My dear community,
As I write to you, the daylight hours are increasingly brief but our efforts to create a School grounded in community and our five Core Principles continue. As part of our commitment to this work we share this biannual update to keep the community apprised of our work to align more fully with our Core Principles.
Campus Culture
Years of efforts dedicated to creating an inclusive campus community where everyone – students, faculty, and staff – feel heard, seen, and appreciated have been manifesting. I heard repeatedly this past summer that a culture change is taking hold based on the tenets of our Community Agreement, which encourages listening, learning, and developing accountability for our words, actions, policies, and procedures. The empathy and self-reflection required by the Community Agreement is helping people who spend time on campus feel more ease and generosity with one another.
This culture change is in large part thanks to the ongoing work of the Anti-Racism Planning Group (ARPG), which developed and implemented the classroom-based accountability process. This past summer, ARPG led an effort to unofficially rename Seelye Hall, SSW’s main academic building, to Juanita Dalton Robinson Hall. Its current official namesake, founding Smith College President L. Clark Seelye, made derogatory public remarks about Indigenous people, one of many historical figures on and beyond campus who merit present-day scrutiny through an equity lens. Dalton Robinson, M.S.S. ’51, was the only Black student in her class at Smith, and was integral to desegregating Cleveland Public Schools, praxis that is important to commemorate. The name change recommendation has been forwarded to the College for consideration. In the meantime, we continue to refer informally to our academic home as Robinson Hall.
For the second summer, SSW offered affinity housing in concert with the Council for Students of Color to provide a supportive environment that allows students with shared cultural or experiential backgrounds to support each other academically. We also offered spaces for community members to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. To create joyful and meaningful spaces for celebration on campus, the Council for Students of Color held its first SSW Spirit Week, including a community barbecue and Halloween in July. I’m delighted to see that campus clubs are reviving for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, too. From line dancing to parent support to unlearning racism, students are doing so much to create spaces for students to come together in community.
We continue to work actively to build a campus community that increasingly supports and serves everyone. To that end, we hired Sotomayor Fellow Janae Peters, M.S.W. ’15, for a newly-created administrative position, director of community engagement and student support, which will oversee on-campus community engagement aimed at nurturing a compassionate and accountable campus culture that aligns with the five Core Principles and the Community Agreement. Janae is thinking deeply about how to build emotional support and restorative justice practices into our daily interactions and offerings, and we are excited to welcome her into this role.
New Strategic Plan Cycle
This past June, we debuted our most recent strategic plan, which covers the next three to four years. I see it as a roadmap to addressing gaps in our ongoing efforts to align our work with our five Core Principles, and I’m hopeful about what following it in the next few years will yield. The plan seeks to strengthen the School financially and academically while keeping the Principles firmly front and center. This includes looking at current program and course structures and affordability, bolstering clinical research, creating a D.S.W. degree program grounded in psychodynamic and social theories that prepares graduates for clinical leadership, and continuing to create and strengthen School accountability processes and learning opportunities for all community members. It is because we’ve done so much work to get to this place that we can tackle next steps from a proactive position of strength, moving toward increasing alignment with the Principles.
Increasing Equity
Our work with the Principles applies to all members of our community, not just students. For faculty and administrators, that commitment includes recognizing the disproportionate amount of informal mentoring and advising responsibilities held by BIPOC faculty members. This has resulted in a democratization of the faculty workload policy and a continued commitment to explore identity tax mitigation efforts across the SSW.
For students, we are exploring ways to bolster financial support. Our data shows that our program is disproportionately challenging for students who need to juggle work to cover living expenses during practicum and that first-generation and BIPOC students are more likely to face these challenges. The School has created a strategic committee, the Committee for Program Affordability and Student Support (CPASS), to collaborate with our student chapter of Payment 4 Placements (P4P) in seeking financial respite solutions. I am also spearheading a working group in the National Association of Deans and Directors to look at how we can increase affordability in social work programs nationwide. The answer will likely be complex and inadequately comprehensive, but it’s clear that the status quo is unsustainable if we truly aim to center equity and justice.
As we head towards the end of the year, I wish all of you rest and ease during the upcoming season. Here at SSW, we will embrace these weeks before our work to prepare for summer 2025 begins in earnest in January.
With respect,
Marianne R.M. Yoshioka, M.S.W., MBA, Ph.D., LCSW
Dean | Elizabeth Marting Treuhaft Professor
Smith College School for Social Work
