Last fall, 27 new full-time faculty members started at Muhlenberg, and 13 of them identified as people of color. Ten years earlier, only nine full-time faculty members total identified as such. Vick says that changes the College has made to every step of the process—from recruitment to evaluation to the campus visit—have made this progress possible.

“You don’t increase diversity in your faculty by accident. You don’t luck into it,” Vick says. “It does have to be intentional.”

Changes to how Muhlenberg recruits began under former Provost John Ramsay more than a decade ago, when the College joined the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD), a group of liberal arts colleges that are interested in diversifying the professoriate. Member institutions have access to a pool of doctoral and postdoctoral scholars from underrepresented groups who can be hired for one- or two-year fellowship positions. Those who secure fellowships gain teaching and mentoring experience and exposure to the environment of a liberal arts college; the institutions gain the scholars’ knowledge and expertise. The College has had CFD fellows in the past but never more than one or two at a time, Vick says. This year’s new faculty cohort has five. The College has also begun targeting job postings to places where scholars of color are more likely to be reached (for example, the Black Doctoral Network and Latinos in Higher Education).

Every search committee on campus must include an equity advocate (EA), a faculty or staff member who has undergone four two-hour-long training sessions on inclusive and equitable hiring practices. That training has been available since 2016 and, as of this spring, more than 100 individuals will have completed it. Additionally, Vick provides training for every faculty search committee to go over some of the key takeaways from the EA training—for example, how biases can manifest in the search process and disadvantage certain candidates. During each search, Vick and Provost Laura Furge check in to make sure “we’re maintaining the diversity of the pool at each stage.”

The faculty finalists who are asked to visit campus receive an email from Vick inviting them to share accessibility needs or other accommodations, “anything we can do to help you be your best self throughout the interview process.” Vick produced a Lehigh Valley Cultural Resource Guide, which includes sections on diverse food markets, restaurants, beauty salons & barber shops, places of worship, education & family resources, community organizations and outdoor recreation, that’s included as an attachment in the email to finalists.

“It’s meant to inject some humanity into the process,” Vick says. “When [prospective faculty] visit our campus, we want to make sure they have time to consider not just if they want to work here but if they can imagine themselves having a life here.”

Vick also offers to connect candidates to a campus ambassador, a faculty member completely independent from the review process, for a confidential conversation about whatever the candidate wants to know. Originally, the program was informal and offered to only some candidates, but it was so popular, Vick expanded it. She sent a survey to faculty asking interested parties to volunteer and to share which kinds of topics they’d feel comfortable speaking to (for example, being a person of color at Muhlenberg, or being the parent of small children while on the tenure track). So far, around 60 faculty have volunteered to be part of the program.

In the most recent hiring cycle, Vick paired ambassador Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Leah Wilson with then-candidate Assistant Professor of Photography Kim Hoeckele. Hoeckele had requested a newer faculty member who hadn’t yet been through the third-year review process, and as Wilson answered her questions about campus culture and life in the Lehigh Valley, it became clear that, if Hoeckele was hired, the two would become friends. Now, Hoeckele has met several of Wilson’s neuroscience colleagues through their connection and has begun to imagine possible future integrative learning courses that could pair art with neuroscience.

“I had about six on-campus interviews over the series of years that I was on the market, and I was never welcomed into the interview process in the same way that Brooke welcomed me as a candidate,” Wilson says. “There are components of being on the market that are a bit dehumanizing. The campus ambassador program, given that it’s designed to center identity and experience, really stands out as important.”

Vick says that, to retain faculty once they’re hired, they need to feel a sense of belonging and community and to feel that the College is supporting them as they work to advance in their careers. In the fall, she organized biweekly lunches for faculty and staff of color as well as an end-of-semester cocktail reception to facilitate connections across campus. And last spring, she announced that the College had joined the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity (NCFDD), “a really well known national faculty development center with all sorts of professional development resources for faculty … presented through a specific lens of equity, diversity and inclusion.” Faculty were excited the College was joining NCFDD, Vick says, and 124 faculty have activated their memberships, including 14 of the new hires.

The College’s next steps include a campus workshop on retention best practices that Vick will conduct this spring and collaboration with colleagues in Human Resources to expand more best practices from faculty searches into staff searches as well.

“We are definitely encouraged by the progress we’ve made and are grateful to have so many new colleagues who embody a diversity of identities, cultures and lived experiences,” Vick says. “We also recognize that there is more work to do, not just to continue diversifying our faculty and staff, but to be sure Muhlenberg is a place where our new colleagues want to stay for a long time.”

The Class of 2025 is Muhlenberg’s most diverse ever, in a variety of ways: 23 percent identify as students of color, 17 percent are first-generation students and 21 percent qualify for Pell grants, the largest federal assistance program for undergraduates.

“We define diversity in a lot of ways. We’re looking to grow all underrepresented populations,” says Vice President for Enrollment Management Meg Ryan. “Having a student body that is reflective of a real-world experience is important for all students. It’s mission critical. The campus community has really come together around this effort.”

Since before 2000, the College has fostered connections with community-based organizations (CBOs) that serve students from underrepresented backgrounds as a key way of reaching diverse applicants. Many CBO partners are in the northeast, says Senior Assistant Director of Admissions and Coordinator of Multicultural Recruitment RaeVaughn Gardner-Williams, but the College also partners with CBOs in Chicago, California and Florida.

Muhlenberg nurtures these partnerships by offering resources (such as presentations on navigating financial aid and the college application process). Deeper relationships are possible with CBOs that are geographically nearby. For example, prior to COVID-19, a busload of high-school juniors from New York City’s Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) organization would visit campus each year. Since 2020, the Office of Admissions has replicated the campus-visit experience for SEO students virtually, with a campus tour and the opportunity to connect with students, faculty and staff.

Admissions offers two specialized programs for students from underrepresented backgrounds: the MULE (Muhlenberg’s Undergraduate Leadership Exposure) Program, for prospective students, and Behind the Red Doors: A Closer Look at Diversity and Multicultural Life at Muhlenberg, for admitted students. The MULE Program is promoted as a behind-the-scenes look at Muhlenberg to students from partner CBOs and students who’ve applied who identify as being from an underrepresented group.

“When it was first brainstormed, we realized that Muhlenberg’s best asset is the ability to get students to campus so we can showcase everything the community has to offer,” Gardner-Williams says. “The plan for the program when I first rolled it out was always for it to be in person.”

Unfortunately, the pandemic forced the MULE Program into a virtual space, where it’s now been held four times: Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021 and Spring 2022. The program includes a financial aid presentation, a virtual tour hosted by tour guides and campus delegates, a mock class with a faculty member and a Q&A panel with faculty, staff and students. It finishes with a game night to allow the participating students, 20 to 30 per session, to get to know each other. 

“We’ve walked away from each of those sessions with students saying, ‘This was phenomenal. I loved it,’ and some of those students committed to Muhlenberg following the session,” Gardner-Williams says.

Behind the Red Doors took place for the first time last spring, right before Through the Red Doors, Muhlenberg’s admitted students’ day, both of which were held in a hybrid fashion (with multiple in-person visit days offered) in 2021. Admissions invited students from underrepresented backgrounds who would be great fits for the College to Behind the Red Doors, which included an icebreaker so the prospective students could connect with one another; virtual tours of campus, downtown Allentown and local shopping centers; and a panel to allow guests to connect with current students (including members of the Emerging Leaders Program for students from underrepresented groups) and faculty.

The format models the MULE Program in some ways, but “we’re being more intentional with the way we work with this population of students,” Gardner-Williams says. “They’ve bought into Muhlenberg by applying and interviewing. We’re trying to re-sell them on Muhlenberg so they get to the point where they say, ‘I want to be there.’”

Behind the Red Doors attendees were impressed by what the city of Allentown had to offer and also by the availability of programs like Emerging Leaders on campus. Parents were also invited (they’re invited to the MULE Program, as well) because of their roles as key stakeholders in their students’ decisions surrounding college. This year, the College will bring Behind the Red Doors participants and their parents to campus for a full day of programming in advance of Through the Red Doors, which will be held in person on Saturday, April 9.

“We want to address the stigma that, ‘I’m going to be one of four or five people, a really small number of people, like me on campus.’ Instead, we’d like to highlight the growing diversity on campus and how, as admitted students, they can contribute to the work that has continued to take place over the last couple of decades on campus,” Gardner-Williams says. “In order for us to continue to work on diversity initiatives, more students who come from these different populations [from underrepresented communities] need to share in this narrative, ‘Hey, this is a safe place. You’ll feel comfortable here and have the resources you need.’”

The Office of Admissions knows that it has been successful in reaching students from underrepresented backgrounds when even those who ultimately decide to matriculate elsewhere email their counselor to let them know and thank them for their help throughout the process. For the students who do come to Muhlenberg, the counselors’ work continues.

“Our office, we’re an admission and retention office,” Gardner-Williams says. “There are times when students I’ve connected with through their admissions process, they’ll come into my office and I’ll look at them and be able to tell, ‘You need a moment. Let’s just talk.’ The same goes for all of us. If you walk through our office on any random day, our doors are always open. That’s part of the College philosophy, but for our office, yes, we encourage students to enroll, but we also continue to provide them the support they need throughout their four-year journey.”

Last summer, the Muhlenberg Center for Teaching and Learning and the Provost’s Office awarded more than 20 grants to faculty interested in examining their teaching practices and/or course content through an anti-racist lens. Some of these grants supported major changes to long-established curriculums.

Ahead of this academic year, the Department of Music revised its entire curriculum to de-center the Western European compositions and composers that music programs have historically prioritized. The department had been considering revising the curriculum, which used to begin with the required courses Western Music Theory and Music History, for years. In the summer of 2020, music faculty formed an anti-racism reading group, and that set the stage for the curricular revision.

The new foundational courses, Engaging with Music I and II, are each broken into thirds: one focused on non-Western music, one on vernacular music (such as jazz, pop and rap) and one on Western European music. After those two courses, students will take Methodologies and Epistemologies in Music, which deals with how ideas and knowledge about music are constructed, and Theory and Practice in Western Tonal Music. Also new are courses on power structures in music, which consider how race, gender, religion and economic structures affect the intersections between music and culture.

Professor and Chair of Music Ted Conner taught Engaging with Music I in the fall. In the course, students learned to play the darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum that Dana Livian ’25 recognized immediately (though in her Iranian community on Long Island, it’s called a doumbek). The instrument was commonplace at community events and weddings throughout her youth, and in class, she and her classmates used it to learn about rhythm and improvisation. 

“Having general music classes that only focus on 100 years of Western European music and one world music class that covers everything else, that doesn’t make any sense logically,” Livian says. “Even in a world music class, I’d expect maybe we’d be learning about [the darbuka]. I wouldn’t expect to be playing it. It’s really cool and really exciting.”

The new curriculum was approved at a faculty meeting last March. Typically, changes in curriculum involve a fair amount of faculty discussion, Conner says. No one questioned the music faculty. In fact, he recalls one faculty member saying jokingly, “You realize we’re going to plagiarize what you’ve done here.”

The newly named Department of English Literatures & Writing also got a curricular overhaul starting this academic year, and the name change is an important part of it, says Chair and Professor of English and Film Studies Francesca Coppa. For example, literatures (plural) signals the faculty’s awareness that there’s more to the field than “the canon.”

“English is a field that’s constantly rejuvenating itself. It’s one of the most exciting things about English,” she says. “There’s a lot going on in English. We felt the name change would, first of all, show the breadth of what we already teach.”

Coppa also directs the College’s Women’s & Gender Studies Program, and her colleague, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies Emanuela Kucik, is co-director of the Africana Studies Program. Both programs center diverse perspectives and offer courses that focus on social justice (the view that everyone deserves equitable economic, political and social rights and opportunities). For more than 10 years, Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing Linda Miller has taught at Lehigh County Corrections Center, where Muhlenberg students and incarcerated students take creative writing courses together. Prior to the curricular revision, “English had those social justice commitments, but we weren’t foregrounding them,” Coppa says. “We wanted to foreground them and make them essential.”

Now, majors must take three social justice courses (including one course specifically centering BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, people of color] voices). Some popular courses that fulfill the social justice requirement include Black Comedy, Gay and Lesbian Theatre & Film and African American Literature. Another new requirement involves taking courses in different literary forms, including prose, poetry and “transmedia” (stories that move from the page to other media like visual art, theatre, film or TV).

Even before the department changed its name and unveiled its new requirements last fall, students understood the importance of diverse perspectives, as demonstrated by the wait lists for some of the courses that now fulfill the major’s social justice requirement. Not only does the curricular revision better reflect what the Department of English Literatures & Writing stands for, Coppa says, there is a practical element to the shift as well.

“Studying the literatures of social justice is a really good complement to an array of careers. Increasingly, sophistication about social justice issues is important in every workplace,” she says. “Students understand that this is a skill they need to be their best selves in the world we live in now.”

A skill Muhlenberg hopes to build in all its community members—including students, faculty, staff and alumni—is the ability to communicate across difference. This requires exposure to diverse communities, says Associate Dean of Students and Director of Student Diversity Initiatives Robin Riley-Casey: “It’s important to understand how communities diverge in their perspectives and how they experience the world and how different cultural histories and traditions inform those viewpoints. And sometimes those viewpoints are at odds with the majority.”

One way to encourage this understanding is through training. When Riley-Casey started in 2010, she was the primary staff member conducting such training. Since then, multiple positions have been created or expanded to aid in the work. Now, Vick, Assistant Director of Multicultural Life Criss Braynen, Associate Director of Prevention Education Jules Purnell and Director of Equity & Title IX Jennifer Storm are among those who also facilitate training and education opportunities for students, faculty, staff and administrators. Resident advisors and orientation leaders undergo training annually; College offices and academic departments can request training to suit their needs.

Under Riley-Casey’s leadership, the Office of Multicultural Life (OML) encouraged student groups to each name a DEI chair to be cognizant of how the group’s policies and practices relate to DEI issues and to facilitate training for their groups. Now, every sorority has such a chair, as does the Student Government Association, the Muhlenberg Theatre Association and the Department of Athletics (which provides student-led DEI workshops), among others. These chairs will undergo training and regular discussions with Riley-Casey. They also collaborate with peers from Student Advocates for Inclusion and Diversity (SAID), whom OML trained to facilitate peer dialogues on issues of identity and difference, to bring discussions on specific topics to their groups.

“It’s important for students to see themselves in this work and work together to get to where they want to be,” Riley-Casey says. “It’s different when I do the training. I’m from a different generation. I can’t always see what the students experience. Students are part of that experience. That’s what the SAID group is about.”

Diverse extracurricular programming is another way to generate stronger cultural awareness, and Kucik—who considers it a crucial complement to her teaching—has been a key player in planning and promoting such programming. While the pandemic forced 2020-2021 programming to take place over Zoom, Kucik says that format often allowed for broader engagement (allowing guests from across the country to attend) as well as greater openness and affirmation (students might share something they wouldn’t in person; peers might offer written support in the chat box).

In the 2020-2021 academic year, the Africana Studies Program and OML co-created a four-event series called From the Ashes of Relentless Racial Crises Amid COVID-19: Creating a New United States of America. Kucik (the faculty advisor for the Black Students Association [BSA]), Assistant Professor of Religion Studies Purvi Parikh (the faculty advisor for the Asian Students Association and Top Naach) and Riley-Casey conceived of the series in response to students who were struggling with the news: of police brutality targeting Black people, of anti-Asian violence and of the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on marginalized communities. While each event focused on a separate community (Black, Asian, Latinx and Indigenous), “one of the things I liked the most was how students from each of the affinity groups and the larger campus showed up for each other at these events,” Kucik says. Because of that, Kucik and Parikh will continue the From the Ashes series, without the COVID focus, with an event each year (or each semester, if schedules permit) focused on interracial solidarity and cross-cultural understanding.

Last year, Africana Studies also co-created a pair of events on Blackness and disability (with the Office of Prevention Education and the BSA) and a pair of events on the experiences of Black trans communities (with the same partners plus the Muhlenberg Trans Advocacy Coalition). Working with College offices, student groups and sometimes other academic departments and programs on events that center intersectional marginalized identities helps bring broader expertise to the table and a broader audience to the discussion, Kucik says. Plus, collaborations like these show students the breadth of faculty and staff who are invested in centering and amplifying diverse voices.

Kucik says that she has noticed that, at some institutions and conferences, attendance at events focused on diversity is often limited to members of the marginalized group being discussed. At Muhlenberg, she immediately noticed that was not the case. The programming is supported financially by all the collaborators who co-sponsor each event and socially by the participation of a wide swath of the College community, right up to senior leadership. (She’s noticed that the president and provost attended all this year’s Black History Month events, for example, which is something she does not take for granted as that is not the case everywhere.) It’s this kind of broad support that is needed not just to promote cultural awareness at Muhlenberg but to produce graduates with an understanding of how to make change.

“In today’s world, there’s so much violence and hatred and discrimination. In the From the Ashes series, we say that solidarity is truly one of the key tools we have for dismantling these oppressive systems,” Kucik says. “Oppressive systems don’t want people to be in solidarity with each other. People in power often try to keep marginalized groups separate. Creating events in collaboration with a wide variety of people and groups—and making sure those events focus on a wide variety of people and groups—is a form of activism. It’s a way of coming together and fighting these systems.”