Teachers College’s Office of the Vice President for Diversity & Community Affairs (ODCA) continued its efforts to address, enhance and invigorate Teachers College’s engagement in fostering a climate of diversity, community and civility and efforts to address gender-based misconduct concerns, including the appointment of a new confidential Ombuds.

• As part of his web series “The Conversation,” TC doctoral student Brennan DuBose convened the panel “Young Women, Empowerment, & Leadership,” featur­ing TC’s Michelle Knight-Manuel and leading female scholars from Barnard, Columbia and other institutions.
  
  
• Erica Walker (Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence), Melanie Brewster (Atheists in America: Narratives from an Invisible Minority) and Derald Wing Sue (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence) delivered faculty book talks.
  
  
•  
• Through the Black and Latino Male Doctoral Education Initiative, senior faculty members offered advice to doctoral students, while advanced doctoral students advised master’s and first-year doctoral students.
  
  
• With the enactment of The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, the College named Counseling & Clinical Psychology faculty mem­ber Riddhi Sandil to the new confidential position of Ombuds for Gender-Based Misconduct.
  
  
•  
• ODCA pro-vided Sexual Assault and Gender-Based Misconduct trainings for staff and students, and Title IX gender-based misconduct compliance trainings for new employees and faculty. The Office continued its Title IX Coordinator poster campaign for Consent Aware­ness and Sexual Assault Prevention throughout the College and presented, with the Men’s Peer Education and the CU Sexual Violence Response & Rape Crisis/Anti-Violence Support Center, programs on Teaching Consent, Healthy Relationships and Bystander Intervention.
  
  
•  
• The Office showed students, faculty and staff the Person-al Empowerment Through Self-Aware­ness (PETSA) video.
  
  
• To continue high-lighting Senior Staff engagement with the campus community, ODCA imple­mented Town Hall Meetings intended to communicate and highlight the work of key administrators, including those in Human Resourc­es, Payroll and Computer Information Services.
  
  
• ODCA collaborated with the Offices of Inter­national Affairs and Inter­national Services to more thoughtfully integrate the increased enrollment of international students into the TC community.

Published Wednesday, Feb 3, 2016