I have had the privilege of serving as the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) since July 2020. Although this is a relatively new role and office, I have been a part of the HDS community since 2012, when I enrolled in the MDiv program. After graduation in 2015, I returned a few years later and began serving as an Instructor in Ministry and as a Racial Justice Fellow.
I continue to be excited to serve HDS in this role for the same reasons that brought me here as a student: the unique multireligious setting of this Divinity School. HDS offers a rich cultural environment for engagement with people across religions from diverse backgrounds, including people who do not claim a religion or believe in God. There is the potential for vibrant interactions, inside and outside of the classroom and in every department, that can transform our way of being in the world. This enables us to engage in our DIB and anti-racism and anti-oppression work at the intersection of religion and/or spirituality and social and systemic transformation.
As we aim to educate and cultivate leaders who can help create a world where religious, cultural, and racial differences do not prevent people and societies from flourishing, we can harness our religious and spiritual resources and bring them to bear on our efforts. I look forward to continuing to explore what DIB @ Divinity looks and feels like. Guided by the principles of restorative justice and racial justice and healing, this office is a space for grounded, heart-centered practices in restorative anti-racism and anti-oppression work that facilitates a decolonized approach, rooted in love, to structural change within the institution. Over the last two years, I have worked in collaboration with other HDS departments and students as chair of the Racial Justice and Healing (RJH) Committee and the Standing Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (SCDI). We are growing in our efforts to address racism and other systems of oppression.
I am excited to begin this 2022-2023 academic year with a new addition to our HDS DIB office. Over the summer, Dean Steph Grayson Gauchel transitioned from his role as Assistant Dean for Student Affairs in the Office of Student Services to his new role as Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging in our office. Steph has played an integral role in the work of this office from the beginning, and I am looking forward to working with him to continue the work of developing this new office.
We are looking forward to this year’s Reorientation and Common Conversation, guided by our RJH Committee. The anchor feature of this initiative is our Common Read program. Our text for this year is the University’s Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. This report was released on April 26, 2022, on the day, and at the time that we were engaged in the final session discussing last year’s Common Read text, Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation. Last year’s text, and the prior year’s text, Race & Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, & US Social Transformation, have prepared us well for our engagement with this report. We will be engaging in this read together with the intention of working towards furthering our vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS, helping the University implement and expand upon the recommendations in the report, and ultimately advancing a vision of a world healed of racism and oppression. A list of dates for the confirmed programming for the Common Read can be found here.
Dismantling systems of oppression and cultivating community is hard/heart work that takes time, and we must be clear about the critical self-examination that accompanies our commitment to external structural change. We will continue to engage in this work as a community. We need our collective wisdom to develop our vision and priorities for strengthening diversity, inclusion, and belonging at HDS. To support this, our SCDI continues to prioritize: addressing western and/or white centeredness of syllabi and pedagogy; developing a DIB Care Team to offer a holistic approach to conflict/harm response through restorative practices; and exploring the meaning of diversity, inclusion, and belonging for HDS. We aim to launch our DIB-Care Team in mid-October 2022 as a pilot program, focused on student experiences of DIB-related harm in the classroom. The HDS Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) Care Team is a resource of support in addressing experiences of DIB-related harm in the community. The DIB Care Team consists of HDS staff, students, and faculty who provide support and accompaniment to the HDS community through a restorative, two-person team approach.
As I proceed in these endeavors, I will always strive to maintain a heart-centered, healing approach rooted in the ethic of love. In all that we do at HDS, we aim to create an environment where every member of the community feels like they belong. This feeling of belonging is vital to our ability to flourish as human beings in the world and at HDS. Through our collective efforts toward building a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS, it is our hope that HDS becomes a reflection of the transformed, connected broader world we are preparing our students to co-create. I invite you to join us on our journey through our Reorientation and Common Conversation and be open to your own transformation.
In community & love,
Melissa
Melissa Wood Bartholomew, MDiv '15
Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging