From the Desk of the Chief Diversity Officer

As I prepare this fifth issue of The Black Mirror, I cannot believe that we are mid-way through the fall semester. Time is genuinely elusive as it passes through us, and we always seem to be scrambling to catch up with it knowing fully well that we will never meet.

As we navigated time all through the summer and into the fall, I think that in spite of ourselves, and because we needed to speed through along with time, we as a community are now considering ways to move forward — although, still, a lot of healing to do, emotions to overcome, and misgivings to navigate. It is essential to move forward; indeed, it is what we must do as humans, but we do not need to forget the past, and more importantly, we have to take the lessons we have learned from it.

I have initiated a series of community-building focus group sessions with the idea of having everyone express their voice as we chalk out our individual and institutional future. Through these focus groups, I hope to get us to reflect on our institutional culture when it comes to handling crises, problems, and difficult conversations and come up with suggestions for building a healthier community by focusing on individual, communal and institutional responsibilities. This process will be drawn out through this semester, and at this time, all I can say is: please listen to each other.

The other side of listening is speaking. There is a lot of noise, but we are having difficulty in identifying  individual voices. There is both power and comfort in joining a chorus and generating more noise, but the lack of unique views means we have still not created safe spaces for all members of our community to speak. In this issue, I am focusing therefore, on what it will take to make our institute a safe space. 

Join this conversation. Send me your thoughts and ideas for what we can do to make our community more inclusive or join one of the community building focus group sessions.