There was high voltage in the reception that Justin Ehrenwerth '01 received when he welcomed Bates, Bowdoin and Colby students to the keynote address of the 2001 CBB Diversity Conference. And there was a lot of whooping mixed in with the applause when he credited fellow students who helped plan the two-day event in March.
"We put together a conference together that we can be proud of for the rest of our lives," Ehrenwerth told the crowd of about 900 people that packed the Page Commons Room to hear actor and activist Danny Glover. Despite an early-March snowstorm, hundreds of CBB students had showed up on a Saturday morning for 13 workshops--what Ehrenwerth called "the true substance of this conference"--with topics that included "A Panel Discussion on Sexual Preference," "Racial Stratification," "Experience of Religious Students on a Largely Secular Campus," "Origins of Hiphop" and "The Challenges of Enrolling Diverse Students."
As the crowd enthusiastically acknowledged in turn organizers Ehrenwerth, Sounun Tek '03, Lee Rankin '03, Rob Tarlock '01 and Rob Henzi '01, it was clear that four months of planning had paid off.
Ehrenwerth, who is white, had been thrust into Colby's discussion of diversity as a member of the 1998 Task Force on Institutional Racism and one of the student group that occupied the president's office in 1999. He knew, he says, that a missing element at Colby was a forthright and intensive student-to-student dialogue about diversity, and he knew it couldn't be imposed by the administration.
Last fall, working independently from his role as Student Government Association president, Ehrenwerth and sophomores Tek and Rankin contacted students at Bates and Bowdoin to organize the joint conference. Kate Burke, a sophomore at Bates, recruited about 20 Bates students to help promote the conference because, she said, "I know people at Colby, Bates and Bowdoin who don't feel comfortable in their campus communities."
Thrilled with the success of the event, Burke said, "We'd love to host it [at Bates] next year or the year after."
Praise for the conference came from faculty, administrators and trustees as well. "It was by far the most positive and encouraging effort to address these difficult and important issues that we have witnessed in our ten years at Colby," professors Mark Tappan and Lyn Brown wrote to students who organized and participated in the conference.
"I think it definitely had a lot of impact," said Tek. "Diversity is a key to understanding each other and the world in general." An Asian American from Philadelphia, Tek said he was surprised when he arrived at Colby that it often seemed like "a strain for minority students to be on friendly relations with the majority students."
"I was just curious about how people felt about understanding others--about understanding minority students in general. What was the bridge between them?" he said. He felt that different groups of students often didn't seem to understand each other and weren't even trying to talk. "That was one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in planning this diversity conference."
Rankin, an African American from Rhode Island, said he hopes the success of the conference will help Colby draw additional students from different backgrounds and races. "People will read about this and say there is a contact mode here and they really do care about my guys and what I'm going through."
More immediately, Rankin says he's seen positive results on campus since the conference. "Before the conference there was never any talk about diversity--only among some small homogenous groups, amongst the black kids or the Asians or the Jewish students," he said. "Now, even within my own dorm, I've had conversations with people who I had never spoken to about diversity before."
"The conference did more to bring up the questions rather than solve problems, "Ehrenwerth concluded when it was over. Between the conference and other diversity initiatives that have taken shape, "This year has been good in terms of starting dialogues," he said.
