This is the third in a series of stories detailing actions CALS students, faculty and staff have taken over the past year to make our community a more diverse, equitable and inclusive place for everyone.
Because Cornell AgriTech is an agricultural experiment station, everyone at AgriTech works with the public, underscoring the need for Cornell to serve as a leader in inclusivity not just on campus but everywhere, said Anna Katharine Mansfield, associate professor of food science and associate director of Cornell AgriTech.
In the past two years, almost every CALS department and unit has established or reinvigorated committees focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, including AgriTech, which launched its first-ever DEI committee in October 2020; the committee transitioned into a more formal DEI council in 2021.
“We need to be open and humble in understanding what our cultural norms are now, because if we don’t become aware of the invisible work that we’re making people do just to become part of our community, we’re not going to retain people,” said Mansfield, who co-chairs the DEI council. “I like to frame our DEI efforts in terms of accessibility, and that really ties into our mission as a land-grant institution, as extension folks and as Cornell, with its founding mission to provide any study for any person.”
The first task undertaken by AgriTech’s DEI committee was creating and administering an anonymous climate survey to assess whether members of the AgriTech community were experiencing discrimination, whether they felt comfortable and welcome, and if they knew how to report incidents of bias. The survey found that the majority of respondents felt comfortable and welcome, but when the data was disaggregated by race and gender, female respondents and people of color felt less satisfied than their white male counterparts, Mansfield said.
The survey also found that more than 50% of students didn’t feel comfortable reporting bias or didn’t know how to report, said Jess Choi, a doctoral candidate in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section and a former member of the DEI committee. Helping students understand that discrimination is unacceptable at Cornell and helping faculty and staff learn how to support inclusive environments drove Choi to participate in the DEI committee; she wanted to spare other students from the kinds of discriminatory incidents she has faced as a Korean-American.
During her freshman year at another institution, Choi was assigned to a group project when a classmate announced he would not work with her because she’s Asian. The instructor made no comment about the racial discrimination and simply reassigned groups.
“That was definitely the hardest part, that the instructor didn’t say anything or stand up for me in any way,” she said. “I wish that the instructor would have stated, explicitly, in the next class session, ‘Racism is not acceptable in my classroom.’”