Adrienne D. Davis, vice provost and endowed professor of law at Washington University, seized its inaugural Trailblazers Recognition Ceremony on Friday, April 15 as an opportunity to report on the university’s progress on matters of diversity and inclusion.
Over the last three years, the university’s senior leadership team – administrators with a chancellor or provost title – went up from four to 11 African Americans.
The University Council, which is the senior administration, went from 23 women to a slight majority of women.
With newly recruited hires, its percentage of black faculty has increased by 60 percent since 2011.
In the study body, its percentage of African-American freshmen went up to 9 percent last year from a longtime plateau of 6 percent, while the percentage of Hispanic freshmen went up to 8 percent.
She cited “significant progress in supporting the LGBT members of our community.” Addressing a room of mostly black alumni and staff, she added, “This is important not only because we support their rights and full inclusion in our communities, but because many people of color also identify as gay or transgender or gender-nonconforming.”
The university created a Bias Response & Support System for students, she said, and is “piloting a freshmen required course on identity literacy, or on how to appreciate, respect and engage each other across our manifold differences.”
And, at the very top, she said, its Board of Trustees “has enumerated diversity and inclusion as its top priority in its five-pronged Plan for Excellence.”
The Board of Trustees itself has little black representation. Only five of 60 trustees, or 8 percent of the body, are African-American. None of those trustees – Arnold W. Donald, Priscilla L. Hill-Ardoin, Louis G. Hutt Jr., Lawrence E. Thomas and Ronald L. Thompson – is an officer of the board.
Davis quoted Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton on the subject of diversity: “Great universities solve great problems. Diversity is a challenge everywhere and we can help solve it. In addition, diverse teams solve problems more creatively and better than ones that are not diverse.”
Wrighton did not attend the university’s first recognitions ceremony for African-American alumni, faculty and staff, but he did record a brief video for the occasion. In it, he credited Davis herself with the uptick in recruitment of black talent.
As officials always do, Davis noted there is much progress yet to be made: “We continue to have challenges translating these values into the daily lived experiences of everyone on the campus.”
As if to prove the point, Wrighton’s video was followed by a poetry performance by Camille Borders, an African-American sophomore majoring in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies and in History. Her poem included the hissing line: “white students say some shit out of the sides of their neck.”
Borders’ inclusion in a program catering mostly to more mature black alumni showed the university’s conscious embrace of the brash, young, black leaders who came to national prominence through Ferguson.
One of the two inaugural Trailblazer awardees – alumna Brittany N. Packnett (Class of 2006) – comes from this generation. A St. Louis native, Packnett was serving as executive director of Teach For America St. Louis when Ferguson blew up. She joined protestors from the earliest days and emerged as a national leader. President Obama appointed her to his Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and Gov. Jay Nixon appointed her to the Ferguson Commission.
Packnett gave a ringing endorsement of her alma mater: “Washington University empowered me in ways I didn’t know I needed.”
She wept briefly while remembering the critical support she received from the late Jim McLeod, a trailblazing black dean at the university. “He was a father to me when my own dad passed,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have made it through Washington University without him.”
Packnett said she balked at the idea of being hailed as a “Trailblazer,” but that it was “absolutely clear” the other inaugural awardee, Cynthia L. Cosby, deserved the honor.
In nearly 45 years of working at the university, Cosby (also a St. Louis native) developed and managed program activities for the Black Alumni Council. She founded the St. Louis African Arts Festival in Forest Park in 1991, with the university as the festival’s producer until she founded the African Heritage Association. She completed her degree at the university in 1993, though she started taking courses at night as an employee in the early 1970s.
Cosby – a consummate inside player, in contrast to Packnett’s more confrontational approach – remembered earlier eras of pushing for inclusion and respect at the university. She remembered when Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth was still chancellor and would attend black alumni reunions to personally “work through bitterness issues.”
This inaugural recognition event also served as a farewell to LaTanya Buck, the founding director of the university’s Center for Diversity & Inclusion. She has been hired away by Princeton University to found a similar center at the Ivy League school. Davis put Buck’s loss in the best possible light: “Princeton can hire the very best person in the world to lead their diversity efforts, and they found her at Washington University.”
Meanwhile, the work continues. The chancellor and provost have appointed a Commission on Diversity & Inclusion to oversee the 12 recommendations made by last year’s Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee. Davis chairs the 19-member committee.
“We are almost one year into our work,” Davis told The American, “and will soon have our first set of recommendations to make.”
“Washington University empowered me in ways I didn’t know I needed.” – Brittany N. Packnett
