Photo courtesy of Student Voices for Equity
2 March 2023
Dear President Katherine Bergeron,
We appreciate your acknowledgement of student demands in official communication to the College, something the Board of Trustees has still failed to do. As Student Voices for Equity, we also appreciate your recognition of our presence as a strong student group.
It is with well-founded distrust that we receive your letter. Your claim to now speak “candidly” falls on the ears of students who have heard your lies and half-truths and who have noticed your silent answers to valid questions for years. As for the allegations about the culture of your senior administrative team, we would like to remind you that these are not allegations primarily directed toward your team as a whole, but toward you specifically and the culture you have fostered within your senior administration. Additionally, we are less than enthused with the independent review the Board of Trustees claims to have initiated and are almost entirely uninterested with its results. We have been clear. We demand your resignation.
It is appalling that only in the past few weeks have the short-comings of the Connecticut College institution come to your attention. For years, students have regularly expressed their dissatisfaction with this institution to you personally, to the Board of Trustees, and to the greater public through various media platforms. It should never have taken over 700 people coming together to advocate against the detriment you caused thousands for you to finally acknowledge our pain. It should have only taken one.
Frustration, anger, and disappointment only begin to scratch the surface of our experiences. We are physically, emotionally, and mentally damaged. We are betrayed. We are traumatized. We no longer trust the vision you or the Board have for the Connecticut College institution. We are not demanding that the actions and practices of the College are brought into alignment with the vision of inclusivity and equity as it currently stands. Our demands and the vision of the current institution can not co-exist. One is genuine, the other is not. We demand a truly inclusive, equitable institution and nothing less.
We find it humorous that Connecticut College was founded to provide higher education for women when they were prevented from existing schools, yet you claim the “vision of Connecticut College as a more inclusive and equitable community” began “with the creation of the division of institutional equity and inclusion in 2016.” We acknowledge it as a clever attempt to take credit for a century-old founding value of our school. We also want to inform you, as it seems to have been surprising, that culture is constantly changing. The campus, national, and global contexts have always and will always evolve. A modern institution evolves in pace with its students, its country, and the world. We expect regular, consistent evolution of Connecticut College and it is in the context of its failure to do so that we have issued our demands. We are not interested in you redoubling your unsatisfactory efforts. We would rather you, the administration, and the Board put all efforts toward meeting our satisfactory demands.
You have delegated unsubstantial tasks to other members of the administration. We have told you—repeatedly—that the Division of Institutional Equity and Inclusion is under-staffed and under-supported. We work in DIEI. We are the recipients of DIEI’s resources. When we tell you that it is understaffed and under-supported, we know it is true. It is an unnecessary waste of energy for members of senior administration to review or relay that information themselves. We demand that DIEI be strengthened with guaranteed salaried pay and bolstered by additional qualified personnel.
We find your mention of a “Division of Equity and Inclusion,” rather than the existing Division of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, ironic. Your intentional or accidental error that excludes the first ‘I’ of DIEI works beautifully as a metaphor for the absence of institutional efforts toward equity and inclusion at Connecticut College. In past communication, you have failed to acknowledge your personal role in the unethical and immoral decisions of the recent weeks. You have pushed the blame to the weak and deflective “we,” as The College Voice so eloquently put it. Now, as you—finally—directly refer to yourself in discovery of the letter ‘I,’ know that you’ve already lost the ‘I’ in DIEI.
For most of the steps you numbered, we still lack visible action, inclusive dialogue, and any semblance of trust. You claim that the student body knows that you and the Board are prepared to make significant investments in the Division of Institutional Equity and Inclusion. What we know is that you and your allies on the Board will do as much as you can to appear to make significant investments in this crucial division. We have no guarantee and no precedent to believe that you will back up these claims. Your example of an “action” is informing us that you told someone else, the Dean of Faculty, to have a conversation with faculty associated with the academic programs listed in our seventh demand. That conversation, by your communication, has not yet occurred. There has been no action.
As you discuss new approaches to search practices across all divisions of the College, we would like to direct your attention to demand #2. In this, we demand that the review and appointment process for the President of the College is restructured. We are greatly displeased with the process that has resulted in your appointment, and we will continue to demonstrate our displeasure until you are gone.
It is disrespectful that we, as Student Voices for Equity, have not been one of the “many different groups across campus” you reference that “have been in meaningful dialogue with” members of the senior administration “over the past few weeks.” The very first meeting of SVE with senior administration occurred just yesterday afternoon, after your email. Our communication with Dean Arcelus at the time of your email was exclusively in regards to confirming for him the well-being of the students in Fanning. You implied this communication has been more substantial in regards to our activism and our demands, and that is simply untrue.
We were intrigued by the individual student meetings you reference. We are disappointed that in having these meetings you haven’t reached out to any member of Student Voices for Equity. We would appreciate being considered in the future.
As Student Voices for Equity, it is our role to amplify the voices of marginalized students. Therefore, we have met with the student body to offer an outlet for more students to air their grievances and personal responses to your letter. These will be available for you shortly and forever archived in the history of Connecticut College.
United for the betterment of Connecticut College,
Student Voices for Equity
