PBN Diversity and Inclusion Awards 2021
Higher Education: Wheaton College
Sometimes when Dennis M. Hanno, president of Wheaton College, is sitting in his office in Park Hall, he says that students will often come up to his window and say, “Can I ask you a quick question?”
Wheaton College is a small liberal arts college located in Norton. It has an undergraduate population of around 1,700 students, most of them living on campus, providing a highly collaborative and personalized educational experience.
It’s the kind of place where students might feel comfortable knocking on the president’s window.
This intimate atmosphere “creates an environment where people are interacting with each other on a daily basis,” said Hanno, who is stepping down at the end of the year. “And there are no artificial barriers between the administration, for example. In some places, I would be perceived as the evil administration. That’s not the case here because all of the leadership team is visible, accessible and engaged in all aspects of the community.”
Wheaton’s intimate atmosphere is also a diverse and inclusive one. Demographically, 7% of its students are international students, 25% of domestic students identify as people of color and 22% of students identify as first-generation college students.
In recent years, Wheaton has created several cross-departmental affinity groups that work to create a more equitable and diverse college. Among the created groups are the Network for LGBTQ+ Inclusion, the First-Generation and Low-Income Student Task Force, Wheaton Inclusive STEM Excellence, and The Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning.
“Collaboration and a strong sense of community are both an informal plus of being here,” Hanno said. “But [a strong community] also helped create those opportunities to do things … [such as] First-Gen and LGBTQ+” cross-departmental groups.
“There are so many different areas where people are coming together to work across disciplines,” he added.
‘I think it’s going to pay huge dividends going forward.’
DENNIS M. HANNO, outgoing Wheaton College president
Since Hanno took on the job as president of Wheaton in 2014, he has prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion. Initially, Hanno founded and served as co-chair of the Council for Inclusion and Diversity, an effort to gather leaders throughout the college to discuss how to make Wheaton more inclusive, while also creating a programming event called the MLK Legacy program, which continues to bring in respected speakers to campus each year.
In the 2016-17 academic year, Wheaton established the Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, which offers specific goals and actions to make Wheaton more inclusive over the course of a decade. Among these goals are establishing bias response protocol and, in 2018, expanding the Council for Inclusion and Diversity into the Diversity, Equity, and Access Leadership program. Known as DEAL, the expanded council focuses on policy, education, assessment and collaborating with a diverse group of faculty and students.
On March 15, 2021, Hanno established the Office for Institutional Equity and Belonging, with Dean Shaya Gregory Poku serving as the associate vice president of the office. Regarding this new role, Hanno said, “I think it’s going to pay huge dividends going forward for the institution to have this office. Because even symbolically, new members joining our community know that this is a priority, this is a value because this office exists. And there’s a high-level person in the role who’s doing highly important and visible work. So I do think it’s been a great add, and a big step forward for us.”
The Office for Institutional Equity and Belonging was created to fulfill one of the tenets in Wheaton’s 10 action steps toward racial justice in the 2021-22 academic year. This includes efforts aimed at institutional accountability, reckoning, leadership and learning. It doesn’t end there for Wheaton. The process of making the college more diverse, equitable and inclusive is “not a goal that [the college will] ever get to the very end of,” Hanno said. It’s a “long journey that we’re engaged in.”
