July 12, 2021
Dear Students, Faculty, and Staff,
I am writing to bring you up to date on the Campus Safety Advisory Committee. As you’ll recall, in my May 10 letter I indicated that I was establishing a process for informing and involving the community in deliberations about what constitutes safety and how best to ensure it on campus.
With input from the AAS, the Committee of Six, and the Employee Council, I invited the following individuals to serve on the advisory committee to guide this process: Allen Hart, Manwell Family Professor in Life Sciences (chair of the committee); Lisa Brooks, Henry S. Poler ’59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English and American Studies; Maya Foster ’23; Sofia Guerra ’22; Michael Kunichika, Associate Professor of Russian and Director of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture; Eli Maierson ’23; Jess Martin, Administrative Director of the Science Center; Christopher Moulton, Academic Support Coordinator; Kate Salop, Chief Strategy Officer; and Emily Tareila, Assistant Director for Internship Programs. I am grateful to them for agreeing to take on this important role.
Cambridge Hill Partners (CHP) is working with the committee to devise a broadly consultative process to inform the co-creation and re-creation of Amherst College’s community safety structure. While the committee, with the assistance of CHP, will be collecting and researching alternative campus safety models, they are not expected to be content matter experts nor are they expected to present me with a preferred outcome. Rather, I am asking them to develop a range of options with an evaluation of the relative advantages and disadvantages of each for our community. Assessing the benefits and drawbacks of a range of options will require the input of the entire community, and the committee is thinking carefully about how best to ensure that the process they are facilitating is open, transparent, and inclusive.
The committee has met twice and has scheduled meetings over the summer to clarify its purpose and role and gather internal and external information to inform an approach to engaging the community in this process. Based on feedback from the committee about the challenges of creating opportunities for community engagement early in the fall semester, I have accepted their suggestion of providing me with a preliminary report in October with the final briefing document presented in December. The senior leadership team and I will use the committee’s findings to inform the recommendation we bring to the Board of Trustees.
I will continue to keep you apprised of the work of the committee, and you can also expect to hear directly from them as they begin their outreach to engage the community in this important work.
Sincerely,
Biddy