Harnessing the Power of Differences

Being a place that values and celebrates differences is part of Mitchell’s DNA. In addition to welcoming students with diverse learning styles, our students represent a wide spectrum of diversity in race, gender, ethnicity and identity. Here students of different backgrounds blend together, work together, learn together and play together. Groups representing all facets of our community share their experiences through clubs, events and everyday interactions. Students also benefit from being part of the diverse local New London community.

Many people of color at predominantly white colleges often feel like they must conform to the culture or be judged by the way they act. Clubs like Multicultural Student Union (MSU) provide students of color a comfortable environment to express themselves and honor their culture.

—Aizhane Glenn, former president of the MSU

As a community, we believe it is not enough to embrace differences on our own campus: we must institutionalize social equity and justice and be a model of those values for society. With this intention, Mitchell has created a committee to take a 360 look at all facets of the college—from academic curricula to hiring to building accessibility and business partnerships—with the goal of developing best practices, policies and strategies for true institutional change. To do this, in 2021 we created an IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access) Committee comprising faculty, staff and students, that is charged by President Tracy Espy and the board of trustees to guide this change.

Empowering students to be agents of change is another essential part of this equation. We created the George Floyd Scholarship to recognize students for their leadership abilities and desire to effect social change. The scholarship was established in 2020 in memory of George Floyd—who died during an arrest by Minneapolis police, sparking protests in this nation and around the world. The fund provides financial support to junior or senior students of color in the Human Services core. With the continued support of Trustees Peggy Flood and Luci Arango, the scholarship expanded from four students in its first year to six students in 2022.

Learning about differences, and the struggles that come with them, takes place in many forms across campus, from MSU events to academic coursework to library resources.

Stephanie Johnson, collection manager for library and information services, sheds light on topics that are relevant to diversity, equity and inclusion through displays of books on topics such as Black History Month and voting rights in the United States.

“This is timely given the debate in Congress over voting rights, which are an important part of the past and continued struggle for civil rights. We hope to help students put these current events into context by understanding the past,” Johnson said.

Dr. Nancy Bombaci, associate professor of humanities, guides students in her African American Literature course to understand the larger cultural and historical context of works by important writers, from Frederick Douglass to Zora Neale Hurston.

Bombaci said, “The texts resonate powerfully in today’s world through the writers’ critical responses to racial and class oppression, not as one monolithic approach but based on their historical positions and gender. My goal is for students to think critically about contemporary problems as they read these writers’ perspectives on similar issues.”

“My most recent class had a strong response to ‘Passing,’ a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen that explored ‘double consciousness’ through the eyes of two biracial women. Double consciousness, written about by W.E.B. Dubois, is the ability of oppressed peoples to perceive themselves from the perspective of both the dominant/oppressive culture and their own,” she said.