Dear St. Olaf Community,

I am writing to follow up on the recent reports from the Working Group on Equity and Inclusion. I applaud the group’s diligence in communicating with the community about its progress, and I wish all of the members well in fulfilling the significant charge in front of them.

In the meantime, I am excited to announce that I have received a $250,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the process of the Working Group and provide seed money for some of its recommendations. This is a “Senior President’s Discretionary Grant” that I applied for in order to provide the Working Group with the resources necessary to impact equity and inclusion on campus.

As a reminder, I have asked the Working Group to step back and take a broad view of how members of our community are experiencing life at the College and to consider issues of equity and inclusion on our campus. I have asked the Working Group to bring a multitude of voices into the conversation — including those on our campus, outside experts, and best practices from other institutions — so that its report this spring can provide the basis for institution-wide initiatives that will make a meaningful difference at St. Olaf.

In the meantime, we will continue to take intermediate steps now that we know will help create conditions that more closely resemble our aspirations for this community. Many of these steps respond to concerns raised and recommendations made by students last spring. Examples of changes we have already made include our new bias incident reporting system, the recent required diversity training for students, and the campus climate survey, along with the ongoing work funded by another grant, also from the Mellon Foundation, called To Include is To Excel. You can track these and other initiatives here.

Thank you for your engagement with these important issues.

Regards,
President David R. Anderson ’74