4. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Logistics to consider/FAQs:

Should we become an official student group at our institution?

This will depend on the specifics of your institution and what the costs and benefits of being an official student group might be. For instance, common benefits include guaranteed funding (universities often give student groups a certain amount of money per year), access to listservs, and inclusion in university communications around “diversity” events and activities. Cons might include censoring and limitations on what you are allowed to do and say. It may be helpful to talk to other students or trainees who have formed an official student group to understand the benefits and drawbacks of being “official.”

How do we structure an organization like this? How much work is it?

Something something flat structure (I’ll come back to this and fill it in -KSL)

How do we motivate faculty to care about these issues and get involved?

  • One possible solution is to push for mandated implicit bias training. However, no one can be forced to engage with this topic and doing so runs the risk of making people resentful for having to do this kind of training. Furthermore, implicit bias training does not equal anti-racism training and may actually accomplish very little in terms of a culture shift. However, universities are more likely to be amenable to enacting implicit bias training, so it could be a good first step to simply bridge the subject if racial equity isn’t a common topic of conversation at your university. This sort of training may also help you identify faculty who are enthusiastic for doing this work.
  • Get faculty involved on their own terms by forming a faculty committee for your group: this allows you to hold faculty accountable for addressing these issues in ways that they think makes sense and can be accomplished given their unique positions of power at the university. It also allows faculty to learn more about what works and what doesn’t by receiving feedback from the larger group on strategies they’ve come up with. This also allows people to have a sense of ownership over the project so that they don’t feel defensive or resentful of being “told what to do.”
  • Ideas to incentivize faculty to be involved: 1) pay them for their time, 2) specifically look for and acknowledge this type of “service” or “volunteer” leadership/work as part of promotion and tenure, and/or 3) find ways to publicly highlight advances in this area with badges or other digital gold stars - this might work as a way for faculty to be inspired to engage via peer-pressure or FOMO.

How to address lack of racial diversity in faculty

-note: talk about how AVDS believes that you must first focus on establishing a supportive environment for BIPOC before focusing on recruitment. Bringing people into an unsupportive environment will be very harmful for them and doesn’t address the underlying issue

How do we hold faculty accountable for racist behavior?

Notes from Hillary for this section:

  • Do punitive models work? For example, mandating a remediation training after a faculty member commits a microaggression. My concern is that the ordeal may discourage them from taking on BIPOC students in their lab in the future.
  • Long term, do we want to challenge the tenure system? How can we mandate consequences for egregious behavior? And what would be reasonable parameters for this?
  • use a restorative justice model to hear from those who were harmed about how they think the situation could be repaired and have a facilitator guide the faculty through this process?

Common terms

It’s important to make a constant effort to humanize and decolonize the language used by your group in your documents. This is often an evolving process as new terms are introduced into the discourse. Some examples include:

  • POC vs BIPOC
  • URM vs PEER

How to manage volunteers and deal with the problem where people join but don’t actively volunteer for tasks

Typically it’s helpful to give people roles, an idea of what tasks they will be managing, and estimate of how much time it will take them per week or month.

When committees divide up tasks, try to break them down into small chunks that people could tackle in a few hours. It is also important to recognize that people within the organization are students, postdocs, faculty, staff first and keep open lines of communication about what the committee needs and what the individuals on the committee can accomplish. If you are constantly finding that you are short on volunteers, you may be taking on too much.

How to create an AVDS chapter that happens to be all white? How do we actually support and center the voices of BIPOC with these limitations?

Start by asking yourself why your group is all white. Do your non-white peers and colleagues already have a group or organization that they’ve created community with? Could you support them in that community instead of creating your own? If your non-white peers don’t have an existing community but also aren’t a part of the community you are creating, you should do self reflection. If you don’t have any non-white peers, you could start by raising that specific issue to leadership (ie “why aren’t there any Black students in our program”). Maybe you don’t start racial equity work by creating an AVDS group, maybe you start by centering, supporting and listening to the non-white voices around you.