$10M pledge advances School of Climate, Environment, and Society

This gift enables the University to begin the process of establishing the new School — first, by recruiting a new dean to lead it.

Read the message from President David Fithian

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Living on campus is an important part of the college experience, especially for undergraduates. The friends they make in the residence halls often become their links to the broader campus — and, once they graduate, part of their Clark story.

To keep students engaged in campus life, and to ensure their success at Clark, we need to offer them a high-quality living experience on campus. We need to make “dorm life” so inviting and attractive that students want to stay at Clark — and perhaps even live in the residential halls — all four years.

Although updated periodically, Clark’s historic residence halls have not seen the extensive renovations that would turn them into spaces where students want to spend a lot of time hanging out with their besties.

In Clark housing, students aren’t looking for a place just to sleep and do their laundry; they want beautiful common spaces where they can connect with their friends, whether it’s to watch a movie, play a game, study together, or cook a meal.

In some cases, students who are affirming their identities seek to meet others who are, too. Higher education calls these “affinity groups” and the areas where affiliated students gather, “affinity spaces.” In these spaces, students can find their spot in the community and gain a sense of belonging. They can develop networks of support to tap into during college and after graduation.

Multiple Projects to Create High-Quality Housing

As part of our institutional goals to offer students an enhanced campus experience, and to achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion, we aim to provide consistently high-quality housing, student spaces, and affinity spaces across campus.

To do so, we will invest significantly in impactful renovations: modernizing our existing, historic residence halls and developing new and improved living spaces and buildings. Our enhancements also will ensure that Clark’s residential spaces meet sustainability and accessibility standards.

Our overarching Campus Design Initiative, which aligns with our Strategic Framework and institutional goals, includes multiple student housing projects over the next coming years:

• Quad Renovations: Substantially renovating our historic housing quads, increasing the quality and quantity of student study and social space.
• Main Street Housing Improvements: Revamping Main Street retail shops and student housing to preserve the character of the existing neighborhood commercial corridor and, on upper floors, provide new suite and/or apartment-style housing for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, and a single-level parking area covered by an upper-level courtyard that would connect with academic buildings to the north.
• New Buildings on Park Avenue: Creating new mixed-use buildings at the corner of Maywood Street and Park Avenue; this could include student housing along with retail shops and university offices.
• Repurposing Existing Buildings: Renovating existing university buildings at the corner of Maywood Street and Park Avenue to include more housing for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, with a blend of walk-up and apartment units (this project is dependent on another initiative, which would move student health and wellness programs to the main campus).
• Enhancements in Main Campus Halls: Improving Dana, Hughes, Johnson Sanford, and Dodd residence halls to provide higher-quality living experiences.

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A community art gallery that examines gun violence. A comic book about the microaggressions focused on Black natural hair. These are just two examples of social justice projects undertaken by middle schoolers as part of a summer educational program launched by Clark education faculty and community organizers. The organizers’ goal: to open the Audre Lorde Transformative Arts School (ATLAS), which would challenge the standard approach to education and operate within the Worcester Public School system.

“We look to artists like Audre Lorde who thought outside the box. We designed a program that was for the kids who don’t always enjoy school but who can develop their critical consciousness and radical imagination,” says Eric DeMeulenaere, a Clark education professor and a member of the ALTAS organizing team.

ATLAS is one of 22 projects to receive academic innovation funding from Clark — a total of more than $320,000 in 2022. The grants are tied to Clark’s Strategic Framework goal of achieving greater academic and research excellence, and many projects — like ATLAS — also incorporate other framework goals such as advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and expanding our outward engagement.

Examples of additional projects receiving academic innovation grants include:

• Equity in Action, an initiative to provide staff, faculty, and students with insights, tools, and strategies to contribute to an increasingly just Clark. A daylong conference, “Advancing Anti-Racism Plans of Action on Campus,” kicked off the project and included sessions, activities, and opportunities to build community among students, staff, alumni, and faculty invested in anti-racism. The project’s leaders are Hayley Haywood, assistant dean for equity in research and learning, and Laurie Ross, associate dean and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
• Justice to Jobs (J2J) program, which supports undergraduate students involved in DEI work and leadership experiences on campus. As part of a retreat with alumni and faculty, students participated in workshops on conducting career searches, developing resumes that highlight their DEI work, and writing statements of purpose for graduate programs that integrate social justice and activism with intellectual inquiry. The students’ materials have been archived to benefit future undergraduates. Hayley Haywood, assistant dean for equity in research and learning, and Jie Park, director of the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies, continue to coach and mentor the students and analyze the program’s impact.
• An Interactive Theater class, taught by Becker School of Design & Technology and Visual and Performing Arts faculty — Terrasa Ulm, Jessie Darrell-Jarbadan, Ezra Cove, and Amanda Theinert — melds games and theater through students’ design of characters and costumes. The class will culminate in a play presented in the Little Center’s revamped Michelson Theater, where audience members may interact with performers.
• A summer project teamed students with biology professors Nathan Ahlgren, Philip Bergmann, and Javier Tabima Restrepo to study urban impacts on water quality, frogs, and microbial communities in Worcester waterways. The project integrated student research, classroom learning, and local STEM outreach.
• Clark’s two longtime undergraduate research festivals — Fall Fest and Academic Spree Day — reimagined as ClarkFEST, an opportunity for students and faculty from multiple disciplines to exchange ideas, including through improved technological capacity. More than 80 students presented posters in April 2022 at the newly launched ClarkFEST, which also featured oral presentations, panel discussions, and 30 interactive media exhibits presented by students in the Becker School of Design & Technology.

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President David Fithian’s $1 million commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, training, student life, affinity space, and staffing illustrates how we aim to embed DEI within and across everything we do.

Examples of funded DEI initiatives include:

• Committing new resources to the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies (CGRAS), enabling it to more fully develop and enhance curricular offerings, offer professional development in conjunction with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), and support research related to anti-racist and decolonized academic practices.
• Providing professional development opportunities focused on cultural competency to senior leadership.
• Providing anti-racism training to students and specialized training for groups, including student leaders, peer mentors, residence hall advisers, and athletes.
• Providing training on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Workplace” and “DEI Microaggressions” to all Clark employees.
• Increasing mental health staffing, including additional resources for campus mental health emergencies; allocating resources to the University’s Psychology Department to help foster applicants of color in the department’s Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program; and adding staffing to the Center for Counseling and Personal Growth (CPG) to better serve marginalized students.
• Enhancing anti-bias and de-escalation training for campus police officers and employees.
• Creating CU Advance, a mentorship and leadership development program aimed at supporting faculty and staff of color in making progress toward their professional goals and fostering intergenerational mentorship between BIPOC employees and BIPOC students.
• Increasing the number of events and programming focused on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including inviting guests to present lectures, discussions, and performances throughout the year.
• Increasing student programming and events, including adding a position in the Office of Student Leadership and Programming to support culture- and identity-focused student organizations and to offer awareness month celebrations.
• Creating affinity housing for students who share a commitment to learning about and centering Blackness and fighting anti-Blackness.

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Through Curriculum and Careers (C&C), we are more intentionally integrating career readiness into our undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Faculty have created a map for each undergraduate major, allowing students to better understand how their academic journey over four years — including the skills and knowledge they acquire through coursework — will benefit them in the workplace.

Through these efforts:

• As part of the first-year advising process, students will fill out worksheets that allow them to reflect on their academic journey and career goals and make decisions about their paths to graduation.
• Students can more easily link what they are learning in courses with their other college experiences: clubs, internships, and community engagement.
• Through the support of course development grants, faculty have redesigned or created courses to integrate the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ (NACE) career-readiness learning outcomes and to help students see connections between a liberal arts education and post-graduation success.
• Faculty who developed C&C-related courses participated in learning communities to engage in collective problem-solving and to share practices with other recipients.
• To develop and implement the major maps, faculty have worked closely with the Career Connections Center, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and Dean of the College’s Office.

C&C received initial funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

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To achieve our vision of Clark as a university of distinction, we need to recruit students who are excited to come to Clark — and to stay here. Advising — especially in the first year of an undergraduate student’s education — is critical to keeping students on track and engaged in their academic journey and college life.

As an early and substantial investment, we have established a student success center in the Academic Commons that is staffed by a team of pre-major advisers who will serve as a visible and accessible one-stop shop for students to find holistic support and referrals to other services across the University.

This investment in first-year advising will help us realize our Strategic Framework goals of increasing our academic and research excellence; advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion; and augmenting our institutional capacity by ensuring our students have the best academic and social experience at Clark — and, by extension, become involved alumni who are committed to advancing the Clark story.

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Currently under construction at Woodland and Hawthorne streets, the four-story, 70,000-square-foot Center for Media Arts, Computing, and Design will draw students and faculty from across the University for creative collaboration, interdisciplinary learning, and emergent scholarship and research in computer and data science and other technologies, art and design, and music.

As part of our goal to advance academic and research excellence at Clark, we are constructing an academic building that will highlight synergies in Computer Science, Visual and Performing Arts, and the Becker School of Design & Technology.

“The ideals of interdisciplinarity and the core values of our liberal education are baked into this building and this center’s structural DNA,” said Betsy Huang, the Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein ’64 Distinguished Professor in the English Department. “We all know the sparks that happen when we put people of great creativity, intellect, and decency in the same space.”

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Given the rise in global temperature, decline in sea ice, and increase in ocean warming and sea level, we have no time to waste in refocusing our institutional efforts to address the earth’s most critical issue.  We must reinforce our leadership position as a campus and community that prioritizes sustainability, particularly in the context of highlighting our scholarly excellence in this area.

To get started, we are relaunching Clark’s Campus Sustainability Task Force to develop a comprehensive Campus Sustainability Action Plan — a larger umbrella that not only encompasses climate action but other measures. These efforts will help us achieve our Strategic Framework goals of increasing academic and research excellence, enhancing our campus experience, and augmenting our institutional capacity.

Moving forward, we must review Clark’s performance on sustainability metrics, assess existing goals, and re-establish a comprehensive set of goals and the steps required to achieve carbon neutrality and promote sustainability more broadly through policies and programs on campus.

More specifically, we are targeting a minimum of LEED Gold certification in the new Center for Media Arts, Computing, and Design, and we will promote progress toward future goals by anticipating the need to increase local solar power production, introducing geothermal heating and cooling, and deploying other best practices to improve efficiency and sustainability.

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