December 13, 2022

December 2022

Newsletter

IDEA Newsletter – December 2022

News

New Centennial Plan Initiative
Schuler Access Initiative

A new strategic planning initiative has been launched to advance Inclusive Student Success. Funded by the Schuler Education Foundation, the initiative is an effort to substantially expand access for both undocumented (US-based; ineligible for federal aid) and Pell-eligible (low-income) students to highly selective liberal arts colleges. After an extremely competitive selection process, Scripps was named as one of the Schuler Access Initiative’s partner colleges. Schuler Foundation will match up to $15 million in funds raised by Scripps for this initiative over a ten-year period, for a total of $30 million in new financial aid at Scripps for financial aid for undocumented and Pell-eligible students.

Over the last five years (as of 2022), Scripps’ annual student body has included between 115–120 Pell-eligible students and 2–6 students with undocumented status. Gifts will meaningfully diversify the mix of students at Scripps, helping advance our college-wide commitment to diverse student access. Currently, students who are Pell-eligible or undocumented collectively make up approximately 11% of Scripps’ student body. They’ve achieved graduation rates of 92–95 percent in four of the past five years, consistently outperforming overall College graduation rates. Gifts will increase financial aid to allow the College to enroll approximately 13% more new students in these groups over the lifetime of the grant (25 new Pell-eligible students and eight students with undocumented status, 33 new students total). Gifts will provide four-year scholarships to each new student including tuition, room, board, and other educational costs throughout their tenure at Scripps. The overall size of the student body will remain the same; however, we will admit/enroll more students who receive financial aid.

NACCC Student Campus Climate Survey Results

The National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climate (NACCC) is a quantitative national survey of undergraduate students and is informed by more than a decade of the USC Race and Equity Center’s climate work. All Scripps College undergraduate students (N=1,074) were invited to participate in the NACCC survey in Fall 2021. In total, 298 students responded to the survey for a response rate of 17.49%. The six content areas included Mattering and Affirmation, Racial Learning and Literacy, Appraisals of Institutional Commitment, Cross-Racial Engagement, Encounters with Racial Stress, and Impact of External Environments. The Committee on Diversity and Equity (CIDE) is focusing on the low response rate and identifying several possible approaches to gathering additional data in the areas of Mattering and Affirmation and Encounters with Racial Stress. Students interested in participating in a follow-up survey are encouraged to email [email protected].

Racial Justice & Equity Fellow Spotlight

Visiting Artist Jasmine Baetz’ community engagement and campus education project is an open-ended inquiry into the visual landscape of Scripps College and the Claremont Colleges and engages with anti-racist and liberatory public art projects and organizations in the region. The project centers on racial justice made visible, interrogating inequity, and creating conditions for imagining and implementing equitable outcomes. She is committed to community-engaged projects while continuously critiquing and adjusting her approaches to and partners in this work.

Q & A with Jasmine Baetz

What prompted your interest in pursuing this project at Scripps?

The shared space of a university campus, and how it is imagined, controlled, and interpreted, has an incredible impact on belonging. I feel both at home and at odds with most campuses where I have learned or taught, and I have made it part of my work to interrogate and reimagine what a campus might look like and speak to. At CU Boulder, I facilitated a community-created sculpture to memorialize Chicanx student activists Los Seis de Boulder and create space for students of color by representing a silenced history that did not fit within the white institutional narrative of the university. At Scripps, I was interested to find out how students, staff and faculty interpret the architecture and art of the campus, and how they understand the institution through what it holds and displays. Along with co-researchers Leslie Hernandez and Paloma Garcia, I have held small group and solo discussions with students, staff, and faculty to get a wider understanding of how the visual culture of Scripps is felt and understood.

What has been the most meaningful insight thus far that has come from the Project?

We have gathered many compelling observations and questions from project participants which we are compiling into a report to first share with participants, and then with the larger Scripps community. An early and enduring focus of this project was prompted by Lily Dunkin’s article in The Student Life: Nazi associations of Scripps statue call into question college’s commitments to inclusivity. This statue by Georg Kolbe was repeatedly mentioned by our discussion participants. We are working with art historian Wolfgang Brauneis to understand the extent of Kolbe’s service to the Third Reich. With support from the O’Brien Lecture funds, Brauneis will deliver a lecture at Scripps in April 2023 about National Socialist artists, and discuss Hitler’s use of the sculpture we have displayed at Tiernan (or another identical casting) in the Great German Art Exhibition. I am sincerely hopeful that this lecture will prompt an institutional reexamination of student demands to remove the sculpture and motivate a broader critical conversation about the visual culture of Scripps.

Why are aspects of racial and gender equity important to the visual culture of a space in general and at Scripps?

Representation can get hijacked to manage an institution’s image and reputation, so we should be critical of projects that operationalize representation of marginalized people. Even so, representation matters, and the possibility of seeing yourself reflected in the space around you is important. Built in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style, Scripps’ campus is a romanticized interpretation and reinforcement of California’s missions, representative of Indigenous dispossession and forced labor, and as many have pointed out, that origin demands critique, interruption, and transformation. There is significant work ahead to create change in the visual culture of Scripps, and we loved listening to how others thought about ways to reimagine and reorient the campus in a way that would challenge its structure. One theme from our discussions is that the Motley and SCORE are felt to be inclusive spaces that generate belonging and serve as examples for how we might vision a campus that prioritizes color, warmth, student-led art, and community-minded space.

Shoutout

In this month’s campus shout out we recognize the community building commitment of two academic departments (Psychology and Keck Science) and three administrative divisions (Academic Affairs, Business Affairs, and Student Affairs). Celeste Day-Drake, Deborah Gisvold, Jennifer Groscup, Gretchen Maldonado, Jennifer Martinez Wormser, and Sadie Otte volunteered for a pilot program to discuss their department’s individual DEI goals and develop specific steps they can take to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in their programs. These department representatives participated in a workshop that introduced meaningful frameworks for this work and addressed the pressing need to move from DEIJ statements to actions. The departments will continue their work in the coming months and participate in a final workshopping event in April to finalize their action plans. We will make these plans available as examples in case other departments wish to develop their own action plans in the future.

Winter Break

As we depart campus to spend time with family and friends, we leave you with the words of Maya Angelou to empower you today and into the new year.

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We cannot be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” ― Maya Angelou.