The University will launch an aggressive recruitment program for Black and Latinx students, with a focus on talent identification, pipeline development, and enhanced financial aid aimed at substantially increasing our undergraduate Black and Latinx student populations. Goal: Develop Robust Admissions Strategies for Effective Recruitment of Students of Color to Fordham As the board, the administration, and I share it with you, I assure you that this should be seen as the first in a series of steps in what we now recognize must be an iterative process: as we listen more attentively and as we do more, we will learn more and adjust our plans and actions accordingly. Therefore, with the backing of the whole Fordham community (from the board to the faculty to the staff to the students), the administration, the provost, the vice presidents, the deans, the chief diversity officer, and I have drawn up the action plan that is outlined below. Indeed, the Board of Trustees feels so strongly about this that they have mandated annual anti-racism training for all faculty, administrators, staff, and students-including the president’s cabinet and the Board of Trustees. The same passion for confronting racism has been clear in all of the conversations that I and the other members of the administration and faculty leadership have had in the course of the past month. The board came away from both of those meetings with a firm belief that the question of racism was of such great mission-importance that they have both recast the charge of the Mission and Identity Committee to include Social Justice (and hence that committee has become the Mission and Social Justice Committee, which will be co-chaired by Anthony Carter and Thomas Regan, S.J.) and asked us to make the confrontation of racism in all its forms an important part of our strategic planning. That meeting was followed by a meeting of the Board Strategy Committee. During the meeting (which was attended by a majority of the board’s members), our conversations were led by the Black members of the board. In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, the chair of our Board of Trustees convened a special meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board devoted to addressing the scourge of racism. We all know this in our bones and in our hearts. But this moment has made it clear that we can and must do more. To be sure, we have in the past made strides in our efforts to create a more diverse, inclusive, and affirming community. Therefore, it is clear that the national awakening has come to Fordham. We have all been moved and dismayed by these statements and testimonials, and deeply saddened by the trauma that prompted them. We have read the many emails, petitions, and Instagram posts that have come from the University community. In the course of the past few weeks, the members of the Board of Trustees, the administration, and I have watched and listened. The protests that have occurred across the country and that have brought together people from every race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and age group in the aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd are both a cry of the heart coming from a community that has been the victim of systemic racism for our entire history, and a call to a national examination of conscience on race relations and on racism itself. The Black community has never enjoyed the kind of respect, and has never had access to the range of opportunities, that other communities in our country have had. After decades and centuries, we have still not created a nation and a culture in which all citizens are truly equal, a nation in which each citizen is treated with dignity.
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