For the HPR’s photo essay of the demonstration, click here.
Sarah Cole ’16 serves as one of the core organizers of the Diversity Report, a campus-wide movement that organized a demonstration called “We Are Here” in the Science Center Plaza on April 27, 2014.
Harvard Political Review: What motivated you to organize this demonstration?
Sarah Cole: To give a little history about the Diversity Report, it was started organically just through different conversations and different communities of color on campus starting back in February or March. We realized we were talking about the same issues. For the black community in particular, it was really started after we had our Black History Month kickoff. The keynote speaker was the former president of the Black Students Association, and the speech that he gave was about the things he did to bring the community together and find their voice and to advocate for better support from the university. They did demonstrations; they did protests; they put fliers all over the campus, underneath all the doors – all the offices and the dorms. I think a lot of students were really inspired by this, and they talked to him about it afterwards.
So later, when I organized the demonstration, he reached out and said that he would be down to support us if we wanted to do something. Through that conversation, we realized that there were a lot of people who wanted to make things better at Harvard. We realized that the Latino community was having very similar conversations when they did their town hall, and so we decided to form this coalition and reach out to other students of color.
We realized the problems were a lot bigger than we thought they were. Especially as student leaders, a lot of times when you’re going through the day-to-day, you think these experiences, these issues are just things that you’re dealing with, but talking to other people, hearing what their problems were, seeing the similarities, we realized these are actually problems on an institutional level that needed to be addressed.
I feel that when we talk about diversity on campuses, the conversation so often gets boiled down to numbers as far as admission rates and attendance. So we wanted to shift the conversation from how many students are here and whether not they should be here to “We are here now. Now what are you going to do with us?” This university has done so much to make sure that it does have diversity on this campus, and now that you have students here, what are you going to do? We felt the demonstration was necessary to really shift that conversation, and do something that people would notice in order to have that shift in the conversation.
HPR: Why did you choose to do this demonstration now? Is it because of the recent wave that the “I, Too, Am Harvard” movement created? Or had you already had a plan for it?
SC: We had started having these conversations in early February, so our conversations started happening before “I, Too, Am Harvard” really picked up. That being said, we do very much acknowledge that the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign has definitely brought stronger visibility to issues regarding diversity on campus and regarding students of color on campus. The “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign’s also very important in shifting that conversation to: “You’ve admitted us here, how are you going to treat us once we get here?” Their campaign, at least their photo campaign, dealt more with interpersonal relations, whereas we’re dealing more with institutional relations. I will say that that campaign – and we’re working closely with them – definitely opened the doors to having these conversations and allowed us a stronger platform that we don’t have to build for ourselves now that they’ve really begun a similar conversation.
HPR: “I, Too, Am Harvard” is a very multimedia-focused project. And I noticed yesterday at the demonstration that you had those signs that said “take a picture and tweet it at us or with this hashtag.” Are you hoping to make this a social media campaign?
SC: We realize that the issues we are facing at our school, while the specific problems might be different from school to school, the overall issues are very similar. So we feel like this could be a way to help other schools engage in the institutional problems that they are finding at their schools. So if we can connect, start this dialogue on a larger level, and perhaps empower those other schools to have similar conversations, the easiest way to do that is through social media because so many people are connected there.
HPR: Are you looking for the university to take specific steps?
SC: On our website we have a report card, and on that report card are different subjects. Within those subjects are assignments. And our assignments are things that we’d like to see changed, and they range from creating an initiative to increase the diversity of faculty and staff to improving Community Conversations. We’ve actually been having conversations with the Freshman Dean’s Office – Dean [Tom] Dingman and the Director for Freshman Programming Katie Steele. We’ve been having conversations with them already, and they’ve been really respectful and are really trying to get things going already which has been great.
Then it [the report] also has issues to do with increasing the budget for the UC. We thought that that was really important because as the student body grows more diverse, as it has for the last several years. There are going to be new student organizations that are formed, and in order to support the diversity within these student organizations and therefore support these diverse students, you need to increase that budget.
HPR: How do you feel like it turned out?
SC: I feel like it went really well. We were really glad to see people sitting around – there was one woman who stood around for four turns that our crowd did and at the end she was clapping.
The statement “We Are Here” was a way to let people know that Harvard has done a relatively good job of bringing diversity to campus and just that there is a community of color here on this campus. We are here, and we’re proud that we’re here, and we’re glad that the university has made efforts to bring us here because they have and they did. Our demonstration was really the two sides of diversity at Harvard: yes, we are here, and the flip side of that is: “But what are you going to do with us now that we are here? How are you going to best support us?” So that’s why we had two sides. I think that a lot of people really understood that.
What really uplifted me was people who were professors at other universities who happened to be in the area. I had a chance to talk to them, and they were saying, “This is so great, this is awesome work,” and they want to support the program. Just so many people from so many backgrounds – parents, students, prefrosh – so many different people saying that they want to be a part of this and support us. This was really positive for me; it’s just always good to know that what you’re doing for other people, inside and outside of our community, and also see the importance and the value of doing it.
HPR: What are you going to do now going forward?
SC: Now that we’ve issued our assignments to the various administrators, we’re really just going to be working closely with them and extending opportunities for other members within our communities to work with them, have these conversations, and make these improvements that we’ve outlined.
One thing that’s always been very important to us from the beginning was for this to be a community movement. So even in the conversation that we have with administrators, probably about half or so of the people at those meetings might be people who are on committees within the coalition, but the other half will be saved for people who are just in our community who might not have the time to dedicate to the full movement but are particularly passionate about this issue at hand.
I think that this will be a great community exercise for our community and just the Harvard community in general. This is a great opportunity for everybody to be able to come together and make Harvard a better place and leave it better than the way we found it.