On Friday, April 20, 2018, BAM 2.0 representatives met with members of the administration. Present at the meeting was Dean Mike Curme, Vice-President for Student Affairs Jayne Brownell, Dr. Kelley Kimple, Director of the Office of Diversity Affairs, and President Greg Crawford. We were pleased to hear positive updates on several of our demands, including the creation, and now implementation, of the bias reporting incident button, possible layouts for a new space to serve as a larger Office of Diversity Affairs and a new website in the works that will display all administrative updates related to the list of demands and will continue to serve as a source of updates for the Miami community in the future. However, one demand in particular has not been met appropriately in a timely fashion by administration. Even after its inadequate response was brought up in this meeting, we feel as though administration is not hearing us loud enough.
Demand #3 reads: "We demand a comprehensive report from Dr. Ron Scott, Associate Vice President for Institutional Diversity including: the initiatives and accomplishments of his office from academic year 2013-14 through 2017-18, and copy of the job description of Dr. Ron Scott, Associate Vice President for Institutional Diversity." This was supposed to have been met by the Office of Institutional Diversity via email by April 6, 2018. On that day, President Crawford sent BAM 2.0 four documents that we feel did not sufficiently meet the demand. Only one of the four were on official Miami letterhead, and the other three seemed to be someone's notes from a meeting riddled with acronyms lacking explanation, incomplete sentences and other grammatical issues. The only official document given to us was the job listing created for the VP of Institutional Diversity, posted in 2009, before Ron Scott took this position. The qualifications outlined in this document would support the claim that he is not adequately doing his job in supporting students.
We are demanding information about Ron Scott's responsibilities as VP of Institutional Diversity to better keep him accountable. We are unable to discuss what's lacking or what could be improved within his office if we don't know his roles. A major point of confusion is what his duties are regarding the student body, the entire institution and where the two overlap. There is a large amount of overlap in the Miami University community between the institution and the students, primarily because the institutions' role is to provide for students. Therefore, we need to understand his role in this complex relationship in order for the institution to provide for the students effectively.
In the same way we have asked administration to be transparent with us about updates on the list of demands, BAM 2.0 knows we, as a group of leaders, must be transparent with the larger community we are representing about any progress, decisions or revelations we have regarding administration. We feel as though we cannot be adequately transparent with everyone about where we as a group stand in regards to the job Dr. Ron Scott and his office is doing, without the proper documents proving so.
BAM has decided to give the administration until Aug. 27 at 5 p.m. to provide official documents regarding Dr. Ron Scott's position as VP of Institutional Diversity. We would also appreciate if we received the last two months of his schedule and a month of his future schedule. In the meantime, BAM 2.0 intends to have a few follow-up meetings, and strategically plan for keeping momentum for next semester, including student outreach, community partnerships and extensive research.
In solidarity,
BAM 2.0
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