WASHINGTON— Centering around the theme “Can Higher Education Recapture the Elusive Dream?” institutional administrators and other education leaders gathered at the 104th annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to discuss higher education’s role in helping students achieve the “American dream” despite emerging discourse that the two are disconnected.
Workshops and panel sessions largely offered best practices and strategies on areas including how to recruit and maintain diverse faculty members, how institutions can protect their brand and still support free speech on campus and how institutions can improve student success outcomes across two-and four-year institutions.
At a keynote networking luncheon for faculty and administrators of color titled “When Core Values Collide: Diversity, Inclusion and Free Speech,” Hollins University president Dr. Pareena Lawrence talked about the challenges that ensue when institutions must uphold their core values of supporting freedom of speech while fostering diversity and inclusion.
Lawrence cautioned that a “nerve is touched” on campuses when diverse groups of students feel that their voices are unheard or “not chosen.” She suggested that institutions can avoid or manage controversial demonstrations of expression by engaging with student groups beforehand to discuss how their speaker or event contributes to the academic dialogue. Institutions, she said, also can have codes of conduct that are inclusive for all students and a planned statement of principles that are clear and continuously updated.
“Principles need to be lived every day,” she said, stressing the need for institutions to consistently apply their institutional policies around freedom of speech incidents on campus.
To foster solidarity despite a difference of opinion, institutional statements around free speech should always refer to groups as “us and the other us,” Lawrence added. “An academic environment that is not diverse will be superficial in its ideals.”
“Debate, disagreement and controversy are often when the best learning happens, but we need to manage it well,” she said. “We can do this … we must do this.”
