Giving

Emily Ricker ’18 knew she could “get away with speaking English” during her 2016 summer internship in Pohnpei, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia. But when she learned she could add a language component to her summer internship, Ricker said yes.

Although the anthropology and political science double-major doesn’t consider herself particularly good at learning languages, she has some background in them. She studied Latin in middle school and took four years of Spanish in high school and three semesters of Arabic at Grinnell.

To learn Pohnpeian, Ricker met with her tutor, Koadendel, a few times a week. 

“I’d show up and sit on the porch for a couple of hours and chat,” Ricker says. Her tutor’s husband and children were often present and occasionally joined the conversation. “I can’t overemphasize the amount of social bonding and cultural learning.

“I learned a lot of basics, basic verbs, walking, hanging out, going to work, nouns for church. I also went to church services completely in Pohnpeian and got to the point where I could understand some of what was being said by others and could participate in greetings. 

“Without the language tutoring, the internship and experience as a whole would not have been nearly as rich, and I am beyond grateful for the wonderful opportunity,” Ricker says.

She put her basic Pohnpeian to use the next summer when she did a Mentored Advanced Project on the experiences of Pohnpeian migrants to the Midwest. Being able to say “hello” in their language “was sort of an in,” Ricker says. 

That’s the kind of cultural connection that Joel ’65 and Nancy Shinder hope to foster with their newly named Shinder Family Fund for Advanced Language Development. They originally endowed the fund anonymously in 2003 and recently decided to name it. “I began to think that if you put your name on it, that you tell the world that you care about it,” Joel Shinder says. 

“Language is so important,” he says. “I feel it’s even more of an imperative today.” 

He credits his interest in languages to his maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, perhaps near Minsk, where many languages were spoken. His grandfather spoke and wrote several. 

“It’s not just the language itself, it’s the culture,” Shinder says. “The first thing you learn in a language is the way you think about things.”

He learned several languages, beginning as a child with Hebrew, then Latin and Russian in high school. “Russian, because of the Sputnik fear,” he says. He studied German and French at Grinnell, where he majored in history. 

He was interested in Middle Eastern histories and earned a doctorate from Princeton University. “Once you get interested in an area, you really have to do the languages,” he says. He studied Arabic and Turkish in graduate school and figured out some Spanish, Italian, Persian, and Greek as needed for research while studying Ottoman-Turkish. 

Nancy Shinder was an enthusiastic student of French and Polish and traveled to both France and Poland. She wants students to have the advantage of a good grounding in another language and culture. 

Student Eligibility

The Shinder Family Fund for Advanced Language Development is designed to support students 

who’ve completed two years (or the equivalent) of a non-native language. The Shinders would like students to benefit from advanced studies or applied experiences, such as internships or immersive language research. However, the fund will not apply to traditional, semester-long off-campus study.  

Imagine the vast quantity of data an online retailer such as Amazon collects from shoppers in a day. Or the amount of data the New York City Police Department collects on “stop and frisks” in a year.

Analyzing and interpreting such huge, quickly changing data sets is the province of the interdisciplinary field of data science.

Data science is “an intersection of mathematics, computer science, and statistics that has developed this new field, where we’re working with very different data, with very different techniques than were common 20 years ago,” says Shonda Kuiper, professor of mathematics and statistics and an expert in statistics pedagogy.

 “Students need those skills to compete in today’s world,” says Jeff Jonkman, associate professor of mathematics and statistics. “Students are very interested in it. A lot of high school students who come to visit want to talk about data science.” 

Kuiper, Jonkman, Samuel Rebelsky, professor of computer science, and other faculty have been working on incorporating data science into the curriculum in various ways. Two new data science courses have been developed, an introductory course and a capstone course. In Rebelsky’s CS 151 course, he’s relating the study of functional problem solving to the practice of data science. 

To support these efforts, the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust awarded Grinnell a $200,000 grant in 2016. Since it began its grant-making activities in 1987, the Carver Trust has distributed more than $258 million in the form of nearly 2,000 individual grants. The Carver Trust focuses its charitable giving on biomedical and scientific research; primary, secondary and higher education; and youth-related needs.

“The grant has provided us some time and space to really think about how to move forward in this new discipline in an efficient way,” Kuiper says. She took 10 online courses and received a certification in data science during spring 2017. 

Of those 10 courses, three were review, “but there were a lot of things that were very new to me as well,” she says. Such as natural language processing. 

“Analyzing text is something that wasn’t commonly done by statisticians before, but now it’s something that we should know how to do,” Kuiper says. “How do you take blogs, how do you take movie scripts, and find patterns?”

During the summer of 2017, Kuiper and Jonkman developed the curriculum for a new 200-level course, Introduction to Data Science. They sketched out what topics they needed to cover and in what depth. They worked “with students collaboratively to develop and design tutorials to train students in these new areas,” Kuiper says. They had 10 tutorials set up before classes started.

They also looked at what people were doing at other schools “where data science is trying to grow into whatever it will be when it grows up,” Jonkman says.

“I think one thing we agreed on,” Kuiper adds, was that “we really wanted this to be an applied class, where students have a final project that they could present to possible employers when they leave the class.”

In addition to developing the curriculum together, Kuiper and Jonkman team-taught the course in the fall. “The team-teaching is incredibly beneficial,” Jonkman says, “because Shonda knows more about it than I do, and I can learn more as I go and hopefully be a lot more ready in the spring.”  They’ll each teach the course again, separately, in spring 2018.

Kuiper adds, “There is no way I think either one of us could have done this without mutual support.”

One of the biggest challenges with this course is that everything is very new, she says. “The tutorials we built this summer are now outdated, because if we’re pulling live data, it’s changing constantly. And we’re using free software, which I think is also very beneficial for the students to use, but that creates a lot of messiness in the classroom and with the data itself.”

In the course, students examined many different types of data, including college data sets; millions of New York Police Department reports; housing prices in Ames, Iowa; movie ratings pulled from the web; and a database of global terrorism incidents.

“Our goal is to be as interdisciplinary as possible,” Kuiper says. “I think every discipline is now using data in new ways.”  

Lucy Chechik ’18, a chemistry major from Minneapolis, wanted to study abroad and chose DIS (Danish Institute for Study Abroad) Copenhagen because of its focus on medicine. 

During fall 2016, Chechik enjoyed getting a chance to interact with female Danish doctors. “My classes were taught by doctors. We got a crash course in anatomy and diagnostics and learned a lot about the health care systems in Denmark, Sweden, and Estonia,” she says. 

She liked spending time with her peers and host family and relished traveling around Europe, but still, she felt like she wanted something more — a chance to really live and work in a place rather than just visit it as a student. 

One thing she’d hoped to do that fall was a research internship, but she couldn’t work it into her schedule.

Chechik had gotten a taste of research during the summer of 2016 when she completed a Mentored Advanced Project with Mark Levandoski, professor of chemistry. She studied neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) — proteins in the brain that are implicated in a variety of diseases including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. 

Since 2014, Levandoski has been collaborating with Bente Frølund, principal investigator in a lab at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology. Her lab also does work with nAChRs. In fact, some of the compounds synthesized in her lab are sent to Grinnell and used for testing purposes in Levandoski’s lab. 

After Chechik’s fall semester abroad, she continued working in Levandoski’s lab. Meanwhile she was determined to go back to Copenhagen. 

Levandoski had also hoped that Chechik would work in Frølund’s lab during her semester abroad. The summer of 2017 seemed like the perfect opportunity. 

“She did most of the work to get it arranged,” Levandoski says. 

After securing the summer position, Chechik applied for internship funding through the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS). The CLS awarded Chechik funding through the chemistry department. Gifts from Shenda Baker ’85, a chemistry graduate, and Mark and Barbara Maisel, parents of Brenton Maisel ’11, made Chechik's global research experience possible, for which she is “incredibly grateful.” 

Although Chechik admits she sometimes felt overwhelmed by her responsibilities in the lab, she soon got the hang of it. “I’ve gotten a lot more confident in what I’m doing,” she says. “I like the hands-on nature of this sort of research. It’s shown me that I want research to be a part of my medical education.” 

Chechik also enjoyed working closely with students from many different nations. 

“Before coming to Copenhagen, I didn’t have a tangible sense of this big, international scientific community. It’s cool to realize that yeah, we’re in this lab, but the international community is working on this.”

Chechik also learned something about the value of talking with people from other countries, even if it’s not about anything important — like bidets. 

“Chinese students are blown away by it,” she says with a laugh. “They tell us stories of their first experience with bidets, and apparently, every Italian home has a bidet. I think that even if we’re talking about something as silly as bidets, we’re starting to understand other cultures and other people. That’s the first step in international relations.”

Topics relevant to the larger student and alumni community were the focus of discussion sessions between the Alumni Council and College administrators during the council’s March meeting on campus.

Fossil fuel divestment 

Council members learned more about recent demonstrations by students asking for Grinnell to divest itself of all endowment funds placed in the fossil fuels industry. President Raynard S. Kington informed the council of the policy recently adopted by the Board of Trustees for dealing with such requests from any segment of the Grinnell community. Emphasizing that he is pleased when students take on issues like global warming and divestment, Kington also affirmed the College’s responsibility to guide them toward viewing these matters in the widest possible context. Becoming educated about the impact of financial decisions is crucial, he said.

Continued growth of the Center for Careers, Life, and Service

Mark Peltz, the Daniel ’77 and Patricia Jipp ’80 Finkelman Dean of Careers, Life, and Service (CLS), explained several aspects of CLS’s current strategies for preparing students to thrive both during their years at Grinnell and after graduation. On-campus efforts include engaging more students in externships, internships, industry-focused visits, and career counseling. 

Angela Onwuachi-Willig ’94, council president, noted that two CLS programs are an outgrowth of earlier Alumni Council undertakings: 1) recruiting alumni to host spring break externships and 2) encouraging them to participate in alumni/student mentoring programs. Both of these efforts remain vital, ongoing interests of the council.

Ensuring accessibility 

Autumn Wilke, assistant dean for disability resources, discussed plans for the new Humanities and Social Studies Complex (HSSC), which includes renovations of Alumni Recitation Hall and Carnegie Hall. At the beginning of the design process for the HSSC, the Alumni Council passed a resolution insisting upon the inclusion of hearing loops in the HSSC and other campus buildings and requesting accessibility of all kinds that exceeds legal requirements. The Alumni Council continues to be a vocal advocate for guaranteeing campuswide access for all persons with disabilities.

Strategic planning

In addition, the council engaged in strategic planning for the future. Specific concerns focus on the council’s visibility to the alumni body and students, the representative capacity of the council, its efforts to improve communication with and representation of alumni, and aligning the work of the Alumni Council more deliberately with the College’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations to achieve the greatest effectiveness. 

New members, leaders

Members finishing their terms on the council include Richard Raridon ’53, Gof Thomson ’62, Barbara Hunt Moore ’65, and Edward Senn ’79. All four have made valuable contributions during their years of service and were recognized and feted at the Alumni Council closing dinner at Grinnell House.

Incoming members were selected by the Council Membership Committee and affirmed by the full council on the basis of their Grinnell era, their current location, and their potential specific contributions to the College and the council. They are Robert Ruhl ’76, Phillip Hales ’02, Brigham Hoegh ’08, and Graciela Guzman ’11. Their terms begin June 3, during Reunion 2017. 

Council leadership will also change, as Onwuachi-Willig becomes past-president, Peter Calvert ’79 becomes president, and John “Fritz” Schwaller ’69 steps into the role of president-elect. 

Austin Simmons ’90 routinely describes Grinnell as a winning lottery ticket. “It was pure luck that I ended up there,” he says. “Grinnell was everything I needed.”

Now a successful real estate developer with Brightwork Real Estate in Tampa, Fla., Simmons came to Grinnell with no idea of what he wanted to get out of the experience. “When I came to Grinnell, I didn’t have a plan,” says Simmons. “I wanted to play soccer and run around with my friends.” He may not have had a plan, but Simmons knew he needed what Grinnell offered — small classes and individual attention. Reflecting on the experience, particularly after having pursued a law degree at a large institution, Simmons realizes how crucial Grinnell was in his development. 

Ultimately, it was John Pfitsch, then Grinnell’s soccer coach, who directed Simmons’ rambunctious energy into specific goals. Pfitsch had been Simmons’ first point of contact when he was looking at colleges. “I don’t know how many thousands of kids approached him in a state of disarray,” says Simmons, “but I was fortunate to catch him at a time when he was extremely wise and a calming influence.” 

After graduating with a degree in political science, Simmons returned to campus regularly. “I came back for reunion every year for the first five or six years and slept on John Pfitsch’s floor,” he says. He attributes his strong bonds with other members of the alumni community to returning as often as he did. Most recently, Simmons returned for the College’s 171st Commencement to celebrate Emily Pfitsch, John’s widow, as she received an honorary doctorate.

Simmons has given gifts to Grinnell nearly every year since graduating but finally found himself in the position to give a major gift this year. “Athletics was very important to me,” says Simmons. “I felt like if I could be involved at Grinnell in a specific area, there would be no better place than the athletics department.” Sarah Johnson, assistant director of major gifts, worked with Simmons and Andy Hamilton ’85, director of athletics and recreation, to make sure Simmons’ priorities matched the College’s needs. 

“My fantasy was to be a big part of the soccer program at Grinnell,” says Simmons. He considered stating outright where he wanted to direct his gift. “But then I thought about my own business. I have to trust my people’s input and collaborate with them,” he says. Instead, he asked Hamilton where the gift would be most useful. When Hamilton said the football program needed an assistant coach/recruiting coordinator, Simmons immediately agreed to fund the position. In March 2017, the College hired Matt Reed to fill the position. Reed spent the past three seasons at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and will work with quarterbacks and running backs at Grinnell. He will also attend recruiting events throughout the United States, increasing Grinnell’s presence and strengthening what has been an area of the football program in need of improvement.

Simmons describes himself as a collaborator. Buying a piece of property, building a structure on it, and seeing it become a doctor’s office, a restaurant, or a store — and knowing that he was an important part of that process — gives him a unique sense of satisfaction. His gift to the football program gave him a similar feeling. “I’ll never have enough money to pay Grinnell back for all it gave me,” he says. “I just want to be part of Grinnell’s future.” 

In 2014, the Alumni Student Connections Committee of the College’s Alumni Council initiated a project to facilitate mentoring relationships between alumni and current students. After developing a mentoring handbook, six committee alumni volunteered to mentor six current students on the Student Alumni Council for the 2014–15 academic year. 

Mentors Rick Stuck ’82, Nancy Schmulbach Maly ’61, Rania Mohamed Robb ’03, Peter Calvert ’79, and Rhonda Stuart ’86 all reported positive connections with their mentees. In 2015–16, the program doubled. 

Ultimately, the connections committee hopes that every student on campus will have the opportunity to connect with an alumni mentor. Through Grinnell Connect, the College’s new online networking platform, Grinnellians past and present are already making strides toward accomplishing that goal. Sign up at grinnellconnect.com.

Q. Tucker: What makes an effective mentor or mentee?

A. Calvert: In my view, most students have the chops to solve their problems already. But when they get caught in a rut or a seeming dead end, they sometimes forget how to reason their way through knotty issues or looming crises. The best mentors do not take ownership away from their mentees but rather help them step back and remember themselves at their best. Once they get their mojo back, mentees are often able to leap two steps forward or reenter the fray from a different angle.

Q. Tucker: Can you give me an example?

A. Calvert: I recently mentored a student who was applying to medical schools, and we found that it was especially helpful to evaluate long-term strategies. We talked through a variety of questions: What if your top schools don’t have slots available this year? Can you identify alternate tracks — what about pursuing a research internship or considering other lines of study in parallel medical fields? These exercises helped my mentee develop a flexible mindset during his senior year. He was ultimately accepted into an exceptional two-year research program in the Boston area, which is helping him build a stronger resume for a subsequent try at medical school.

Q. Tucker: What do you want Grinnell alums to know about mentoring current students?

A. Calvert: I want them to know how rewarding and natural it is. The time commitment is not excessive — perhaps three Skype calls a year and maybe some texts. Hopefully, an in-person meeting can be arranged. The ability to gently guide a current student and be one part of their Grinnell journey is a fantastic use of our life experience. And we share that unique link to the Grinnell crucible we were all catalyzed by once. 

The Alumni Council is a group of 26 Grinnell alumni and two student representatives working with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations.

In his 48 years of life, physics professor Sujeev Wickramasekara made an immeasurable impact on his peers and his students. When he died in December 2015 at the age of 48 of a sudden cardiac event, his wife Tammy Nyden, associate professor of philosophy, hoped to continue his impact through a memorial scholarship fund. Paula Smith, professor of English, and her husband Paul Tjossem, associate professor of physics, knew right away they wanted to make that hope a reality.

Smith and Tjossem knew Wickramasekara from the time he arrived at Grinnell in 2005. Tjossem actually knew him a little longer. “I was a member of the search committee that reviewed his application for a faculty position,” he says. “Even on paper, Sujeev made an immediate impression — here was a scientist, so early in his career, who was already a first-rate theorist and even had prior experience teaching at a liberal arts college. 

“From the start, our friendship focused on teaching,” Tjossem says. The College’s workshop physics curriculum — discovery-based courses that involve more extensive laboratory and group work than traditional physics classes — was a major draw for Wickramasekara. “Over time, he and I worked together on department projects and consulted on whatever we were doing,” says Tjossem. “We were next-door office mates, so especially when he lived in Grinnell, that meant we talked every day.”

Smith was dean of the College when Wickramasekara chaired the physics department. “From working with him and seeing what he accomplished, I could see that Sujeev represented all that we hope from a liberal arts faculty member,” Smith says. “He was a spectacular researcher who devoted himself to teaching while also taking on service to the College.”

The scholarship that Smith and Tjossem created will be awarded annually to a student or students with financial need, pursuing a degree in physics. In particular, the scholarship aims to aid students who come from traditionally underrepresented populations. 

This year Rebecca Wong ’17, a physics major from Highlands Ranch, Colo., received the first Sujeev Wickramasekara Memorial Scholarship. She had the chance to have Wickramasekara as a lab instructor only for a semester, but she remembers him fondly. “He was really thorough when he gave out lab instructions. If you had a question and raised your hand, he was immediately over to you to help you understand, and then he’d shoot off to the next student,” she says. Wong remembers his passion for physics and his drive to help students not only understand what he was teaching but also to enjoy it. “It’s bittersweet getting this award,” says Wong. “He was so young, had accomplished so much, and still had so much promise.”

Although the scholarship does not lessen the grief of Wickramasekara’s friends and family, it does extend his impact on students’ lives. “One of the hardest things about losing Sujeev is to think about the hundreds of students who would have benefited from his teaching and mentoring,” Tjossem says. “To receive this scholarship will be an honor and a reminder for students about his legacy.” 

To learn about creating a memorial fund, please call the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, 1-866-850-1846, and ask for Jayn Chaney ’05.

This fall’s Alumni Council gathering focused primarily on two key issues occupying Grinnell at the moment, diversity and inclusion, and “Global Grinnell.” 

Having recently formed their own committee to address issues of equity and inclusion regarding alumni (Page 33, Fall 2016, The Grinnell Magazine), council members engaged in further discussions of the topic following a presentation by Lakesia Johnson, assistant vice president and chief diversity officer. Johnson discussed this year’s first-year “common read” at the College, Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi, which council members read in advance. According to Steele, stereotyping and bias lead to “stereotype threat,” resulting in negative experiences among minorities in any culture. Johnson described ways she and her office are working to minimize such harmful influences on Grinnell’s increasingly diverse campus. 

A second significant conversation during the Alumni Council weekend centered around Grinnell’s new Institute for Global Engagement, whose mission, according to the College website, is to create “opportunities for students and faculty to develop their knowledge of the world.” Grinnell’s student body is now nearly 20 percent international, said Michael Latham, dean of the college, in his address to the group. The aim of this new institute, Latham continued, is to bring the world to Grinnell and to send Grinnell to the world. Grinnell supports adding international applicants to the student body through careful work in admissions. Further, the College invites up to a dozen international scholars a year for speaking engagements. 

Davíd Cook-Martín, assistant vice president for global education and senior international officer, described opportunities for travel through new Global Learning Program tutorials. These courses for first-year students guide them in studying global content. Spring 2016 classes included Origins of a Liberal Education, which took students to Padua, Florence, Rome, Madrid, and Mexico City; and Tolerance and Intolerance, which involved travel to Paris, Strasbourg, and Berlin.

In other news, a new Grinnell College alumni and friends website is in full operation, alumni.grinnell.edu, as is Grinnell Connect, www.grinnellconnect.com, a platform designed specifically for mentoring and career networking. Alumni will want to check out both of these for information and the opportunity to connect with fellow Grinnellians and students. 

Yes, Grinnell is charting new terrain as time goes on, but all that is happening —on campus and within the alumni community — is based on the solid history of the school’s founding. The core value of excellence in education, respect for diversity, and a tradition of social responsibility and action are affirmed at every turn. 

The Alumni Council is a group of 26 Grinnell alumni and two student representatives working with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. The council’s mission is to foster strong connections between alumni and the College, and among the 20,000 Grinnell alumni located in the 50 states and 55 nations.

For many students on campus and many recent alums, the names Sebring and Lewis are synonymous with a performance hall — the place they saw Anoushka Shankar perform, or where they presented a Mentored Advanced Project, or where they sang with the Grinnell Singers. Life trustee Penny Bender Sebring ’64 and her husband, Charles Ashby Lewis, are the people behind that hall and many other spaces on campus. Consistent donors since the mid-1980s, Sebring and Lewis have made major contributions to the construction of the athletic complex, Grinnell’s fine arts, and a number of endowed scholarships. 

Over the past five years, they have advocated modernizing what became the Center for Careers, Life, and Service (CLS). That modernization has been conceived and is being led by Mark Peltz, Daniel ’77 and Patricia Jipp ’80 Finkelman Dean of Careers, Life, and Service, starting with the creation of career communities (initially called “Career in” programs). 

Sebring and Lewis helped CLS create its first career community, the Education Professions Community (Ed Pros) in 2013. Their combined gifts of $900,000 launched and sustained Ed Pros, and their latest gift of $450,000 will launch the Business and Finance Community, bringing their total contributions to CLS to $1.35 million. Grinnell is not the only beneficiary of Sebring and Lewis philanthropy. The couple has established similar education professions programs at two other schools — Lewis’ alma mater, Amherst College, where he is a trustee; and the University of Chicago, where he is also a trustee. 

Grinnell’s new Business and Finance Community aims to help both students and recent alumni build networks and realize the potential of their education when considering careers in finance, consulting, advertising, and related fields. Students who join this community will gain access to specialized advising, have opportunities to attend workshops and seminars through strategic partners such as the Harvard Business School’s HBX Credential of Readiness Program, and connect with employers and alumni in business and finance.

The CLS is planning ultimately to have seven career communities and a robust internship program. The College’s longstanding pre-med advising program is being re-purposed to become the Health Professions Community, the third career community. There will be four others: Arts and Communications, Science and Technology, Government and Social Service, and Law. “These communities will provide social capital for first-generation and low-income students that they wouldn’t otherwise have, offer a new type of group on campus, and act as an intellectual and financial primer in addition to offering career advice,” says Lewis. 

Sebring and Lewis are excited to see where these new communities will take students. “Chuck and I are extremely pleased with the efficacy of the Ed Pros Community under Ashley Schaefer’s leadership,” says Sebring. “We believe that the career-focused community model provides powerful opportunities for students and alumni to apply their liberal arts education for both personal success and society’s benefit.”  

Grinnell’s Alumni Council seeks to facilitate connections among alumni, students, faculty, and staff. This spring, we discussed the need for a more comprehensive and engaged conversation related to diversity and inclusion, two longstanding core values of Grinnell College. We recognized that while the College has made great strides in increasing the diversity of its students and faculty, the College is still striving to meet its own high standards for inclusion. For example, institutional data reveals that meaningful numbers of students of color left Grinnell — graduated, transferred, or dropped out — feeling alienated and unsupported. Data also suggests that Grinnell’s first-generation college students, LGBTQ, disabled, and international students experience similar feelings of isolation. Alumni of marginalized identities have generally been less engaged with the College than Grinnell’s majority alumni community. 

In order to engage and connect alumni in these critical conversations, the council’s Executive Committee proposed creating a new Diversity and Inclusion Committee. At the time of these discussions, we had no information about the College’s plans for a new diversity framework or the decision to withdraw from the Posse program. Even so, the Alumni Council unanimously voted in favor of the proposal.

The new Diversity and Inclusion Committee, co-chaired by Jeetander Dulani ’98 and Allison Brinkhorst ’11, will work closely with Lakesia Johnson, assistant vice president and chief diversity officer; the director of intercultural affairs (once hired) and staff; and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, particularly Jayn Bailey Chaney ’05. 

One of our first projects will be to connect students of marginalized identities with alumni mentors. We are also committed to keeping alumni informed and engaged in Grinnell’s evolving diversity framework and plan. We are eager to hear from alumni who are interested in serving as mentors for current students or helping advance the College’s core values of diversity and inclusion. 

Today, Grinnell’s student body is more diverse than ever. Domestic students of color comprise more than 25 percent of the student body, and international students make up nearly 20 percent. Thanks to Grinnell’s commitment to meeting the full demonstrated need of every admitted student, the College remains economically diverse and has an increasing number of first-generation college students. In 2014, The New York Times ranked Grinnell second on its “Most Economically Diverse Top Colleges” list. For decades, Grinnell has also earned a reputation as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly campuses in the nation. As time passes, Grinnell’s alumni community becomes more and more diverse. 

The work of Alumni Council, and its Diversity and Inclusion Committee, aims to build on these successes and also broaden and deepen the conversation about what it means to be a Grinnellian. We look forward to continuing these conversations with all of you. 

Contact the Diversity and Inclusion Committee:

Jeetander Dulani ’98 and Allison Brinkhorst ’11