timeline of dialogue with the board of trustees
For a quick summary of the current status of our solutions, please see our Solutions page.
June 7, 2020
Letter from alumni delivered to board and Groton administration urging that Groton:
Or its Board of Trustees encourage and match donations to organizations providing frontline support to antiracist efforts, such as The Movement for Black Lives, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Color of Change, and Equal Justice Initiative, and up to $200,000 or greater;
Encourage alumni to leverage their expertise (e.g., legal, legislative, medical, psychological) toward supporting those on the frontline of antiracist efforts;
Remediate all curricula (e.g., history, English, languages, ethics, ecology, STEM, etc.) and extracurricular activities (e.g., peer counseling, Wellness, theater) to better center the histories and perspectives of peoples of color; these curricula must delve into the history of structural racism and must incorporate an understanding of how oppressive narratives continue to shape the way we all think.
Clearly communicate a plan to increase racial diversity and cultural competence among students, faculty, psychological services, office of admissions, leadership, board of trustees, and invited school speakers. Statistics must be made publicly available regarding specific categories of racial self-identification among these groups. Any effort to increase racial diversity must also center the retention of those who are hired, accepted, etc.
Formally query and teach students about the institution’s historical and contemporary complicity in structural oppression. This includes, but is not limited to racist and gendered wage gaps, hiring practices, and disciplinary trends;
Publicly release a full list of its endowment holdings. Groton’s investment strategy must align with its dedication to “diversity and inclusion.” In the absence of such alignment, Groton must communicate its plans to divest from companies that recapitulate structural racism and environmental injustice (as current students have been advocating for). More broadly, Groton must work with students and alumni to develop and publicize Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria for its investments.
Based on feedback we've received on the use of the word "demand," or the act itself, moving forward we will use "solution.”
June 8, 2020
Letter from alumni forwarded to Groton faculty
Board replies to letter promising conversation among board and administration regarding letter
June 14, 2020
Board publicly replies to letter, inviting us to discuss
June 20, 2020
3-hour Zoom call
We come to verbal agreements about all 6 solutions and went over which departments were responsible for each point:
Solution 1: Board agrees to match donations to antiracist organizations up to $250,000 and would gather board supporters within the next week. Upped by $50k following board members commenting “easy” regarding the original $200k. Alumni should establish and manage fundraising platform.
Solution 2: Alumni should be in touch with alumni office to discuss how to communicate about leveraging alumni expertise to support antiracist efforts
Solution 3: Outside of board’s purview, so alumni should be in touch with school administration regarding these points
Solution 4: Outside of board’s purview, so alumni should be in touch with school administration regarding these points
Solution 5: Outside of bord’s purview, so alumni should be in touch with school administration regarding these points
Solution 6: Board in talks with current students about divestment from fossil fuels. Board would share Groton’s endowment holdings.
We also discuss: how the letter was received by the administration and board; concerns about the tone and diction of our letter (e.g., "demand" vs. "suggestion", adversarial vs. cooperative); board concerns about parallel though separate organizing among resigning form officers; delineating actions as “within Circle” vs. “outside Circle”; board concerns that our info may be outdated; board commitment to provide information to all alumni about the ways in which the school has changed since our graduation (graduates on call represented classes ranging ‘13-’19)
Shortly after call, board issues “Statement of Racial Injustice” to entire Groton community
June 22, 2020
We email board members with a detailed summary of how we would move forward as discussed during June 20 conversation
June 24, 2020
Board member replies that Solutions 3, 4, and 5 should be decided by an alumni council and a Black alumni council subgroup.
June 26, 2020
1-hour Zoom call
Board members explain why an alumni council is preferable over our original plan for solutions 3, 4, and 5. We do not discuss the other solutions.
June 30, 2020
We email alumni office to request a list of alumni with fundraising expertise to provide logistical guidance for our imminent donation-matching fund
We email board explaining why we believe an alumni council was not the best approach to Solution 3, 4, 5 and initiatives of student life more generally:
Forming an alumni council (which is an excellent idea in general) would and should take a substantial amount of time in order to define its purpose, establish its structure, and solidify its mechanisms of offering recommendations to the school.
We do not need to wait for such a body to form before implementing any of the subcomponents of these Solutions, many of which would be implemented within one day.
e.g., publishing statistics on the racial breakdown of the Groton faculty (we acknowledge that this later occurred on July 10, 2020)
To this end, we created a chart which listed each solution subcomponent and asked the board for point people among them and timelines along which they would be implemented. We filled in our own names as point people to follow up on each task, and requested that they fill in the blanks with reasonable timelines and point people on the board or administration to help us see through each specific solution for accountability.
We already have ~700 signatures from alumni, current students, and parents about the endorsing these action items.
July 1, 2020
Board member emails us reprimanding our reaching out to the alumni office, asserting that any communication between us and the school required the board as a liaison in order to “coordinate these conversations so that everyone has the information they need to be as productive as possible.”
Board member implores us to have a Zoom call in order to again explain that an alumni council is the correct mode of moving forward with Solutions 3, 4, and 5.
July 6, 2020
45-minute Zoom call
We advocate for the concurrent creation of an alumni council and implementation of Solutions 3, 4, and 5 for the reasons listed above. We also advocate for including student voices in such decisions.
The board argues that our letter did not provide enough information to act with the haste with which we were urging. They insist that our solutions exclude many voices. As an example, a board member referred to specific alumni of color who had, in private conversations, asserted that they had had great experiences at Groton. When asked to explain their methods of soliciting this information, they responded, “by asking the questions”. While elevating the voices of black alumni is important, our initial solution as discussed with the board, refers to an institutional and historical report on the school, similar to the Slavery and Justice report conducted by Brown University, not individual experiences.
When explicitly asked twice if they are committed to moving forward with the alumni council as a prerequisite for Solutions 3, 4, and 5, the board does not directly respond but strongly implies that they are.
Over email
Following our call, board member writes on our chart, “I’m not sure where we are on this” regarding Solution 1 (our agreed-upon donation-matching fund).
July 7, 2020
Board member emails us with his interpretation of where we were with each solution:
Solution 1: Alumni should establish fundraiser and solicit donations. Board would match.
Solution 2: Alumni should rally each other around leveraging expertise to aid antiracist efforts
Solution 3: Under purview of Mr. Maqubela and administration
Solution 4: Under purview of Mr. Maqubela and administration
Solution 5: Board will ask Black alumni about their experiences at Groton and to develop solutions beyond those represented by the solutions. Query will include other constituents afterwards.
Solution 6: Board working with students on this.
Board indicates that information about Groton’s progress and ongoing efforts would be published later in the week.
We do not reply as we decided to regroup since this communication was not in line with what had been discussed previously.
July 8, 2020
Board promises information about Groton’s progress the following day.
July 9, 2020
In the evening, we ask whether this information was still forthcoming.
We receive an email containing an update about Groton’s progress. Contents are similar to the Board’s recent email to all Groton alumni. This email also asks us for an update about the donation-matching fund.
July 10, 2020
We email the board confirming their summary (July 7) on the current status of fundraising. We would reach out to alumni to establish the fund and ask for donations.
In response, we receive an email from another board member, implying that his contribution to the matching portion of the fundraiser is contingent upon us supporting the board’s efforts more broadly.
We reply with a concise version of this timeline to demonstrate our confusion. We explain that our disagreements were about whether Solutions 3, 4, and 5 necessitated an alumni council. We ask for clarity as to whether this board member was in fact saying that his donation was contingent upon us supporting the board’s efforts more broadly.
Board sends an email to the entire Groton community entitled “Inclusion and Confronting Racism,” illustrating the strides Groton has taken in the domains of diversity and inclusion since 2013.
July 11, 2020
Board member expresses incongruity between Trustees’ methods of driving change and ours; therefore suggests “you move the matching fund idea forward how you think best” though expresses concerns about us dictating where donations should go.
Status of solution on July 13, 2020:
Solution 1: Contradictory information from different board members. Status of donation matching unclear. However, we will move forward and set up a donation fund led by alumni to reach the $250k goal. Details of the alumni-led fund TBA.
Solution 2: Unclear whether we have support from the alumni office; currently alumni-led
Solution 3: New Curricular Working Group
No stated commitment and plan to: expand this overhaul to extracurriculars; address racist behavior at psychological services.
Solution 4: School has shared the racial makeup of faculty. Board says that the school has already identified reasons for low BIPOC faculty retention. Board says that GRAIN is the mechanism by which racial diversity of the student body is being increased.
No stated commitment and plan to: increase racial diversity of faculty, psychological services, and invited school speakers; require annual all-faculty anti-bias training; require all-student anti-bias education; address BIPOC student dropout/retention issues.
Solution 5: Board has indicated interest in asking Black alumni about their experiences at Groton
No stated commitment and plan to: formally query institution’s history of structural oppression beyond that which can be identified by alumni (e.g., racism, sexism, etc. as they manifest in: admissions policies, admissions practices, faculty and staff compensation, disciplinary trends going back to 1884)
Solution 6: Board says that conversations about the endowment are ongoing with a group of students on the Sustainability Committee. They have agreed to create and publish on Groton’s website Social, Environment, and Governance criteria for endowment holdings.
November 1, 2020
Anonymous board members have agreed to donate $50,000 to the Groton Alumni Antiracism Fundraiser, to be split proportionally among the 5 organizations that raise the most money by the fundraiser’s close (December 31, 2020).