Reflections Magazine Issue #48 - Spring 1998 | Page 8

Catholic Identity
Values in Action:
Enhancing Diversity

T

he Catholic church teaches that every person should
be treated with dignity and as academic dean
Sharon Weber, OP ‘69 points out, a Catholic
college has “an institutional duty to allow and help every
individual within the community be the most fully human
that he or she can be.” At Siena Heights that duty was
embodied in the recent initiative to increase and retain
racial and ethnic diversity at the Adrian campus, a threeyear program which concluded this fall.
Supported by a $150,000 grant from the Lilly
Endowment, faculty, staff and students explored ways to
improve the campus climate for diversity. Grant director
Susan Conley Weeks identified four project objectives: (1)
to enable college leaders to sharpen their awareness and
strengthen their commitment to diversity, (2) to assess the
current climate for diversity, (3) to infuse the teaching and
learning environment with inter-disciplinary diversity
experiences, and (4) to increase opportunities for the
community to identify cultural characteristics different from
their own--as well as common threads of humanity which
bind all people together.
Grant activities significantly influenced college life
from October 1994 to November 1997. Faculty and
administrators took a hard look at their own beliefs and
responses, and engaged in an in-depth study of attitudes on
campus. Seven “Discovery Teams” of students, faculty and
staff undertook widely different multi-year diversity
projects, ranging from a study of plays dealing with Jewish
and African-American issues and creation of an original
one-act play; to a monthly newsletter exploring Latino/
Hispanic culture; to a cross-cultural business project that
linked Siena’s Mexico study program, the Business
Division and the Students in Free Enterprise group.
Perhaps the most prominent influence of the Lilly grant
was “The Face and Voice of Culture,” a three-year series
of major art gallery exhibitions with related activities in
music, dance, literature and drama. The series attracted
major public notice while focusing attention on the art and
culture of classical India, contemporary Australia, the
Holocaust, Native America and the Afro-Brazilian
population.
At a concluding celebration of the Lilly project in
December, a featured reading seemed to sum up the
spiritual basis for this important three-year undertaking:
“O Source of All Being...encourage me as I dare to take
risks with You, so that together we can transform our
world...”

8
Exploring continued
But, writes Weber, “the plurality of faiths within our
community and the need to be faithful to accord each person
the respect he or she deserves presents, I believe, the greatest
challenge for today’s college in the Catholic tradition.”
She goes on to ask, “Is there a way to privilege one belief
system that allows an honest openness to, and therefore
privileging of, other belief systems? I suspect it is on our
ability to take on the challenge of exploring such a relationship
that our remaining a Catholic college hinges.”
There is support among both Catholic and non-Catholic
faculty for trying to strengthen Siena’s Catholic identity.
“I believe it would do wonders for the quality of the
curriculum, and also for the quantity of students searching for
authentic meaning in their li ٕ́