Dreams, hopes and visions for leadership: a personal account of last year’s LASPA conflict

Once again, we’re at that point in the LASPA Center search process where we await an announcement of who has been selected as director for the center, which has been slated to launch later this year. I remember, however, the controversy and confusion that resulted from last year’s search, which was terminated in its last stages after reaching two final candidates.

I was part of the group that protested the decision to scrap and restart the search, but it seemed few understood why we were so upset. We were a small^[1] but vocal group of students who happened to identify as marginalized and their allies, protesting the candidate we supported. Margo-Okazawa Rey, was not selected. Paradoxically, we were highly visible because we were vocal, and yet the numbers in our ranks were diminished by the overwhelming majority of students who were at a loss for our concern.

“Some students just want to be angry,” I heard one of my co-workers say after the particularly tense and bitter forum on the issue.^[2] Still today, it’s been regretfully evident to me that many of my fellow students have little knowledge of exactly what it was that students were protesting.

Our decision was informed by our consciousness of the origins of funding for the LASPA center, the family for which it was named after. Jude Laspa, an alumnus and former board member of Harvey Mudd College, was a high-ranking executive of the Bechtdel company at the time when it was implicated in the corporate greed-driven privatization of water in Bolivia. The actions of the Bechtdel company incited what was called the Water War (“la guerra del agua”) between protesters and the Bolivian Army called to enforce the Bechtdel contract through martial law in the city of Cochabamba in 2000. One unarmed 17 year-old boy was shot and killed in the conflict and at least 175 were injured.^[3]

Was that the notion of leadership Scripps wanted to promote? How could we be sure that Scripps lived up to its fluffy rhetoric of the “development of our students as world citizens and the next generation of leaders” in its implementation of the LASPA Center? What about that time Scripps had centered white feminism in their involvement in the Institute for Women’s Leadership in Latin America two years ago, promoting Western model of leadership for Latin America funded by the State Department and inviting a keynote speaker who had been complicit in violence in Latin America during her time as a foreign policy staffer in the White House?^[4]

Our decision to protest was rooted in dreams and visions of what a leadership center could be for marginalized students and the climate at Scripps. Students of color, queer and first-gen students, disabled and low-income students, and our allies are vastly outnumbered by white cis-gendered and class-privileged women on this campus, who often don’t engage with us in crucial conversations to make the campus a hospitable and safe space for our identities. Often, we carve out our own spaces by forming student-led organizations in SCORE, where we have been relegated to having dialogue with/within ourselves.

What we envisioned for the LASPA center was wonderful, not just for ourselves^[5]: a director  who would have experience working with marginalized communities; open architecture, whiteboards! people exchanging ideas! how to navigate age, class gender in all spaces; incorporating leadership into academic curriculum by having LASPA  classes about social responsibility and navigating for-profits, non-profits, and everything in between (student-led class as origin); teaching people how to look at one situation from multiple lens (well-rounded leaders dealing with, multiple fields– science, business, social justice).

But also, an institutional ally who could call out the fact that some students, those who bear the burden of creating safe communities for themselves while being students and leaders, are overworked and overloaded already; a director who could forge connections to not just organizations like TFA^[6] and business fellowships, but things like responsible research, local orgs, mentors whom students can truly feel connected to, who have experience in facilitation and know how to work within the academy but are still committed to their communities. A director who would ensure ethics and morals were critically embedded in the practices of the leadership center, rather than a glorified resume-building center.

Someone who would make sure that the values of leadership that marginalized communities possessed would also be reflected in a leadership center. We saw these possibilities embodied by Margo Okazawa-Rey, one of the two final candidates.

Margo already had a relationship with students at the Claremont Colleges. She was the 2006 Scholar/Practitioner-in-Residence in the Intercollegiate Department of Women Studies and in 2009 the Intercollegiate Asian American Studies Department established a summer fellowship in her honor. In fact, Margo was something of a superstar with established repute in both academia and activism. Most of all, Margo embodied the social justice values that we desperately sought to see reflected in spaces and ideals on-campus.

We supported Margo with a petition that gathered 50 signatures prior to announcement that neither candidate would be hired.^[7] By many anecdotal accounts, we were assured that support from faculty and students was overwhelmingly in favor of Margo Okazawa-Rey, especially so because most students besides marginalized students seemed uninvested in the selection process. So it was a double slap when news arrived that Margo had not been selected–and in fact neither candidate would proceed on.

We saw Margo’s rejection not just a rejection of her as an individual, but a rejection of social justice and values. Not only of her qualifications, but also of who she was – a queer, biracial woman of color. We saw her as someone who facilitate a wide variety of different interests, and as an intersectional feminist. And yet despite–perhaps because she was someone who would and could champion underserved communities, despite the fact that she had demonstrated student and faculty support, she was rejected. Because that just wouldn’t be applicable enough to the entire student body.

The reason cited by Bettison-Varga as for why the search should be scrapped and relaunched was that the vision for the Leadership Center and the role of the director had not been made clear, due to a logistical error. But marginalized students and their allies had a host of questions resulting from this explanation. Why was it impossible to work with one or either of the candidates to address and work out the vision in coordination with the College? What was the point of proceeding so far in the selection process, investing the effort of students, faculty and staff on the search committee and in feedback sessions, only to unprofessionally turn both ‘exceptionally-qualified’ candidates away at the final decisive moment?^[8]

The salt in the wound was that by rejecting someone of Margo’s caliber and repute in social justice and activism, Scripps was sending the message that no one else with her qualifications need bother apply in the next round.

Later, Denise Nelson Nash would iterate to me that the decision had nothing to do with social justice and how applicable that seemed to the school, but the realization that the school was looking towards big name, big profile candidates that came with own ideas for the leadership center instead of looking towards the Scripps community to figure out needs for a leadership center. But in a follow-up round-table talk between students and administrative staff that was hosted in Spring 2014, Lori Bettison-Varga did address the notion of a center that incorporated social justice.

“I will not commit to hiring a director with commitment to social justice,” she said. “The LASPA center is not social center–that may not be answer you want to hear, but it is a component in center. I fear that by saying LASPA center is not social justice center I will be read as saying social justice concerns will not be reflected in center and that’s not at all what I want to say.”

“It has to be a place that serves everybody. Everybody.”

Which might implicate, of course, that social justice is just for marginalized folks, and that making a commitment to it is tantamount to jeopardizing the needs of the whole community: a false dichotomy.

LBV’s concerns about how her words would be perceived were grounded in reality. Because it is a real deep-rooted fear of marginalized students that their values and visions for leadership and a just and fair society will be well, marginalized by the lack of investment by the majority, if they are not intentionally placed at the forefront of initiatives.

In 2013, Scripps drafted a Diversity and Inclusivity Plan in response to persisting student concerns about “isolation, exclusion, and devaluation [that] are very real experiences for the students of color, low-income students, LGBTQQIA students, and disabled students on our campus.”^[9] In its introduction, the plan states:

“In our ever-changing world, in order to ‘lead with excellence’ it is imperative that we attend to and prioritize diversity throughout our College initiatives.  Diversity should not be an add-on to what we are doing but rather, an integrated aspect of every decision we make. We cannot simply appreciate diversity; it is a requirement for our success. To prepare our students to become leaders in our dynamic and diverse world, it is simply critical that we provide them a collegiate environment that enacts and implements diversity as a key component of our Scripps mission rather than only espousing it in verbal and written materials.”

During the BeHeard forum, LBV was asked to provide a definition of leadership in order to clarify how it was Margo Okazawa-Rey and Tamara Hamilton’s own visions for the center were at conflict with the position they had applied for. She refused, saying that it would be up to a new steering committee composed of students, staff, faculty, and alumnae to define leadership.

As we anticipate the selection of the new LASPA director, I encourage students to think critically and dream once again about what leadership means for you individually–what you want to see in that space, what values you want to see reflected, and whether social justice and the dreams and visions of marginalized students could be or should be left by the wayside.

“As members of the Scripps College community, we hold a deep love for our college, the ideals it stands for, and its future potential. Among those ideals is diversity. When we came to Scripps, we were told that, here, we didn’t have to choose between our myriad interests in the arts, sciences, social activism, business, law, technology, or public service. We felt encouraged, then, when the mission statement of the LASPA Center for Leadership reflected values Scripps purports to uphold by emphasizing a wide range of opportunities in a multitude of sectors. The rejection of Margaret Okazawa-Rey symbolized a rejection of a vision of diversity and inclusivity for both the LASPA Center and Scripps College as an institution.”

– Letter to Lori Bettison-Varga and the Board of Trustees

by Scripps Coalition Against More (2014)

Electra Chong

Contributor

Scr ’15