One of my favorite things about the University of Rochester is that the community here has
never been afraid to tangle with hard questions.
Now I am not talking about the difficult questions in physics, engineering or political science,
though Rochester's plenty good at those.
I'm talking more about the questions that force us to confront our own implicit biases,
uncomfortable truths, our assumptions about how the world works.
Our final speaker today, Beth Olivares, is the Dean of Diversity Initiatives here at
the University.
She's here to share a little bit of her story and to talk about what it means to both visible
or invisible in our world.
Please join me in welcoming Beth Olivares.
Thank you Nick.
So much wisdom here today.
I hope that you have learned a lot.
I know I have listening to all the talks.
I'm here to tell you a little bit about the work that I do and my story.
So this is a very pixely photograph of the University of Rochester and the reason that
I have it up here is a metaphor for the fact that students who are the first in their families
to go to college, whose family income may actually be less than tuition here costs for
a year or who unused to white spaces, predominantly white spaces.
I will remind you that our K-12 education system is currently more segregated than it
was in the 1950's.
These folks don't always understand how to navigate the spaces of higher education because
in fact higher education was not built for them.
Low income students and those who come from families who do not have a history of higher
education, often have a fraught experience when they arrive here on campus.
Here on our campus as well as at other campuses across the nation.
Fraught because the idea of success as an academic feels to them as though they have
to leave behind who they are and where they come from so there's a dissonance that sometimes
happens when such an individuals become educated. They're changing their lives and therefore they're
changing and their family relationships are changing as well.
This can be very painful and burdensome.
Some students may question, "Do I really belong here?".
They feel sometimes a sense of isolation.
We have a, there's a term called the "Imposter Syndrome" that many such students exhibit
and experience.
They're not quite sure how to ask for help or if they really need it or where to go.
How to navigate here at Rochester our very open curriculum, making sure that they fill
out the right paperwork and get the right signatures at the right times.
So then we, so, being first generation and low income is pretty much an invisible, invisible characteristic
but when you add into it the idea of being a raced individual of being black or brown,
those things are not always invisible.
They often are things that are seen immediately and people who see you have certain ideas
about what it means to be black or brown.
So students have many, many experiences of being both hypervisible—meaning it's very
obvious to everybody when somebody is black or dark brown—but also invisible so we have
students and faculty and staff who have experiences of the hypervisiblity of always being on point
and always needing to talk about, to be the spokesperson for their race or to be the person
who all the folks turn to in class when a question about a certain ethnicity comes up
but also being invisible and so recently I had a conversation with an African American
woman who's a computer scientist.
She has a PhD.
She worked at the NSA for over a decade and now she's in higher education and she talks
about being in the room with other people who come in and they assume that she's a secretary
because they have never in their lives met an African American computer scientist with
a doctoral degree before.
So hypervisible and invisible and when you add the context of race so the research shows
that black men in particular are assumed to have ghetto specific knowledge regardless
of where they come from or where they grew up or their education level and this creates
burdens that students bring with them, that faculty and staff bring with them, that affect
their experiences here.
Now we know that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 opened up higher education to people of color
but institutions such as universities are slow to change so we may be peopled by lots
of different individuals now but we also need to understand that we have the responsibility
as institutions to change our policies and procedures and the things that we do so that
we're actually what I call actively inclusive for all.
We know that U of R students have a long history of activism around issues of social justice
and race and they impel us to become more actively inclusive and more equitable and
in the most recent protests over the past year students are telling us in fact that
they don't always necessarily always feel safe on campus.
That they're told if their black or Hispanic that there only here because of affirmative
action or that there, it was a mistake to let them in.
Douglass Leadership House, which is a house on the Fraternity Quad has been targeted for
really vile, really vile racist comments and also actions against the students who live there and this
leads to what the literature calls racial battle fatigue which is the feeling of both
racialized individuals and people who do race work and who may be low income or first generation
the, that the, the exhaustion that you feel after a lifetime of these kinds of experiences.
In the academy, racism has become something that we talk about as historical artifacts
or something that happens out there and not here but we know from listening to our students,
our faculty and our staff that that's not exactly true.
So, where does that leave us, right?
So we think of higher education and of universities as sanctuaries of scholarship.
We conserve knowledge in our libraries, in our art galleries and our museums.
We create knowledge in our research labs and our research experiences.
We disseminate that knowledge by giving talks, publishing books, portraying art and so for
me the concept of bringing with us all of who we are in terms of all of our experiences
and all of our life, our qualities and being in a sanctuary of scholarship actually,
those things intersect in an interesting way and for me they intersect through my personal
story and I'm going to share a little bit about of that with you.
So I was born into a shattered family that didn't understand or value higher education.
My parents divorced when I was three months old.
My mother, as a single mother, became an alcoholic when my older brother died at the age of twelve.
I was homeless twice as a teenager, quite poor, once in the Bronx and once in Puerto Rico.
I was the first person in my family to go to college and I only went to college because
of pressure from boyfriend, right.
You can't go out with me unless you're going to be educated so I decided I was going to
become educated because I wanted to go out with the boy. Which is great, right?
It seems to have worked out.
That boy turned into my husband.
He actually became schizophrenic and tried to take my life.
I survived that attempt on my life.
I also more recently survived stage four Non-Hodgkin’s disease lymphoma, right, so I have had all
of these different experiences.
I lived in multiple multi-racial families.
My mother was also what I call a serial monogamer.
She had a lot of different partners in her life but each of these experiences has helped
me understand the inter-dependence of human beings and the power of love and compassion
to actually make a difference in the world and to create sanctuary. But it doesn't take
a story like mine although in my person it took this story to make this happen.
It's actually available for all of us.
So, I run the Kearns Center here on campus and the Kearns Center works with students from
sixth grade all the way through graduate school and I also do some work with our faculty and
our goal in the Center is to transform lives through educational opportunity.
I believe because my life was changed by educational opportunity and those of some of my colleagues
and many of the people who work with me that we can create this kind of environment so
that students actually can achieve.
We want the students individually to be able to achieve and we also want to change the
systems so the K-12 system and the higher education system need to change to make those
kinds of achievements possible.
We want our Center to be a sanctuary.
We want us to be a place where it's cool to be smart, where resources for success are the
focus and that everyone is seen.
We have open and frank conversations about difficult topics including racism, classism, sexism
and we tell the truth and validate our students' experience.
We focus with a ferocity of purpose on social justice.
Our goal is that every student we touch is seen and understood.
So I wanted to show you this data, a little bit of data.
We work in the Rochester City School district with six through twelfth graders so on the
left hand side, on both sides of the bar are a hundred little students and on the left
side the colored ones, there are forty three and on the right hand side there are ninety
six and what that represents is the fact that the Rochester City School District right now
has a graduation rate of students who start ninth grade, only forty three of a hundred
will graduate.
We've been in the district for ten years working with our programs.
Ninety six percent of the students who are in our programs actually graduate on time
from high school in the Rochester City School District, thank you, and not only, not only do they
graduate on time but they also enroll in college.
So no one can tell me that even though Rochester has the highest child poverty rate in the
nation for a city its size and our schools are under-resourced and constantly under attack
that the children in the Rochester School District can't achieve success.
In the undergraduate realm, our students four and five year graduation rates out pace national
and college averages.
Eighty five percent of the students in our McNair program, which encourages students who
are low income first generation and minority students, to go into PhD work.
Eighty five percent of them go onto graduate study.
Over a hundred and ten already have doctoral degrees.
Our alumni are professors, researchers, clinicians, surgeons.
They're all over the country and in fact all over the world doing work that, that makes
a difference and they describe their experiences in our program as transformational.
Brandon, who you saw in the earlier slide, is now at NASA.
He has a PhD in optics from the U of R last year and is now a research scientist at NASA.
So I've been humbled in the past couple of years to receive several national awards for
the work that I do and I have always downplayed comments such as Dylan's here on the screen
believing as I do in the ability, of the innate ability of every student, to succeed and to
achieve his or her goals but more recently I've come to understand that it's true: without
the space that I and my colleagues have made purposefully here at the U of R, many of my students
would never of actually been seen.
They might never have had the opportunity to speak their dreams, never possibly understood
that the path that they could take was actually there for them.
When we say no one is invisible we mean that whatever your circumstance, wherever you come
from, whatever your issue is, your problem or your thing to celebrate, we're here for you and
we love you.
We see you and we understand that you have circumstances that are beyond your control
but those circumstances do not prevent you from actually achieving your academic dreams.
So the challenge is to make this real at the entire university level and make the whole
academy such a place.
One of the ways that we're trying to do that is through the University's anti-racism campaign,
"We're Better Than That." Because we believe that our responsibility as educated people
is to bring more light into the world and to drive out the darkness of racism and hatred.
There as many ways to do that as there are people in this room, in this University, alumni,
across the country.
Meliora in fact requires that we leave the world a better place than we found it when
we got here and that we enable our students, our alumni and ourselves to live out the promise
that's embedded in our logo, our mission: "Learn, Discover, Heal, Create and Make the
World Ever Better." Thank you.
Beth Olivares, everyone.