Letter to the Community Regarding the Senior Diversity Officer Search​

Dear Members of the Trinity College Community,

As you know from my announcement of November 7, 2017, Karla Spurlock-Evans, Dean of Multicultural Affairs and Senior Diversity Officer (SDO), is retiring in June 2018. Now, it is time to turn our sights toward how we will fill this position and to mark a new era of diversity and inclusion on Trinity’s campus.

Here, I invite faculty, students, and staff to nominate themselves or someone else to the SDO Search Committee​ by 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 6, 2017. The search committee will be supported by an external search firm, as has been our practice with other senior-level administrative positions. I have asked Anne Lambright, Dean of Academic Affairs; Allison Read, Chaplain and Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life; and Jason Rojas, Chief of Staff and Assistant Vice President for External Affairs, to review the nominations and to select a nine-person search committee that will report to me. We encourage those of you who are on shared governance committees related to diversity, inclusion, and multicultural affairs to nominate yourselves. We hope to start the search in January 2018 and to have a new SDO in place in July 2018.

Whether or not you are interested in participating directly in the search process, I ask that you share with me your aspirations for the SDO at my upcoming office hours on Friday, December 1, from noon to 1:10 p.m. You also can share your thoughts with other members of the senior administration who will attend, over the next several weeks, governance committee meetings of the faculty, students, and staff. As part of the search process next semester, we will offer more chances for you to offer your input.

This is an amazing opportunity for us to come together as a community to begin to lay the groundwork for strengthening diversity and inclusion at Trinity. Please join in living up to our value as an inclusive community!

Joanne Berger-Sweeney

President and Professor of Neuroscience