Haverford Senior Staff Accede to Most Strike Demands

By Adrian Velonis, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Haverford student activists have continued to press the administration for substantive change after initiating a campus-wide strike on October 28. On Thursday, November 5, a public meeting was held between strike organizers and administrators, including President Wendy Raymond, Provost Linda Strong-Leek, and several members of the Board of Managers. In the meeting, students reiterated and clarified their demands to college officials. A number of senior staff also stated their personal commitment to resign if they were unable to fulfill the demands that they formally agreed to. On November 6, Raymond sent students a spreadsheet containing detailed responses to each of the demands, including timelines where applicable; an abbreviated version of her response is available here.

Student–Administration Zoom Meeting

The meeting held over Zoom on November 5 began with an apology from Wendy Raymond on the administration’s role in the systemic racism faced by BIPOC students on campus. “We have fallen short of our stated principles of equity, integrity, trust, concern, and respect,” Raymond said. “As the current president of the college I am accountable for real, impactful change that POC students will see and feel now. I am also accountable for establishing ways forward that will sustain our anti-racist actions for future generations of Haverfordians.” She then laid out steps that the administration had taken in response to the strike demands, including plans for instating a new Chief Diversity Officer.

Board Chair Charles Beever ‘74 stated, “Both the Board itself and the administration are accountable for the commitments that are made as part of this activity. In our role as having final accountability for the health and well-being of the college, we are of course very interested in understanding and listening to this discussion and…ensuring that the actions that are defined are followed through [on].”

Strike organizers then took the stage with an explanation of the format of the call. Their cameras were off, and instead of their real names they identified themselves as historically recognized white men in the college’s history, such as Henry Drinker, Pliny Early Chase, and James P. Magill, among others. Their primary reasoning was that they had experienced legal threats to their persons from parents or alumni who opposed the strike.

“Rather than identify ourselves publicly, everyone that is speaking on this call has made the decision as a collective unit to name ourselves after some of the old white men who have made Haverford the racist institution that it is today. Some students, parents, and administrators have attempted to paint our legitimate calls for change…as an act of bullying because they’re uncomfortable with the conflict necessary for radical transformation. And unfortunately, some of these calls have been bolstered by the threat of legal action against student organizers. […] And so for that reason, we’ve anonymized ourselves and turned off our cameras. Maybe if people are looking up our names, they can learn something about Haverford’s history.”

As the call continued, the organizers issued two new demands for the administration. Each demand was accompanied by additional clarifying details as well as providing timelines for the college to fulfill. The new demands are paraphrased below:

1. The return of institutional land back to Native American nations. If this cannot be achieved,the college should instead:
   1. Provide free higher education to Native students on their traditional homelands as land-based reparations.
   2. Establish a reparations program for any descendents of Native Peoples indigenous to Pennsylvania state territories.
   3. Announce that any individual Lenape individual or descendant of Native Peoples original to PA state territories heritage will be given preferential admission consideration. Upon admission, said individuals will receive a full-tuition scholarship, including room and board.
2. The complete renewal of the Black Cultural Center. The house’s current state illuminates the neglect and lack of priority the house faces. In solidarity with our Latinx peers and the continued erasure of their work, we also demand a Latinx Center.

The Black Cultural Center is currently stationed in the Ira de A. Reid House, which strike organizers say was “hastily constructed due to previous Black student dissonance in the 1970s,” referring to the student boycott in 1971–1972 and associated racial tensions. Haverford has not had a formal Latinx Center in several years. Until recently, La Casa Hispánica (also known as the Roslin House) served this function, but the college made efforts to sell it, prompting students to demand its return multiple times in the past.

Organizers then went through each of the demands that they had previously expressed to the administration, requesting comments on what actions would be taken in regard to each demand, and why some had been rejected. Contentious points of discussion included the college’s refusal to sever relations with the Haverford Township and Ardmore Police Departments and its additional refusal to offer direct financial aid to Philadelphia Mutual Aid funds, which the college stated was for legal reasons.

Students also brought up the issue of the BIPOC profiling that existed on campus, such as Campus Safety carding Black individuals to prove that they were students, but not doing so for the White residents of Ardmore who have routinely broken policy during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by making use of the college’s nature trail, which is currently off-limits to non-students.

Organizers also offered instances of the way in which racial tensions affected daily campus life between other students. “Y’all have not experienced this. […] Haverford has clearly made a division between us and others on this campus to the point that our White peers do not look at us as we walk by them to go to class. That is the division that we are talking about.” Administrators stated that they had not previously been aware of such overt instances of racial profiling at Haverford. In an emotional response, Board Vice Chair Garry W. Jenkins ‘92 stated “There’s an interest among the Board, including Board members of color…including me who feel this personally, from our own experiences. And I don’t know if you can hear it in my voice, but hearing some of the stories about students being carded, that is new to me, that is the first I’ve heard of that at Haverford today, and it’s certainly upsetting.”

Strike organizers were critical of the language used by administrators. When Beever said that “we hear you,” one speaker responded, “There’s a difference between hearing and listening. Listening is actually processing, analyzing, and taking into account our statements.”

Some amount of confusion occurred in the call over the extent to which students would be paid during the strike. President Raymond stated that students who were striking would be eligible for up to 20 hours of missed work through the college, but that work done in organizing the strike itself was not subject to financial compensation.

Raymond also emphasized the need for the college to fulfill students’ “formal education, the classroom education that we must deliver to give you course credit toward a Bachelor’s Degree.” Organizers responded by referring to the optional teach-ins that had been organized by students and faculty over the last week in order to provide a form of educational structure in the context of racial justice, which they noted a quarter of the student body had attended on the first day alone.

Asked about the possibility of renewing the pass/fail model from the spring 2020 semester, Strong-Leek stated that “This is another one of the things that [we’d] be discussing with the faculty and [Educational Policy Committee].” Raymond clarified that it would be possible for the college to follow the same model in the fall 2020 semester as well, pending faculty and EPC approval. This was approved following the meeting: see Demand 10B in the revised list of administrative responses to strike demands.

Students also brought up a number of issues related to Haverford’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) procedures, including the presence of a non-representative staff. One organizer said, “We need to place special emphasis on the removal of problematic therapists. […] We had an instance of a therapist who laughed at a student who was going through a traumatic experience.” Another organizer added that the individual “was telling LGBTQ+, queer individuals to basically stop being queer. […] There needs to be more vetting,” and a Zoom chat participant stated, “This counselor actively supported conversion therapy.”

President Raymond quickly responded that such behavior was “not acceptable,” and said that she was unaware of “how that happened and was not known.” However, she emphasized that “I and others are limited by what we don’t know,” and stated an intent to discuss the matter with CAPS.

Near the end of the call, Christopher Mills ‘82, the Assistant Vice President for College Communications, read a message from the Zoom chat: “Can you commit to vacating your positions if you fail to deliver [on the official responses to the demands]?” Mills responded, “If the accountability group commits to that, I say absolutely. I will commit to that.” Strike organizers asked the same of Raymond shortly afterward: “Absolutely. I am here for this work, and if I am an impediment, as president, absolutely.” Strong-Leek also said, “As do I. I’ve been here three months, but yes, absolutely.”

Administrators finished the call with a promise to communicate over email with organizers any progress that was being made on their revised responses to the demands of the strike.

Administrative Follow-Up

On November 6, CAPS Director Philip Rosenbaum sent an email referring to some of the criticisms brought up during the call. “Conversion therapies do incredible harm and we do not and have not ever taught or practiced them. Being accused of practicing conversion therapy is something we take incredibly seriously,” he said. “Accordingly, we ask that the individual(s) making this claim or those with first-hand knowledge of it come forward in some fashion so we may address it. We are concerned that unless the incidents being referenced are addressed that this rumor is harmful to current and potential students who may be dissuaded from utilizing CAPS.”

Also on November 6, President Raymond emailed students with a written list of some of the steps that she had announced at Thursday’s meeting:

• As of today, I have stepped down as chief diversity officer and welcome Linda Strong-Leek as interim Chief Diversity Officer for about one month, with a plan to move to an interim co-CDO structure. That will mean two people sharing the CDO responsibility, as of December 1, on an interim basis. The second person will be a staff member of color currently in the Dean’s Office, with the intentional design of having these individuals in academics and student life.
• The Board of Managers will implement an Anti-Racism Inclusive Accountability Group charged with verifying assessing institutional progress toward stated goals.  It will be populated with students, faculty, staff, alumni, Board members as well as outside experts, and we will welcome continued dialogue with students about the specific structure and role(s) of this group. 
• The College will designate a student living-learning space for BIPOC and FGLI students no later than the next academic year.
• A wholesale reorganization of the DEI work within the Dean’s Office is underway and will continue, designed to become a sustainable organizational support structure both for ongoing work of value to the student body as well as many of the changes/initiatives currently under discussion. 
• $10,000 of the new ‘3126 Fund’ will be immediately allocated to the Interim CDO, and, once named, to the Interim Co-CDO in the Dean’s office, for use toward BIPOC/FGLI initiatives, with BIPOC/FGLI student input.

In the spreadsheet that accompanied her November 6 email, titled “Anti-Racism Commitments and Strike Responses 2.0,” responded to each demand issued by student activists with “Yes,” “Yes, qualified,” or “No.” Additional columns provided explanations for the responses, references to the group(s) responsible for managing them, timelines, budgets, and progress (“for future reporting”). Each demand was broken down into specific requests; in some cases, the administration accepted part of a demand and rejected another part. Out of a total 70 sub-demands, college officials responded to 31 with “Yes,” 24 with “Yes, qualified,” and 6 with “No.” Lastly, 9 sub-demands—mostly “additional college commitments” not explicitly demanded by the organizers—were listed as “N/A.”

The Bi-College News has published a summarized list of the demand responses in the article linked here. For the full response of the administration to each point, please see the aforementioned spreadsheet.

Further Developments

Strike organizers hosted a sit-in on Founders Green at 9 PM on November 5. The tone of the sit-in was relatively positive, with organizers emphasizing the progress that had been made during the Zoom call and the commitment of several members of the senior staff to resigning if they were unable to fulfill the demands that they agreed to.

On November 7, the Committee on Student Standing and Programs (CSSP) sent an email to students “acknowledg[ing] the harm that has been done by this committee, specifically to BIPOC and FGLI students” and “apologiz[ing] for the role that this committee has played in perpetuating the institutionalized racism that exists at Haverford.” Instead of engaging in standard operating procedures, the CSSP stated that it “has chosen not to hold normal mid-semester checks. Instead, our discussions were completely focused on CSSP’s role in the issues raised by the student strike. […] Our intent is to begin to use a different model and structure, with more representative student input by the end of the semester.” They asked students to provide anonymous feedback on the best path forward for the committee. After obtaining and integrating student feedback, the CSSP stated that “the full plan for restructure and reform will be submitted to the community by February 1, 2021, with the understanding that full implementation will take place by Fall 2021.”

As of now, Haverford students are still striking. President Raymond stated in her November 6 email laying out the college’s revised responses to strike demands that she requested a formal response on the status of the strike by Sunday, November 8.

Pictured above: a banner hanging on Founders Hall, referencing a 1977 tagline. Image credit: Adrian Velonis