By Brady White, Reporter

MOUNT BERRY, Ga. – While diversity, equity and inclusion programs have come under attack on college campuses and in state legislatures throughout the country, Berry’s has only grown. This semester, the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement absorbed both the Bonner scholarship program and Berry Impact, formerly Berry College Volunteer Services, and it added significant office space in the Krannert Center.

Since 2023, more than 80 anti-DEI bills that target programs at colleges have been introduced in 28states and in Congress, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. As a private college, Berry is largely immune to such legislation, which is a principal reason the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement has been allowed to flourish. 

“While many departments like mine have been disappearing, mine has grown,” said Haley Smith, chief officer of the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement. “It would be adverse for Berry College to be anti-DEI considering our founder started the college for marginalized populations.”

Smith’s office renamed itself last year in part to distance it from the stigma and divisiveness associated with the acronym DEI, according to Smith, who was named Berry’s inaugural chief diversity and belonging office in June 2023. The office’s mission, however, remains the same.

She came to the college in 2020, joining as director of diversity and inclusion after a decade of experience in community organizing and reconciliation in rural contexts.

Missional alignment

Smith said her office’s name change was beneficial in terms of self-understanding because it allowed staff to highlight the community engagement aspects of the office’s activities. In addition, Berry’s missional commitment to Christian values helps to protect the college’s DEI efforts from changes in the political winds, she said.

“Jesus asked, ‘Who is your neighbor?’” Smith said. “Well, my neighbor is LBTQ, Muslim, Black . . . Everyone is my neighbor.”

And while Berry’s missional commitment is to specifically Christian values, this commitment does not minimize or exclude the values of others in the office who have different beliefs or faith traditions, according to student director Mykelle Patterson.

“So many of the people in our office are intentional about loving others, regardless of and in addition to their faith,” she said.

Pushback

The rebrand didn’t please everyone, however.

Christina Bucher, associate professor and chair of the Department of English, said she found the office’s name change “troubling” as another example of what she described as a problematic pattern of DEI aversion at the college.

When the LGBTQ+ group on campus, Listen, sought official status as an authorized student organization, Berry’s administration dragged their feet, she said. Many years passed before Listen gained recognition, and this inaction made the administration’s reluctance evident, she said.

“All that had to happen was that [President] Steve Briggs had to sign” his approval, she said.

What has become a nationwide purge of DEI programs catalyzed in 2023 when the Supreme Court ruled that factoring race into admissions is unconstitutional (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard).

This post-WOKE reaction did not surprise Bucher.

“Anytime minoritized peoples make some progress, there’s always some backlash,” she said. “That’s what’s happening right now with DEI. That’s the backlash.”

Rather than using applicants as a means to the end of fulfilling a diversity quota, at Berry DEI values are included by keeping an open mind towards the backgrounds of applicants to the college, Smith said. DEI isn’t simply a checkbox,” in other words, it is the “DNA of Berry College.”

“My goal is to see Berry be a model of practicing good neighbor culture on a college campus and the communities the college impacts,” Smith said at the time of her promotion in 2023.

Briggs vowed then that Berry is committed to being a place that embraces a diversity of people and viewpoints, respecting our differences and valuing dialogue. He described Smith’s promotion and the office’s re-brand as “deepening our understanding of belonging and what it means to be a good neighbor in a way that is consistent with Berry’s core values.”  

Noting also that the moves came on the eve of the election season that just concluded in early November, Smith entered the new role “at a pivotal moment. . . . “We need bridge-builders like Haley.”