President Anne F. Harris addressed the families of Grinnell students during her President’s Welcome.
Hey, Ben. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. It's wonderful to see you all here, my early risers. It's great to see you. My name is Anne Harris. I have the profound honor of serving as the 14th president of Grinnell College, and I'm here in great joy today to spend a little time with you, updating you on what's happening at the College so that you walk away with even more of your finger on the pulse of this marvelous institution knowing that you're spending this incredible time with your students.
I hope some of you were able to hear the Herbie Hancock concert last night. It was in honor of Herbie Hancock, although he was recently in the state of Iowa, our beloved alum who is a jazz, not just a jazz musician, but a jazz innovator and so forth. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. I think we're all good to go because we're also joined via livestream for any parents. Our parents and families are all over the world. So it's my real pleasure to welcome you all and to be in the good company of many student affairs staff members whom I'll introduce as we go along.
The way that my remarks are organized leaves room for questions at the end, and I would love to know what people are curious about. That's the lifeblood of an institution like ours, is curiosity. So please do feel free to think of questions and it can be about the residence hall plan, it can be about the meal plan, it can be about what's philosophy today. We can talk about it all. I'm really excited to do so.
So my warmest good morning to everyone. It's meaningful that we're here in Herrick Chapel. For those of you who are parents of seniors, this is where the baccalaureate ceremony happens is in Herrick Chapel. Families come. Students run that entire ceremony, and it's a very powerful, beautiful time right before the big one, which is commencement. So you will find yourself in these seats again, whether it's four years from now, three years from now, or this very spring.
This is also the site from which I was, I would say put in charge, but I really felt called into the work of telling students that they needed to go home in March of 2020 and not come back after spring break, and that was an incredibly intense time and we are graduating the class that was here as first year students this spring. That's really rather incredible. That's when my son entered ... Well, my son entered college in the fall of 2020. So it's just incredible to think of all the different things that are happening that have happened in this space and how students came into community even through a pandemic.
So I'm going to go ahead and begin with the official part of my remarks, but I wanted to mark the space that we're in and the time that we're in as well and say my warmest greetings to the families who are joining us via livestream from all over the country and all over the world.
So over the last few weeks, I've had the distinct privilege of getting to know your new students and hearing from your returning students about their summer internships, their projects, their travels and their adventures. Some of the lists of accomplishments sound like speeches you'd hear at a retirement party, and I'm not making that up. They just list these incredible things they've done. Your students are amazing. They gain and grow knowledge, confidence, and resolve every year. So I want to first extend my congratulations to you for the young people that you have trusted the world with, trusted Grinnell with.
This is one of my favorite events of the year because meeting our students' families and loved ones deepens my understanding of their ambitions and hopes and dreams. I take great joy in making the connection between their lives before Grinnell, the people they're becoming, and their very bright futures.
Now, as parents and caregivers of college students, we're in a long transition from cheering them on at home to cheering them on from afar. I'm struggling. I know this from firsthand experience as a parent. My husband, Professor Mac McKenzie, and I have three children. Our oldest, Oliver, is at McAllister College. Our middle child, Iris, is at the Ohio State University, and our youngest is starting to look at colleges. So he's a senior. Roman is a senior in high school.
When our children were at home, we learned about their experiences and hopes and dreams during those now precious back then more mundane moments over the dinner table, while stuck in traffic, not so much Grinnell, but while stuck in traffic on the way to practice or lessons or work, as they pass through our kitchens eating everything in sight. Now that they've gone off to college, learning about their daily lives is a very different process. I wanted to pause on that for a minute.
You may feel like you have no idea what's going on in their daily lives or that you know more than you want to. My son recently sent me a picture just with the caption, "Cooked frog legs." That was it. There was nothing about a science class or anything else that was happening. That was it. Is that too much or too little? I'm still thinking that one through. You might text them and get the mysterious Y or N or some emoji that seems random but might actually hold deep meaning for them, hard to know, or your child might FaceTime you to ask you burning questions like, "How many laundry detergent pods do I use?" or, "What's grandma's actual name?"
Now, these are not from my children, I have to say, but there's this TikTok dad out there who collects these wonderful moments and they've been very poignant for me to read. My favorite is actually a college student listing his mom as his emergency contact, and for the line titled Relationship, writing, "Good." I just keep thinking about that one. I just love it. Love that child, love that mom. Those small daily moments of connection and understanding of their daily lives have transitioned now to short births of texts or WhatsApp or long FaceTime sessions. If anyone receives letters from their child, let me know. That's a beautiful thing, a lost art.
Now, my experience as a professor and a college administrator here at Grinnell has taught me that there are many people watching out for your college student, attentive to your college student. Here at Grinnell, our faculty and staff are focused on and dedicated to helping your students succeed, find belonging, and explore new interests, and all three of those are very different things. I will say you'll often see that my first question to you will be, "What's your child's tutorial?" and I'm amazed how often you all know the answer almost all the time. That interlocutor of the faculty member who's teaching tutorial is deeply, deeply involved in your lives, and I think that's marvelous.
So from our incredibly accomplished faculty to the staff of student health and wellness, for example, to our amazing academic advising team, to the Centers for Career, Life and Service, and if these are all familiar names, great, and if they're not, we're going to keep repeating them until you're familiar in those spaces too. That's important to me. Your student can find someone to help. You can too.
I'm going to say this, college is hard and Grinnell is not perfect. That world around us, the world within us is ever-changing and connecting students to support and advocacy, those are the two real emphasis that we work on in student affairs, supporting students and advocating for them and teaching them self-advocacy as well. That takes time, but it's a life skill to know how to connect and to collaborate.
By coming to Grinnell, your child has joined a community of inquiry, and I want to pause on that concept for a minute. It's a powerful conceptualization of learning articulated by the education philosopher, John Dewey, who's very important in my thinking. It argues that educational experience thrives at the intersection of social experience, cognitive experience, and teaching experience. So usually, community of inquiry has the visualization, has a Venn diagram that's got educational experience in the heart, acknowledges social experience, cognitive experience, and teaching experience.
Our students teach themselves; they teach others. Of course, they are being taught, but that's not a passive situation. I've been very fascinated by the agency that students gain when they teach as well. It's why we have so many good mentoring programs at Grinnell too.
So within this conceptualization, Grinnell is a place where we seek to build and maintain trust and create an environment where students have the advocacy and resolve to be capable of great things. That's why that educational experience is so key. We do have great challenges, we all know this, on multiple scales to take on.
Back to John Dewey, who also famously said, and my dear colleagues hear quote me this I think once a week, "Democracy must be reborn with each generation and education is its midwife." He said that in 1916, and it is profoundly motivating and true. For some of our students who come to Grinnell from outside the United States, they're seeing democracy in a new light. I could editorialize and say we're all seeing democracy in a new light these days. So others might not have thought about it much, but either way, in the words of political philosopher, Danielle Allen, I can't recommend her brand new book, Justice Through Democracy, enough, "Democracy depends on trustful talk between strangers." That's what these weekends are all about. I hope you have trustful talk between you. I certainly hope you have it with me and the incredible team that I have the honor of serving with. Grinnell College depends on trustful talk between strangers.
This is my invitation to you on behalf of the faculty, staff, administration, and alumni of Grinnell for us to learn together in this community of inquiry. Now, democracy and education both call on us all to be simultaneously constituents of democracy of Grinnell and caretakers of democracy of Grinnell. Both need our continuous care so that they can continue to thrive. Both benefit from our participation and our critique. This is why I'm always open to questions.
This dynamic to me is what it means to be a Grinnellian, constituent and caretaker both. Throughout its history, Grinnell has examined and reexamined its values and goals, and we're very close to embarking on a new strategic plan on the next chapter of the College's history. Now, inherent in this plan is the idea that the College with each new class is able to shape a future that doesn't look, shouldn't look exactly like today or last year or 10 or 15 or 50 years ago.
At Grinnell, we're able to remake our community each year as we welcome a new class. We continue to welcome exceptional students, and I want you to have a sense of whom your students are with from across the nation and across the globe. So here's ... and to the gentleman wearing the best T-shirt of all, Grinnell, conveniently located between New York and LA. Last year, I was partnered with a student from Uzbekistan during a volunteer event. Of course, I always ask, "What's your road to Grinnell?" I love our students. I think they're courageous from the word go because we are not on the obvious path. We are off the beaten path. I asked him why he came to Grinnell and he said, "Well, I want to meet people from all over the world." I quietly said, "Well, you could go to New York," but he replied again just total earnestness. He said, "Sure, sure, but here, we're all together right here," and I take his point.
In every classroom, you will have students from all over the country and all over the world. Think about that community of inquiry. In every residence hall, in every occasion, not a utopia, but a gathering place. That's how I think of Grinnell here in the middle of Iowa. So now we do say without irony, we're in the middle of everywhere. That student from Uzbekistan is inspiring. He's on the team that produces our very own Grinnellian fashion magazine called Gogue, and yes, that's Grinnell's own Vogue. It's dedicated to fashion and identity and it is just brilliant. If you see a copy, scoop it up.
So to let you know a little bit more about what's happening at the College via our student presence, we have just over 1700 students registered this fall, including 457 first year students. We received a record 13,335 applications for 450 places in the first year class. So hug your child extra hard the next time you see them. That's one of the most selective admissions rates in the country. I will say we're not proud so much of, "Oh, look how low our admit rate is." To me, it's the interest in the College. It's the 13,000 applications that come, again, from all over the world.
So it's not only that your student is here that's fantastic, it's how they're here within their identities and their energies. So I want to give some shape to this. This year's entering class, and we always do this, and this is in one class, 457 students, they come from 40 states and 34 countries. Actually, it's 467, and among the 467 of them, they speak 49 languages. That matters a lot to me. I grew up in Switzerland, English is my second language. We moved when I was nine, and the idea of moving in multilingual spaces and, again, Grinnell, Iowa, 49 languages speaking in the first, spoken, spoken in the first year class.
So overall, let's pull back now to all four classes, at the College, students come from 48 states and the District of Columbia, and I know one of our missing states is West Virginia and I'm working on the other one. They come from 67 countries, and among them, among all the students at Grinnell right now, they speak 64 languages. So please think of that multilingual. Not everybody's speaking them all the time, although it is beautiful to walk across campus and to hear all the different languages that are spoken. Global Grinnell is for real. Global Grinnell is here, and this is why we say without a trace of irony that we're in the middle of everywhere, and there are times at 4:00 on Friday afternoons, there's a middle of everywhere program, and I've learned about Taiwanese tea ceremony, I've talked about Switzerland. Yes, I talked about cheese. It was great. It was just wonderful. I also talked about direct democracy, which is the best training for a small liberal arts college, by the way. Everybody votes on everything.
So it's really powerful to think. A very precise number for you all, 20% of our students come from outside the US representing more than 40 countries, including Brazil, Bulgaria, India, China, and Bangladesh. 10% of those students hold dual citizenship. Nearly one-third of our students self-identify as students of color or as being from two or more racial backgrounds. So every class does this, but I think it is important to see, again, with whom are your students in community, in this community of inquiry? 68% of students engaged in community service. That lets you know the kind of knowledge into action, the kind of community engagement that our students already come with, let alone develop.
64% participated in fine, creative or performing arts. 62% were involved in sports during their high school years, and there is a football game this afternoon, and I will be wearing a different outfit. A remarkable 61% participated in work internships or other career related activities. We're seeing this much more and more now with high school students already participating in work culture, teaching us about work culture, and 27% have participated in student government politics or social justice activities. Again, giving you a sense of what's in the air even before they come to continue to shape this institution.
So this is a community to be proud of. I hope you are ... I know you're proud of your child. I hope you're proud of all the students that are here, that have made their way to Grinnell. I do think a lot of the metaphor of a kaleidoscope because what I love so much about education, it's never the same thing twice. Within all this community, this kaleidoscopic community, we do seek to create a sense of belonging, and I'll be talking more about that later.
So before I turn to where Grinnell is going in the future, I have a couple of other quick updates. So first, I'm very welcome to please ... I'm very pleased to welcome, goodness, JC Lopez to Grinnell, and I paused on that because I thought I saw you in the back. There you are, JC. Terrific, terrific. So he's here as the Interim Vice President for Student Affairs. We are in a period of big transition and I'm so grateful to him for his experience across the various functions of student affairs and his welcome addition to the senior leadership team.
I also know that Ben Newhouse is here, Dean of Students and Associate Vice President. Michael Sims, also in the background. Ben, JC, and Michael, are there other student affairs folks here today? Hey, Maure Smith-Benanti in the way back. Excellent. Ashley Adams is here as well. I see a lot of waving hands. I see Nancy and maybe MJ as well. So MJ, so much of the orchestration of what you're seeing comes from this incredible team. So I'm really glad that they're in this space and please feel free to talk to them as well as they're here.
Now, we're undertaking a national search for a permanent vice president of student affairs. It's been a very long time since there's been a national search for this position. So I say to you, we'll be sending out updates and so forth, but if you want to think with us on this, we welcome nominations. You can send them to president@grinnell.edu or to WittKieffer, which is the search firm that we're using, W-I-T-T-K-I-E-F-F-E-R. WittKieffer is the search firm, and I think this is a very exciting time. They were just on campus and I think student affairs post-pandemic is an entirely different sector. I think we've got the professionals in the room that can speak to that than it was before. So this search is very, very important.
So you may also have heard about the national rankings that just came out. Wanted to touch on that, of course. Here at Grinnell, we ask a lot of hard questions about rankings. We question the easy answers as we say. That includes lots of questions about methodologies and that's where the controversies of these rankings are, so how they're constructed, who's surveyed, what incomes do the rankings care about, and there's so many now.
So we know that some of them are important to our constituents. We know that many of the metrics measure things that are important to us, like academic quality, like graduation rates, like social mobility. This is so much the dedication that Grinnell has in its financial aid access and in its first generation limited income investments as well in students.
So in the most recent US News and World Report ranking, probably the most popular one, Grinnell was ranked number 11 in the country along with Barnard, Claremont McKenna, Middlebury College, and Wesleyan University. Everybody has mixed feelings about rankings. If I can be proud of this institution, I will be. That is not the only marker of pride that we have, but you can be proud that we're here at the 11th, ranked 11th in the nation. Now, Wall Street Journal had another one. What's the other one? Washington Post has another one. There are lots of them out there. If I were to go through them, that's all we would talk about this morning. I'm going to talk about the ones, again, that mattered to us, and what do we learn?
What we're learning is how we're seen, how we're perceived. We know who we are, but this is also an important thing. So we'll continue to pursue outcomes that support Grinnell's mission. I want to pause on the social mobility score within the US News and World Report where we are now number 31, having jumped 70 spots. So there's something going on there against a big, big change in the methodology. The difference there is our no loan initiative. That's why I think we've jumped in the past couple of years. That, of course, makes it possible to graduate debt-free from Grinnell. That's a big intragenerational uplift and it's our commitment to financial aid to meeting all demonstrated need. We did not fare so well in the Wall Street Journal in terms of social mobility, but there are many ways to look at social mobility. Wall Street Journal looks at salary five years out. Many of our students are in graduate school at that point, so I completely understand why we didn't.
Sometimes a low ranking is a point of pride. Our students are doing something else. So if you've got more curiosity about that, we can ... but just, again, feeling that little bit of pride is ... Oh, it's okay to feel pride in the Midwest. I'm learning that. I want it to be okay. Sorry.
So here's our mission statement. I think it's always good to hold that among us as well, to graduate individuals who can think clearly, who can speak and write persuasively and even eloquently, who can evaluate critically both their own and others' ideas, who can acquire new knowledge, and who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the common good. That is our mission statement.
What does that look like today? What does that mean today? That stood us in good stead for many, many years. So I've presented a vision that speaks to what it means to serve the common good today. I really gave some time, what is the common good, what do we need, what does this world need. That is for the College to be an agent of civic trust, moving knowledge into action for a more just and equitable society. I spent a lot of time thinking about trust.
We are now articulating that vision through our strategic plan within a framework of collective impact. Collective impact is really interesting. It's used by a lot of nonprofit organizations, a lot of different NGOs that come together to move something and to achieve social change from many different places. Collective impact relies on shared information, shared understanding, and shared goals, and this is some of what we're doing today and a lasting realization that change doesn't happen in isolation, it happens in an ever-changing ecosystem.
So within that framework and throughout research, deliberation, and collaboration, we turned to the experts of our Grinnell ecosystem. That's our students, our faculty staff, trustees, alumni, the parent and family advisory council, actually parents last year and many others. We had dozens of town halls, individual interviews, feedback sessions, meetings, departmental brainstorms, and Grinnellians shared both their experiences and their ambitions and ultimately brought forward over 763 ideas for how the College can deepen those experiences to equip all constituents, centrally students, with the skills, resources, and partnerships to move knowledge into action for positive change.
So I want to be clear here. We have this long mission of common good. We were founded by abolitionist congregationalists, people who thought about the world differently and had the courage to live out those convictions. We know that everything we do, whether it's from the science classroom, whether it's in the ... I was going to say poetry lab, the writing classroom, whether it's in the art, we know that our students' knowledge moves out into the world. How do we equip them for that knowledge to have impact? That's really the drive behind this strategic plan.
So we've arrived at it. Guess what? The title is right in there, Knowledge into Action. That's the name of the strategic plan. That's what will guide our decisions over the next seven years. There's a dual meaning here, which is that we are moving our knowledge of Grinnell into actions that reflect our striving to always be better as a community, to increase belonging, to close demographic gaps, to increase access. You'll never find complacency here. I certainly have not. Knowledge is aspirational, and you'll see things here that are deeply aspirational, but it's also operational with all kinds of actions that push us towards those aspirations.
So in other words, if we want to dedicate our education to teaching students how to move knowledge into action in the world, we have to be able to do it here at Grinnell. I love that the strategic plan is a test of its own self. We want to meet people where they are and we want to move those aspirations into reality.
So this is ... I'm going to go through the four parts of the plan really quickly with you and then we'll wrap up and see if there's time ... That cannot be the time. See if there's time for questions because that's, again, the joy of us being in community here. So if you want to think of the one phrase that captures the entire plan, Knowledge Into Action is a strategic plan that strengthens collaboration and discovery for positive change in the institution and the world it shapes.
So here, we are always in these spaces where we discover new things. Now, sometimes we have students, graduates, alumni that change the world. You've got Bob Noyce, a graduate of Grinnell High School and Grinnell College who invented the Intel processor. That has absolutely changed our lives, I know a huge, huge way, a computer scientist who transformed millions of lives and who really honestly did say, "Don't overinvest in this intel thing. I don't know if it's going to take off." That's actually part of Grinnell lore.
You also have alumni like Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith in whose honor Renfrow Hall, which you're watching emerge downtown, downtown, is named. She is the first Black alumna of Grinnell College. She graduated in 1937 and she just celebrated her 109th birthday this summer in Chicago. We are building it as fast as we can, and that's what she told me, "Build faster." She's amazing. She is amazing. So we live in the legacy of her commitment to civic engagement and education that she practiced for over 80 years in Chicago. I do want our students to live more in the legacy of our alumni, to see their sense of belonging over time as well as place. It's all in the strategic plan.
So here are these four themes. The first is catalyst for educational excellence. No surprise there, but catalyst, not just that we're excellent, but that we know how to capture support and advocate for new ideas, greater engagement with meaningful intellectual and developmental experiences through teaching and learning that equips individuals for positive change. The big change, the big thing that this means for your student is that we will be working for your student to have coordinated curricular and co-curricular engagement with experiential and applied learning, with global study, with mentored advanced research or mentored research and/or internships.
So basically right now, these are all available. They're brought together through advising, but we want to coordinate more and we want to close the demographic gaps of access. We want to be sure that every student has these experiences, if not all of them, the ones that they want for their coordinated approach of curricular work and co-curricular work. We have such rich co-curriculum here, so rich that I wish we had another word for it, but experiential learning, the one where you're out in the world with it and global study is phenomenal. Talk to your child about doing some programming out of the institute for global engagement, and there's a whole lot of financial help for that as well.
The second one is belonging and connection. So I will say when we're out here in the beautiful prairie, many times that can be liberating, but we also found out during the pandemic it can be deeply isolating. So I've taken that very much to heart. We're looking for those authentic and lasting connections with Grinnell, town, college and with each other in spaces and experiences that facilitate intellectual, experiential, and social communities.
So the emphasis here on the word spaces is our own focus on residential experience, on residential life. So there is a plan that will culminate in 2031, too late for your dear students to, of course, have air conditioning in all of the residence halls, but also more of these communal spaces, more of these spaces where they can be together. In the meantime, there are plans, and I'm happy to talk about them as well.
So we want to also increase our graduation rate. I think we lag behind our peers in that one. We know from our research, our students, if they do leave, it isn't because of grades, it is not because of finances, it is mostly belonging and mental health. Now, not everybody's different and different things can aggravate mental health, but belonging is a real strategic emphasis for this college.
The third theme is collective equity, and here we can see the gears starting to move together, more equitable thriving. It's not just creating access for students to come here. It's not about, again, it's not a utopia, it's a gathering place, but how are we pushing ourselves? How is the College making changes that foster the thriving and success of individuals of BIPOC, Black, indigenous people of color, FGLI, first generation limited income, LGBTQIA, which has become its own word now, but, of course, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and, of course, asexual, and plus, seeking, also, students of religious and disability identities. How are we not seeking assimilation into some unexamined norm, but in fact changing whether it's our academic calendar, the way we do dining, all sorts of things. There's real potential here to create ... You see belonging and connection and collective equity are indeed connected.
So Dean Montgomery has said — and Dean Beronda Montgomery, the incredible dean of the College here — has talked about changing cultures and structures that many of us benefit from in the pursuit of equity as not easy but as necessary. So we want to examine a whole lot of norms.
Then the last one is shared goals and common ground. This is for Grinnell to become better known as a trusted partner and a destination for coalition building through living, learning, and working across difference in community and for the common good. Now, here, Renfrow Hall will have a role to play, as well our powerful tradition of community engagement and applied learning. In the southeast part of Renfrow Hall is an entire space dedicated to civic innovation, to doing exactly this work of building shared goals, to building common ground. We all know that is how true change happens, and then to develop Grinnell College's voice in our multiracial and multicultural democracy itself within its global setting.
So when every Grinnellian has a seat at the table and a place to belong, we'll know that we've succeeded, and we have metrics too, by the way. We'll talk about those another year, but when we have more stories like that of our trustee alum, Ham Serunjogi, class of 2016, the co-founder of Chipper Cash, and I invite you to look up Chipper Cash, that enables low cost financial transactions across many African nations. Stories like Ham's need to inspire us to keep pushing, and he was selected by the students to be the commencement speaker in May of this year.
So he grew up in Uganda. He attended secondary school in Kenya. He came to Grinnell through a very long path. He was just appointed to serve as an inaugural member of President Biden's Advisory Council on African diaspora engagement in the US, one of only 12 in this country. So this is what I mean about fostering that, not just turning around and saying, "Oh, what a happy accident," but how do we keep fostering this incredible energy that our students bring when they come here, that your students bring when they come here. We want every Grinnellian to take what they have learned here and truly use it to change the world.
The deep faith that I have in our students is the fervent hope that I hold for our world. I am honored, and I say this on behalf of all the faculty and staff of Grinnell, to walk with your students, to learn with and from them, to cherish and cheer them on maybe even this afternoon, and I can't wait to see what we can do. Thank you so much.
I'm very happy to take questions, truly, existential or operational. I have a mic, but I should not have a mic. I see lots of great hands, but I'll come down. How about that?
Sean Horn:
Good morning, Anne.
Anne Harris:
Good morning.
Sean Horn:
My name Sean Horn. I'm a parent of [inaudible 00:33:30] Henry Horn. Along with a couple other parents, we were in a political science class yesterday. We heard a great presentation by an alumnus named Austin Frerick, who's written a book about farming and about government policies, antitrust laws, and consumption that has basically driven out family farms, especially in Iowa. Part of the conversation was about what schools can do. When you talk about common good and [inaudible 00:33:59] if we were to look at Grinnell's own practices, food sourcing, are you buying food from local farmers or Sysco? That's S-Y-S-C-O, not C-I-S-C-O. We were looking at the schedule of investments in the endowment. Are you following ESG guidelines? Are you buying tobacco stocks or fossil fuels? So in terms of how this college is behaving, you talk about common good and positive change, what have you changed about what the school is doing along those lines?
Anne Harris:
Oh, that's terrific. That's really, really great. So the first thing I would say is strategic plan theme four, objective three speaks exactly to that, and this is how I want to live in that strategic plan. So I don't know, Myrna, if you've got a copy of it because I do want to quote from it. I haven't gotten that part memorized yet, but shared goals and common ground has a land stewardship element to it that involves everything from the College's institutional and historical relationship with the Meskwaki Nation, which is 20 minutes away in Tama to, the list is long, how we live our campus. So when it comes to food, we don't participate or we don't use a food provider like Bon Appetit or Cisco or any of the other systems. So it's very local. It's completely local. It's Chef Scott Turley and his team. There is a Grinnell farm, and they're also connections with Grinnell farmers, but this goes deeper than that.
In our endowment, we do indeed follow ESG guidelines, and I'm happy to say we're going to do much more discussion of the endowment with the community because, well, there was already, about seven years ago, a big fossil fuel conversation, and you can look up Grinnell College fossil fuel, you'll see that whole conversation lined up there. So I would say on this one, and there are many things where we haven't even gotten started, on this one I would say we've gotten started, but it's mostly due to individual efforts when it comes to things like food and land.
I will say, hold on, institutionally, I should say, I should absolutely give credit to the HSSC, which is a geothermally heated, and cooled building, and when you see the scale of the humanities and social studies complex, that is an achievement. The south central energy plant that we're building to connect Renfrow Hall also has some very, very good environmental, and then we can enter into the whole controversy about LEED certified and not LEED certified and so forth, but that environmental stewardship piece is there. So I think I would say on that one, great individual efforts, some institutional moments, but we can do more concerted efforts. That's a great question. I'm so glad you were in the class.
Yes. Hello.
Speaker 3:
Hi. So as a mother of a Black student on campus, I want to ask, a year ago, unfortunately, we were sitting here a couple of weeks after there was a racially driven crime on campus, and at that time, students, it turned out that many non-White students on campus started sharing their negative experiences over the years that the administration seemed very surprised about. I heard a lot about plans and discussions and things that were going to happen, but I'm wondering if you can share a couple concrete examples of things that are different now that should make myself as a parent feel more comfortable with my student continuing to be at this college.
Anne Harris:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
Anne Harris:
So two concrete pathways. One is security, the other is solidarity. So on security, we now have cameras on all of our public streets on the campus. This was something that was missing last year. We were not able to hold individuals yelling racial slurs out of cars accountable, nor were we able to capture the perpetrators of the racist vandalism that occurred in our parking lot. So there are now cameras on 10th, on 8th, and those are big wide public streets that we have lots and lots of traffic through. We also have ... I would say it was already there, but we have a deepened relationship with the police department. Now, that's always a complex issue because that can tip over into actually creating less of a sense of security depending on the historical relationship with a police force, but what that's translated into is trusted mediators.
So the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is an office, this is something that I created. I'm starting my fourth year as president. I created that almost right away just to have more visibility and consolidation, more partnerships and more staff, frankly. So trusted mediators are helping with that security and accountability piece, and we've had some case studies already this fall of students just feeling like they could reach out and say, "You know what? Not feeling good about walking down this street. How about some support?" or saying, "I've heard about this," and then we get to the bottom of it.
So this year, that's on the security piece, better lighting as well. So these are practical things that are now fully in place and fully operational. Quick point, we have an amnesty policy that we worked at with students, meaning that those cameras are not used for surveillance. They are only used when there's a reported incident. That's important within Grinnell culture, well, frankly, within all culture.
Then on the other aspect of this work, solidarity, there are now a series of community dialogues that have been happening. We are making inroads in the high school. We think that this is part of the ... Maybe it's socioeconomic resentment that's of the College, which then through racism, visited upon certain students. So making connections with the high school has been very important, but the community dialogues, Ryan Solomon out of the Office of Service and Social Innovation is doing those steadily. I think it's every two weeks throughout the community. We had a big one, December 5th, and we did come out with a plan. We worked with Joshua Barr in Des Moines.
So there are all sorts of basically mutual accountabilities that we're setting up so that ... I'm going to be honest, this country has an incredibly complex and unaddressed history with its racism, so the chances of this happening are probable. How we respond and what we have in place to respond, such as community dialogues, such as accountability measures, and so far and this year, and a whole lot was done. My understanding is that there were interventions at the high school. They were not led by the College, but they were led by the partners that we had. The mayor has been very responsive. The police chief has been responsive more on the accountability piece than the community dialogue piece. We have a new school superintendent that we're working with, and I have to sit down with him, but those are the two things, very concrete.
The other thing too is to bolster those spaces of affinity, belonging, and just being in community. So if you see the BCC ... Now, again, that's not a preventative measure. That's part of that what does it mean to be a Black student at Grinnell, and we're asking the same questions about Latin A students and other student of color experiences, but Sawubona House is a house designed for ... It's a living learning community about African descent and African diaspora. So there's a living and learning community, and then the BCC, the Black Cultural Center is also a fully now renovated space.
Some of these are quotidian things. There's now a hair salon, and then also there's a treasured libraries, so there's living in legacy as well. That's beyond the scope of your question, but those are concrete things that we've done for accountability, security, and for solidarity, and not letting people think, "Oh, if there's not a problem, there's not racism to address." The community dialogues really keep the conversation going. I'm happy to talk to you further as well, absolutely. Well, actually, many of us are, Mark Reed and others, [inaudible 00:42:16] I see somebody up front. Oh, hi. There it is. Terrific.
Speaker 4:
You mentioned that-
Anne Harris:
I don't think that mic is working. I'm so sorry. No, I think it's-
Speaker 4:
You mentioned that one of [inaudible 00:42:50] to increase graduating rate, and the second question, what percentage of the graduating class-
Anne Harris:
Okay. Terrific. Yes. So we lag about 10 percentage points behind our peers. So our peers are everybody you can imagine in that list of 11th and up and so forth. So we are about 83% to 85% graduation rate on average. Now, I want to be clear with you, the pandemic has thrown those numbers way off because we had students who took ... That's the four-year graduation rate. That's the one I hold myself to. By the time you get to six year graduation rate, we're in the 90% along with all our peers, but I really want to push us because to me, and sometimes there are really good reasons, this is why it would never be 100%. There are really good reasons to step away for a year or two, but we're at around 83% to 85% on average. We're much lower with the pandemic, but that's because we had students take a year away or take a semester away, and then they ended up graduating a year later, sometimes two years later.
So my goal is to raise us up into ... It'll take a while because we really have to address the belonging question. I think, again, that's what our research is telling us or the reasons that students are leaving. We have excellent, excellent persistence rates. That's from the first to the second year. We're in the mid 90s there. We lead there. It's between second and third year. That's when we're losing students. So we have done ... This is back to your excellent point. We've done a whole lot of research. We need to make those now tactical changes. This is why we're looking at advising. We think that in between year when you're no longer a new first year student, nor do you yet have your intellectual community of your major or majors or major and concentration, we're losing students. Students are losing their sense of purpose here, of being seen and so forth.
So there's been some programming for second year, but it's really at the beginning of the second year. So how do we stretch it out over time? How do we keep those? Again, that's for that, but I care deeply about that 15% of our students. Again, it'll never be 100%. Sometimes you don't have a pilot program. No, we don't. That is very true. We have good physics though, and that has worked out too, so I appreciate digging a little bit into your question.
Secondly then, in terms of students who go on to graduate work, so there's different kinds of graduate work, but in terms of getting a secondary degree, it's over 50%. Then we've got a lot of students who are on Fulbrights or Rhodes or other kinds of scholarships. We also have students who continue in internships or who want to go directly into some workforce or who work with an NGO, but between graduate schools that earn a PhD, medical schools, law, we have a lot of students who go into law schools as well. What I would invite you to do if you want to learn more is to go to the career life and service website. CLS Grinnell should get you there, and you'll see our career communities, and I love this because you can be any major at Grinnell but belong to a career. You can be an art historian like I was and belong to let's say a law and government policy, career community or you can be a biology major and belong to the business community. They have a lot of data there. If you want to find out more about how many of our students go to graduate school, how many of them go for MBAs, how many of them go into philosophy, PhDs, and so forth. I love the question. CLS Grinnell. Yes.
Speaker 5:
Just at a really high level, can you talk about the arc of a student experience from coming in as a freshman and baccalaureate four years later? Just what do you see that we might not see as a freshman parent?
Anne Harris:
What a beautiful question, that you might not see. You'll recognize it in your student. The one word that leaps into my head is agency. We see our students develop agency. How do they develop agency? In two ways, and I'm thinking about the Grinnell experience. They're going to be doing a lot of discernment, choosing classes, choosing majors, making those kinds of commitments, deciding, "This is how I want to use my resources. This is how I want to use my scholarship. I want to go off campus. I want to do an internship. I want to do all these different things." So they assert their agency, they affirm their agency. There's a lot of discernment that they have to do.
Then experiences. I will say our classrooms are vibrant spaces. I'm so glad you were able to sit in a poli-sci class, but those small classrooms, they are deeply experiential. Our global Grinnell, everything about studying off campus, students come back from just that. It can be the two weeks over spring break. We have course embedded travel is what we call it. Those are spring semester classes where spring break, which is a two-week spring break at Grinnell is spent off campus as part of the study and then you come back. Of course, we have off-campus study as well, but we found our students do so much. They want so much flexibility in their global experiences.
So increased agency. It's an agency arc, and I'm going to cite discernment and experiences as the things that make it happen. So maybe I would invite you to pay close attention to those moments of decision making and those moments of those transformative experiences like travel, like internship, like that particular class they're always talking about. I think that's where you're going to see the transformation on the arc. It's a beautiful question.
Maybe one more question. There's places to be and, yes, I see one more and then we'll be done, but we'll see each other again.
Speaker 6:
[inaudible 00:48:57]
Anne Harris:
That's really powerful. So the SCOTUS decision, Supreme Court of the United States decision on affirmative action, reversing 50 years, 50 years of commitment to equitable access and the key point, equitable access. I think now they've gotten us to equal access and we know that there are not equal experiences in the United States. So had to always make my comment about that.
So the things we've done very ... I'm trying to be brief. So coordinating. So let me put it this way. Of course, there's greater scrutiny on admissions, on what gets weighed in any admission decision. We can no longer weigh race as a factor in admissions. Recruiting is wide open. So we've put a lot of energies in partner programs. So we just had dinner last night with a college board, which works out of Birmingham, Alabama, an incredible organization. So we've got a lot of partner organization. I will tell you we're working with some that are based in particular areas because students coming in cohorts also increases a sense of belonging. So working through those partner organizations is key.
Second, what our marvelous trustee and alum, Graciela Guzman, called people power. So our alumni are awake to this very, very much so and reaching out themselves and saying, "This is one of the places you should look at," because here's the thing. At this point, some of this is just what I'm going to call terrible mathematics. There are simply more White students than there are students of color in the United States, and if we're blind to that, everybody's highly qualified, but just the numbers are, there's always going to be more White applicants. So increasing, changing the odds, increasing the number of applicants in our pool, applicants of color, in our pool, will increase not just the odds, but will increase the presence of students of color, but that's real concerted work. So there's a lot of, again, partner organizations, alumni.
Then the other thing, of course, is to maintain equitable access financially. So Grinnell meeting 100% of demonstrated need. We do not gap any families. Grinnell doing a no loan initiative. It's our policy now. We don't package ... You know this better than anyone. We don't package loans in financial aid at all. There's still a student work contribution. Then the last piece, of course, is need blind, and that's the one where we need to see, we need to understand how need blind and other, anything that's blind, is going to affect how we're able to see students coming into the institution.
So I would say our financial aid policies is the third part of the strategy, but literally all year, we'll spend about this. ASFAC is what we call the committee for the Admission and Student Financial Aid Committee and the work continues, lots of consultation with legal counsel and so forth, but those are some concrete ways that we're responding. QuestBridge is another partner organization that we work with and so forth.
So I love your questions. They are critical and wonderful and thought-provoking, and it's an honor to be with you here today. I wish you a marvelous time. Do hug your student. They're just terrific. They're just wonderful. Thanks so much.
