an educational institution, and our number-one priority must be to deliver an exceptional education both in and outside the classroom. Each of our employees has an active role to play in ensuring that our education and our students’ experiences stay at the highest level.

We also recognize that we play a role in building a strong workforce both in Maine and in higher education. We continue to seek opportunities to recruit a talented and diverse employee base, train thoughtfully on issues of importance, provide world-class professional development, and evaluate performance thoughtfully based on a variety of measures. Simply put, we need to recruit employees from a wide variety of backgrounds and work hard to assure that once they are here, we appropriately support their growth and development.

The following is a snapshot of some of the specific ways we are working to recruit, retain, and train faculty and staff who are committed to this work.

• We will continue to construct faculty and staff development opportunities centered on belonging by:
  • developing trainings for academic department chairs on conflict resolution, mentoring, discrimination reporting; and
  • by pursuing a formal engagement with the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Graduate Trainee Program —a program that provides opportunities for students and young alumni an opportunity to explore and be introduced to careers in careers in educational advancement—with the goal of developing a pipeline of new talent for the Division of Development and Alumni Relations.
• We will create a multiyear recruitment, engagement, promotion, and retention plan for Bowdoin to increase the diversity of our workforce. We will start by working to diversify our candidate pools and hires and then focus on employee retention—and we will identify internal benchmarks for progress on all these fronts.
• Information Technology (IT) will continue to support the Next Leaders Fellowship to build a pipeline of diverse IT executives for Bowdoin and other schools across the country.
• We will work to create a Bowdoin College-specific employee climate survey.
• Based on the recommendations of the Working Group on Faculty of Color and International Faculty Equity, Development, and Inclusion, we will develop a department- and program-level equity dashboard meant to bring transparency and enhance equity in faculty labor.
• A cadre of employees have been invited to participate in the eCornell online certificate program focused on matters of equity, human resources, and inclusion.

Being a part of Bowdoin extends well beyond being a current student. Alumni, parents, and the larger Brunswick and Maine communities are all stakeholders who all play a role in how we develop the Bowdoin community and how we think about who we want to be. The front door of the College, so to speak, is our admission process, and our work continues beyond Commencement through the work of development and alumni relations—with the goal of having our students’ relationship with Bowdoin extend far beyond their time in Brunswick. The initiatives below are designed to enhance a sense of belonging for all prospective students, current students, alumni, and the broader Bowdoin community.

• We will work to understand and address the unintended impact of bias in the admissions interview process by conducting a demographic audit of students who complete an interview and their admission and yield outcomes.
• We will continue to invest in and build on the work of the Alumni Council Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access Committee  to better celebrate and recognize the contributions of the many different members of our alumni community. We will continue to work and support the Bowdoin College Black Alumni Association as they program both on and off campus and work to organize the Asian and Asian-American and Latinx alumni communities.
• We will build on the work of the Accessibility Task Force, now in its sixth year, with the following projects:
  • develop a classroom furniture pool with a range of sizes and designs to make appropriate options readily available and preclude the need for students to make accommodation requests;
  • review accessibility designs for a renovated Sills Hall;
  • review the consultant’s report on the accessibility of the servery in Thorne Dining Hall and develop an improvement plan;
  • launch a PDF-remediation project for campus web page developers to convert existing PDF documents on the web to an accessible format;
  • develop a website accessibility policy to set standards for all digital platforms and applications on the website; and
  • support digital accessibility awareness, outreach, and training for faculty, staff, and students.
• We will enhance accessibility awareness on campus by:
  • encouraging campus-wide adoption of the accessibility statement for all event publicity;
  • establishing a student-led accessibility mentor program for newly enrolled students with disabilities, and
  • inviting a speaker to discuss the power of universal design.
  • We will continue to partner with Black Owned in Maine to provide material support to Black-owned businesses through our purchase decisions.