An Open Letter to Dean Robbin Chapman

April 17, 2018

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

Dear Dean Chapman,

Welcome to the Harvard Kennedy School! We are glad to have you here and look forward to working with you. Many of us have spent the year or two of our degrees working to hold HKS accountable to its Diversity Statement. In this statement, HKS committed to: recruit diverse groups of students, faculty, and staff; increase the range of underrepresented minorities; remove sources of unconscious bias; and develop a curriculum that celebrates diversity.

We believe that Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is crucial at HKS because the classrooms of the world’s leading school of government should look like the world that we work to improve. Despite rising application numbers, many American communities and regions of the world remain underrepresented at HKS. The percentage of students in the MPP and MC/MPA degrees who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, or Asian either decreased or remained unchanged between 2005 and 2015.  The faculty remains overwhelmingly white and male. There is much to be done for HKS to have a culture that is comfortable engaging in difference and disagreement.

However, there have been positive developments that make us hopeful that HKS can change: the creation of new courses on disability and LGBTQ rights; an effort by the Admissions Office to expand recruitment in the American South; an open dialogue about how to increase the number of international speakers and events, to name a few. Your arrival is another encouraging sign of progress.

Over the next few weeks, you will meet with faculty, staff, and students to learn what HKS needs to do to achieve the diversity that its students, staff, and faculty deserve. In advance of these discussions, we would like to call your attention to the following issues:

– Accountability and Transparency: The HKS administration has been reluctant to make data on diversity publicly available. The Diversity Task Force draft report from 2017 mostly includes data up to 2015, and is only accessible to current students on KNet. To us, this reluctance signals that the administration knows it is not meeting its diversity standards. But acknowledging this failure is the first step in improving our D&I problem. We want HKS to publish this data so that we can use it to hold the school accountable and offer solutions for our most pressing needs;

– Diversity of All Kinds at All Levels: Diversity is not simply an issue of black and white, domestic and international, or conservative and liberal. We want HKS to acknowledge and work towards achieving all forms of diversity, rather than prioritizing some forms over others. In addition, we want the school to truly leverage the diversity in our community, ensure that everyone can bring their experiences to their work, deepen our understanding of others’ perspectives, and look at who benefits from the decisions we make. This includes admissions, recruiting, fellow selection, faculty hiring, curriculum design, and beyond.

– Meaningful Student Input: The Diversity Committee is currently controlled by the HKS administration, which decides the schedule and agenda of meetings. This means that the Committee does not have a regular schedule (it has only met once this semester), and many students do not feel that the Committee takes their concerns seriously. The Committee should meet regularly (perhaps every other week) and proactively solicit student input into meeting agendas. HKS should also consider creating paid positions — equivalent to research assistant roles at academic centers — for selected students who will contribute a considerable amount of time to HKS diversity initiatives.

We are here to work with you and support you, and will continue to do so even after some of us graduate from HKS. We believe that, throughout your tenure, you will engage with students, listen to our needs, and consider missing perspectives. We recognize that taking these steps will not be easy, and it will require collective effort to champion and enact these much-needed changes. We want to make sure you know that we, the students, will be behind you in these moments of courage and action.

Sincerely,