2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Earnest Hemingway described the phrase ‘ver llegar’ in Death in the Afternoon: “the ability to watch the bull come as he charges with no thought except to calmly see what he is doing and make the moves necessary to the maneuver you have in mind.”

I wish all attendees were empowered to determine how to stand your ground and chose how to adjust your efforts to serve students and faculty in the face of a level of “back lash” not seen for decades and even laws prohibiting your offices and programs. We have survived the backlashes, legal rulings, or changing college and university leadership priorities before. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In this paper we will present ideas for reframing and renewing approaches to ensure progress and survival of the move toward justice and anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-genderism and more. In other words, the goal is to focus on, using the somewhat deficient analogy of a pipeline, “changing the pipe while we save the water in the pipe,”

In order to do this you must develop your adaptive strategic thinking, and you must understand the psychology behind the resistance, or out right opposition, to your efforts. You have to combine the art and discipline of planning, marketing, and change management. To do this we suggest your strategies focus on the nuances of motives and allies to be honed from different constituents (such as, students, staff, faculty, administrators, alumni, recruiters, donors) and the intensity and justifications for opposition (such as, cognitive misunderstanding, belief in a thereat to values or principles, emotional ties to an ideology, deeper threats to identity).

Even if you are not under attack, or have a great protector, you have to get various forms of data and other artifacts in appropriate formats. This includes creating appropriate published and on-line information describing your activities, data and publications that support the approaches being used, and your results to date. As important as these artifacts are, they will not suffice. All these artifacts can do is create enough authenticity for some people to listen. To be really prepared you and your allies from various constituencies must predict the challenges to your efforts and create the narratives that will touch how those audiences can be made to feel that your efforts are not only worth it for your participants, but actually make them feel better.

Misalignment of your approaches with the challenges are not just ineffective they can deepen resistance to your efforts. For example, if the challenge is from the administration about funding of your efforts, then providing data that the participants really liked and felt good about the program may not help. On the other hand, relating the feelings of the participants to retention of tuition paying students, or how donors have been motivated to give to the program may be more useful.