Proposed Allocation of Carnegie Academic Leadership Award Funds

Dear Campus Community:

As you know, at the end of September, we received word that the Carnegie Corporation of New York had awarded $500,000 to Harvey Mudd College in the form of an Academic Leadership Award for outstanding academic and institutional leadership. We are tremendously grateful to Carnegie for this recognition, and we have been working with various groups on ideas for how we might best use these funds to further support our efforts to build a more inclusive campus experience for our entire community.

After consulting with ASHMC, the Department Chairs Committee (DCC), Faculty Executive Committee (FEC) and the leadership of our Board of Trustees, the President’s Cabinet has developed the following list of proposed funding initiatives:

• Academic Department Awards ($70,000; $10,000 for each department): Each academic department will receive funding to support department-specific efforts to enhance academic equity, diversity and inclusion. Projects could be curricular, capacity-building in staff and faculty, directed toward faculty-student interactions or other forms of impactful activity.
• Campus Student Space Renovations (App. $90,000): The Platt Living Room is a central hub of student activity on campus. Funds would be used to refresh the living room space, including purchasing new couches and chairs as well as more portable end tables and updating the accent wall carpet. We would replace the existing study tables and chairs with furniture designed to allow small or large groups to work together more effectively. This will make it easier for groups to work collaboratively in the Green Room when it is available. The funds would be used to create a living-room-like space for ASHMC groups in the Linde Activities Center Riggs Room. This includes adding couches and chairs (the same new versions installed in Platt), a microwave and refrigerator. These funds would allow us to create 16 new lockable storage spaces in the hallway outside the Riggs Room for ASHMC groups and clubs. Existing card readers will allow ASHMC groups to access and use these spaces when the LAC is closed, in the same way as the Linde computer lab allows 24/7 access.
• Diversity Strategic Planning Workshop (App. $75,000): Funds will support planning and implementing a workshop to develop HMC’s Strategic Plan for Diversity and Inclusion to be held in fall 2018. The workshop would start with our Convocation dedicated to this theme Friday afternoon, Sept. 7, followed by breakout sessions to explore increasing diversity and inclusion across various areas. The Friday program would end with a picnic dinner for participants. The program would continue on Saturday morning with reporting from the breakout sessions and work on further developing next steps toward implementing the strategic plan. All members of our community (faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents and trustees) would be invited to participate.
• Diversity and Inclusion Programming for Staff ($10,000): Funding will provide the opportunity for staff members to participate in training and development workshops and peer-to-peer learning that will enable individuals to leverage their ideas, perspectives and talents to achieve greater collaboration and innovation as a community. In fostering an inclusive community, we seek to celebrate the diverse experiences of our staff members and contribute to an enriched campus culture at Harvey Mudd where all employees feel valued.
• DSA Office of Health and Wellness Programming ($25,000): These funds will provide additional support for the Office of Health and Wellness (OHW) for the 2018 calendar year. The OHW is a campus-wide educational initiative with the goal of helping students thrive, achieve a sense of well-being, reduce risk factors and bring about balance in their lives.
• Faculty Executive Committee Diversity and Inclusion Training ($25,000): Funding will support initiatives emerging from the work of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Subcommittee of the Faculty Executive Committee. Guided by community input, projects will focus on building capacity and will include campus diversity training supported by one or more external experts.
• Ongoing Support for the Summer Institute ($50,000): Summer Institute is a longstanding and selective summer program for incoming first-year students. Arriving on campus two weeks before orientation, SI scholars begin taking Math 30B, the more rigorous version of our first Core mathematics course; participate in workshops and co-curricular programming offered by student mentors; a ropes course during a trip to the San Jacinto Mountains; local community service; and exercises to develop allyship, multicultural awareness, community-building and leadership skills. The program is offered to students who are underrepresented in science, math and engineering (e.g., women, first-generation to college, students of color), but does not limit participation to students from these groups. SI primes students for leadership, and often, our most-respected campus leaders were first SI scholars.
• Programming Support for Faculty Assoc. Dean for Diversity (App. $5,000–7,500; plus an additional $7,500–10,000 from President’s Discretionary Account): The ADD has been allocated $15,000 in discretionary funds from the Carnegie award. These much-needed funds will be used to support ADD efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. Initiatives range from faculty and staff support and training to investigation of equity-centered pedagogy to student-faculty relations.
• Social Justice Clinic ($50,000): Funding will be set aside to support two Clinic projects during the 2018–2019 academic year. As envisioned, these projects will be student-generated but will require faculty sponsorship. Further details about the social justice Clinics as well as procedures for the application process are in development and will be announced soon.
• Social Justice Summer Research Funding ($100,000): Funding will be set aside for faculty-developed summer research projects that will take place during summer 2018. Social justice research funding will be allocated by the Faculty Research Committee as part of their annual call for proposals. Projects may represent the introduction of a new dimension in a faculty member’s research or a new line of inquiry.

Per Carnegie’s requirements, the funds must be expended by Sept. 30, 2018, with a final accounting and report provided by Jan. 1, 2019. Because of these timeline and budgeting limitations, we believe we can be most effective by using these funds to bolster existing diversity and inclusion efforts and to pilot new programmatic options, such as social justice Clinics and research. We also believe it is important to use this opportunity to take on some additional short-term, high impact opportunities—such as renovations to student spaces—that did not have prior funding sources identified.

If you have suggestions for any of these programs or if you think something is missing from this list, we would love to get your thoughts and feedback. To send your suggestions, please email me directly at klawe@hmc.edu.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in brainstorming around how to best use these funds and for your wonderful ideas on how we can make the Harvey Mudd College community even stronger.

Sincerely,

Maria

Maria M. Klawe
President, Harvey Mudd College