Andover’s Anti-Racism Task Force (AATF), a committee charged by Head of School Raynard Kington in September 2020 to address the inequalities of people of color at Andover, no longer exists. The Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Action (IDEA) committee is now working to implement the recommendations from the Task Force’s report, created in March 2022. From the IDEA committee, initiatives are diverted to individual departments such as the office of Community and Multicultural Development (CaMD) and the Dean of Students, and progress is posted to a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) dashboard on Andover’s official website.
The recommendations in the Task Force report, made to be carried out over five years, fell into six broad systemic categories — training, support, creation of clear goals and measurable outcomes, improved data, improved systems for recruitment/retention of faculty and staff, and consistent DEI performance assessments for employees.
Co-Chair of the Task Force Linda Carter Griffith, Associate Head of School for Equity, Inclusion and Wellness, described how the Task Force’s original committee from 2020 has since dissolved. Griffith also noted a change in culture at Andover in regards to Anti-Racism and how this shift has been reflected in the Administration’s Anti-Racism efforts.
“The committee consisted of parents of students who have since graduated and four of the trustees on the committee of twenty are not here anymore doing work for the school, and faculty and staff as well. Members of the AATF report created recommendations, that was their goal. It was a very intense time, we were in the middle of Covid[-19], all of our meetings were on Zoom, and it was also in the middle of a racial reckoning in this nation. The work was incredibly important at the time,” said Griffith.
Griffith continued, “The committee is no longer here; however, Dr. Kington assigned me to work with the IDEA committee. It’s a committee of faculty and staff, my colleagues on campus. We are responsible for implementation, so what we do is we look at various recommendations we had to prioritize and the ones that were prioritized are on the [Andover DEI website] dashboard. In the future we will continue to look at recommendations that were created back in 2020 and determine which ones are top priority, and then we will work with departments and divisions across campus to implement those, and that sometimes includes students… While we will continue to discern the Task Force recommendations and their relevance currently, as we move forward, we are also going to be working on lots of new initiatives as they come forward, from the students and the community.”
According to the Spring 2024 State of the Academy, The Phillipian’s annual student survey, 47.5 percent of students believe that Andover’s Anti-Racist work is somewhat sufficient, while 30.7 percent believe the work is not sufficient. When asked about student awareness about the AATF’s progress, Griffith indicated that all updates on the Task Force’s progress are published on the online DEI dashboard. Although the administration’s efforts on Anti-Racism have not been directly communicated to the campus community, Griffith described how work on Anti-Racism is still ongoing, with some initiatives such as bias training to be repeated annually.
“My feedback from students has been that email is not necessarily the best way to communicate information… If we add new recommendations, which we might, we may actually publicize some of the big new efforts [towards Anti-Racism]… Unfortunately, publicly, there is a lot of backlash to the language of DEI and it’s really important how this language of Anti-Racism work has evolved… What’s important to me is that students actually understand that because they’re not hearing the language Anti-Racism it doesn’t mean that we’re not doing important work around cultural competency, belonging, equity, access, and Andover’s real clear about their ‘Youth from every quarter,’ which means ‘diversity.’ It’s critical that students understand the language,” said Griffith.
Similarly, Aquita Winslow, Dean of CaMD, reaffirmed the continuing Anti-Racist efforts of the administration, highlighting the new CaMD advisory board as one of the initiatives derived from the Task Force’s recommendations. She also spoke on the importance of her role within CaMD in facilitating conversation between students and the administration.
“Deans sit in very specific rooms. If you’re making decisions about the school, you want to make sure that there’s somebody in there whose job it is to be thinking about, ‘How does this decision impact students around inclusion? How is this decision going to support students around being valued members of the community…’ That is my main lens: to be that student eye, to be that student voice,” said Winslow.
Winslow continued, “There are multiple different committees that I sit on and the goal of that work is to implement the goals of the Task Force… The work of the Task Force is still very much in play. We are still very much making sure we are being consistent with the goals and trying to meet all the goals that we have yet to meet… [The CaMD Advisory Board is new and] there’s a representative on the board from every student group that is under the CaMD umbrella. We want everybody’s voice at the table… It gives students the opportunity to talk to administrators in a space that will allow them to share and express their concerns, and for those concerns to be taken seriously.”
Conversely, Ozochi Onunaku ’25, who serves as the Co-President of the Black Student Union and a board member of The Brotherhood, did not know about the DEI dashboard and pointed out the administration’s lack of communication about their progress on Anti-Racism at Andover. Onunaku mentioned how the administration’s various committees and departments could follow in the steps of CaMD’s weekly newsletters and produce their own updates on their ongoing work.
”CaMD has taken great strides in trying to allow diverse opinions and perspectives from all walks of life to communicate with one another… As for the administration, I’m sure they’ve also done a lot of efforts. One of the biggest issues is that transparency and communication could be better, it could be improved. The administration could definitely take up some inspiration from what CaMD is doing in regards to facilitating Anti-Racism talks and help in communicating more about Anti-Racism to the student body, because CaMD does, for example, send weekly newsletters for events involving different diverse groups on campus… If they were able to send biweekly, monthly, newsletters on progress with diversity of Anti-Racism initiatives, that’d be fantastic. Just showing the student body that it is an active problem and they’re actively working on it around the clock to reduce the number of cases of racism on campus,” said Onunaku.
As Andover’s student body and faculty continues to evolve, Winslow called attention to the destructive power of fear. She emphasized how staying true to Andover’s core values could combat this fear and foster a stronger community.
“Fear is an ever-present problem… People always fear someone who’s different than them. Fearful people fear people different than them. Sometimes the person that they fear is a person of colour, sometimes the person that they fear is transgender, sometimes the person that they fear is a woman, or a person of faith. When someone is living in a space of fear, they will react based on that fear. They will make racist remarks or sexist remarks or transphobic remarks or anti-semetic remarks, because their fear is what’s causing that behaviour. Do we still live in a climate of fear? Yes. Is that fear getting better? In some areas it is, in other areas it’s getting worse… It’s a moving target and so we always have to be present and remind people of our values, and that’s the way we combat it,” said Winslow.
