Sydney Martinez, Campus Carrier news editor
Alicia Meehan, Campus Carrier deputy news editor
The President’s Office announced Haley Smith’s resignation as Chief Belonging and Community Engagement Officer via email on Oct. 15. Smith joined Berry in 2020 as the Gate Scholarship director and became director of student diversity initiaives in 2021. In June 2023, she was subsequently promoted as the inaugural chief of diversity and belonging. Smith posted on LinkedIn that she is seeking new career opportunities.
In her position, Smith worked closely with community partners to provide meaningful educational opportunities for students. She coordinated speakers, planned community events for students and faculty, including Solidarity Week and Be Love Week, and helped start the Good Neighbor Culture initiative.
President Sandeep Mazumder’s email recognized Smith’s contributions toward advancing Berry’s Good Neighbor Culture.
“[Smith’s] dedication to fostering inclusion, building strong community partnerships and advancing our Good Neighbor culture has made a lasting impact,” the email said.
Casee Gilbert, Berry’s chief of staff, declined an interview but said in an email the office’s interim transition plan includes multiple professional staff covering Smith’s work as well as student staff and two graduate assistants.
Mazumder said there is no rush to find a replacement chief officer of belonging, but rather an evaluation of how staffing needs to be done.
“We are figuring out who will take leadership of the various components of that work,” Mazumder said. “But we’re also not rushing what’s going to happen staffing-wise. We want to really take the time to evaluate: now that the Good Neighbor work has been up and running for a while, what does it look in the future in terms of staffing it? We’re going to take this period to think about what the next steps are there.”
Mazumder said that the work should be taken on by a group of staff instead of having a singular chief officer.
“I would say [Smith’s] work needs to be done by a team of people,” Mazumder said. “That’s true of anything in a college or a university, that work needs to be taken on by a group of men and women who are of the same mind and are believers of the college’s mission and fulfilling that duty in order to see that mission be accomplished, so that’s the way I’m viewing this. How do we make this a true team effort in the next phase of good neighbor and make sure that it’s reaching as many relevant units on campus as possible?”
Senior Sydney Layne, student community outreach specialist for the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement declined an interview. According to an email from Layne, operations under the office will be temporarily student-led.
“In the meantime, it looks like Bonner, Impact and the other parts of the office will be student-led for a bit,” Layne said in an email.
Junior Jackson Backus, a student who works in the Bonner Scholarship Program, said that student workers within the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement received the news of Smith’s resignation at the same time as the rest of the student population.
Backus said that there have already been impacts on the offices’ projects and initiatives due to restructuring. Professional staff have been changing positions within and out of the office, leaving structure changes for student workers to deal with.
“I don’t know if [events held by the Office of Belonging] were impacted by the fact that she wasn’t here,” Backus said. “There might be indirect consequences of it, but due to a lot of restructuring we were already having, we were expecting those anyway.”
The previous scholarship director of the Bonner program, Laurie Chandler, took a new opportunity and left Friday. Chandler’s departure, along with other professional staff changes within the Office of Belonging, has no correlation with Smith’s resignation, according to Backus.
“We did have several other professional staff who’ve transitioned into different roles on campus, but that was before Haley’s departure and didn’t have anything to do with [it].” Backus said.
Backus said that students in the different offices in the department are struggling to work together after Smith left. He also said that this sort of disorganization is expected after any change in leadership.
“Because of the way our office is broken out into a lot of different subgroups, it’s been very difficult for many of the subgroups to unite because we haven’t had a very major authority figure,” Backus said. “It’s a good and bad thing because we get to know each other, but it’s also kind of unorganized”
Gilbert said by email that the Office of Belonging and Community Engagement will continue to do great work and programming.
“Please know that the president and his cabinet remain deeply committed to nurturing a culture of belonging, strengthening community engagement and upholding the values that shape our Good Neighbor framework,” Gilbert said in an email.