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Commissioner's report 10-18-06 |
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Contributed by Michael Adeyanju
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Good evening. I hope everyone’s week is going well. Last Friday I met with Jesse Raney, the assistant to the Director for the Office of Institutional Equity. We discussed many things like some of the programs that deal with the retention of freshmen students here at Ohio University. One of the programs we discussed was LINKS which is a multi-cultural program that deals with the creation and retention of under-represented groups of people here at Ohio University. She also was very interested in the Diversity forum and gave me some recommendations on things that we should make sure we do for the forum. She asked to be kept in touch on how the forum goes and the types of things that we learn from it. Yesterday I met with Doctor Christine Taylor who is the Assistant to the President for Diversity. It was an interesting meeting that mainly dealt with us looking at the retention rate and some hurdles that she believed faced the African-American student. She posed some good questions about the retention rate and why specifically we are looking at the retention rate of high performing African-American students. She asked if there was even such data that supported our research and was interested in going over the data that is going to be released in the coming weeks with me at another meeting. She also wanted to know what was one of the main things the Senate was working on this year, and when I told her the idea of budget transparency; I was asked to come back to the senate and pose the idea of what would we do if we saw that money was going somewhere we did not like. What would we put that money to use for? Dr. Taylor posed some good questions that I will be looking into, in the coming weeks and I ask that you do the same on the issue of budget transparency. I met with Will Tarter the Black Affairs Commissioner for Graduate Student Senate, to basically get to know each other and to touch base on the types of things both Graduate Student Senate and Student Senate were working on. It was a productive meeting with ideas being generated on some of the problems here at the university. WE also came up with a list of people who we believe we as the black affairs commissioners should have a working relationship with. We discussed meeting once every two weeks to touch base and to see if one or the other needs help on any activities or initiatives that they might be doing. Last night I had a meeting with Commissioners Heery, Fardy, Wemer, Walker, Robbins and Vice President Crites to discuss the Diversity forum. Although it is in the planning stages it looks like it will be a productive forum that will generate some ideas into what the students see as problems here at the university, and what we can do to help solve those problems. The Multi-cultural Visit Program will be next Thursday in Grover, from 8-10:15. I will be meeting with Commissioner Walker to discuss that types of things we want to do at the program, and then will send out an email to everyone who signed up to help detailing what we want to do. I will also be meeting on Friday with Senate Interns Chauncey, and Gabe to discuss some ideas they have on how to better the university. I will also meet with my intern to touch base and see if there is anything he would like to achieve or any problems he sees around campus that I might be better able to help solve. I hope everyone has a good rest of the week and End of report.
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Black Affairs