President Michelle Schutt of Greenfield Community College opened her email in February to find a damning report detailing the racial climate on her campus.
The 46-page document came from Re-Center, a consulting firm that was brought to Greenfield last year to diagnose why the Massachusetts institution’s Black and Latino students were graduating at a substantially lower rate than its white students. Faculty members had hoped to hire a vice president to lead diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on the campus, but Schutt first wanted to assess the college’s racial climate, which led to the contract with Re-Center.
When relations with the firm soured, Schutt abruptly terminated the contract in November, and no final report was anticipated.
The consultants’ observations, collected during their less than six months on the campus, nonetheless landed in Schutt’s inbox. The final document described, among other things, an administrator’s use of a racist slur for Black people, and a faculty and staff retreat at which another administrator repeatedly interrupted a Black member of Re-Center’s consulting staff.
The college, the Re-Center report said, was a place where “racialized harm is allowed to continue without being addressed,” fostering a “culture of prioritizing whiteness, white feelings, white fragility, and white incapacity.”
The report laid the bulk of the blame for Greenfield’s racial climate on President Schutt and Provost Chet Jordan, who Re-Center said had failed to hold white administrators accountable.
“An ownership of the direct harm they cause and are causing must be acknowledged and addressed or it will continue to occur,” the consultants wrote.
Schutt disputes many of the report’s findings.
The confrontation between Greenfield Community College and Re-Center underscores the challenge college leaders have when hiring outside consultants to diagnose internal causes of racial disparities. Campus-climate assessments can offer a window into how students and faculty of color are experiencing life at their college. They allow people to raise concerns that often don’t bubble up to the administration. But these assessments can also expose deep divisions on campuses.
“When you ask people about their opinion, they give it to you. If you ask people about sexual assault or race, you can get negative results,” said Jeff Grim, an assistant professor in the higher-education program at George Mason University. “If you want to know what the problem is but you are not ready to see what the problem is, that’s not how the process should work.”
Very few outside of the administration knew about the decision to fire Re-Center, and even fewer people knew of the report until rumors began to trickle out.
The faculty union insisted it had a right to the full document, since it was the faculty that had helped draft the 2019 DEI strategy and demanded the addition of a DEI coordinator. A public-records request was made, which Schutt rejected. She agreed to allow the union president, Trevor Kearns, to review the document through a camera or in person. When Kearns saw the heavily redacted document, his anger intensified over the cancellation of the contract and the refusal to release the report.
After Schutt “didn’t tell us about canceling the contract, and hid the report, we couldn’t trust her to implement the changes that were needed,” Kearns said. “She had essentially lied to us.”
The entire, unredacted report was eventually leaked in the spring, and word quickly spread that Re-Center had been fired the previous fall. Faculty members began to worry that Schutt’s earlier promises to hire a DEI coordinator, diversify the faculty, and confront the graduation-rate disparities would not be fulfilled.
Greenfield’s faculty union voted no confidence in President Schutt and Provost Jordan in June (Jordan’s contract expired on July 1).
“For the college to hire DEI consultants, identify problems with administration, and for the administration to shut it down is not encouraging,” Kearns said.
Schutt didn’t apologize for keeping the report private. In a statement to faculty, staff, and students in June, the president said the report “included information that was shared confidentially and characterized participant comments and questions out of context and in a manner that is not consistent with a process that creates a safe space for learning and growing.” Schutt went on to criticize the content of the report in her June statement, claiming “the DEI consultant offered a document that included incomplete and, in some places, inaccurate information.”
Schutt believed that releasing the report, which in her view contained enough details to identify specific administrators, would not help the college move forward with its plans to hire a vice president for DEI.
Re-Center’s approach, which focused on teaching a mostly white faculty and administration about white privilege and that race was a social construct, was not what Greenfield wanted from the firm or how administrators thought the institution would be best served, Schutt’s administration has maintained. Administrators wanted to learn, but they didn’t want to feel shamed.
“When an outside institution comes in to do an analysis and say how well or not well you are doing DEI, that does not promote growth,” April Parsons, vice president for academic affairs at the college, told The Chronicle. “If I go into training to talk about how I can be better, that is a mentorship relationship where we are promoting each other’s growth.”
Re-Center did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment.
Administrators at the college were torn. The work of trying to examine the campus culture was worthwhile. But the report that Re-Center delivered was so toxic, it had the potential to tear the institution apart.
“These reports are meant to serve faculty, students, board of trustees, and donors. And they cannot do that well for everyone,” Parsons said.
Schutt, who declined to give an interview to The Chronicle, hired a crisis public-relations firm.
“I want to acknowledge that I could have done a better job of communicating with our community earlier and with more details about the discontinuation of the relationship with the DEI consultant and next steps,” Schutt said in her June 10 statement.
Greenfield Community College sits 40 miles north of Springfield in a western Massachusetts county that is more than 90 percent white. In 2019 the college adopted its first diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan, which was developed as the proportion of students of color grew.
From 2013 to 2022, enrollment dropped by more than one-third, to 2,042.
Students of color today account for more than one-quarter of all those enrolled at the college. But success remains elusive for Greenfield’s Black and Latino students. Black students graduate at a rate 15 percent lower than white students, and the rate for Latino students is 13 percent lower than their white counterparts.
The college’s diversity committee set three goals for the institution: supporting student success, diversifying the faculty and staff, and “increasing cultural dexterity,” which included creating two required courses on U.S. and global diversity.
“Together, we will help shape an institution that is ready for 2042 (the year the United States will become a minority-majority nation) and is prepared to lead the region as a model for embracing diverse populations, equitable access to all,” the report states.
The DEI strategic plan proposed attracting more minority students to fill seats that were being left vacant, while also combating the disparity in graduation rates. Critical to that mission, according to those who worked on the 2019 report, was hiring more faculty and staff of color. The strategic plan, which had the support of the administration and the Board of Trustees, called for either the hiring of a DEI officer or placing a current administrator in charge of DEI efforts, and offered a budget of $5,000 to pay for diversity, equity, and inclusion functions. Greenfield didn’t enact any parts of the DEI plan from 2019, according to Kearns, the union president.
The report also suggested changing the college’s hiring policy to match the demographics of the faculty and staff to the shifting demographics of the student body. The report states that the committee — made up of faculty members and some students — recommended the “development of an affirmative action plan.”
The authors of the report recommended the college collect race and gender data for the faculty and staff, assess which departments’ faculty didn’t reflect the diversity of the students enrolled in those programs, and then recruit faculty members to fill those seats. Greenfield would hire more first-time faculty members instead of more “seasoned applicants,” which the faculty believed would open up jobs to a wider number of applicants and increase the chances of attracting minority colleagues. The report recommended the college advance at least one candidate who fit each “department’s definition of diverse” among the three finalists for each position, and finally, the college would establish a relationship with local graduate schools and recruit faculty candidates from those institutions.
Schutt arrived at Greenfield in the fall of 2022, after serving as the vice president for community and learner services at the College of Southern Idaho, a Hispanic-serving institution. Schutt was herself a first-generation student from a working-class family.
Schutt agreed with faculty members and students that the college needed to hire a DEI coordinator but first wanted it to explore where it was falling short on retaining students of color, graduating them on time, and recruiting minority faculty members.
Campus-climate assessments use interviews, listening sessions, and audits of campus policies and practices to measure their impact on students, and how campus culture is affecting certain subsets of students. The firms that conduct assessments work with college leaders on what is going to be measured and how the questions are crafted.
Re-Center began as a camp called Discovery Center that was founded by the actor Paul Newman and his actress-wife, Joanne Woodward. Children with disabilities attended the camp, where they participated in recreational activities with nondisabled peers. When camp organizers noticed the children segregated themselves by race, the center pivoted to racial-climate assessments and hosting anti-racism retreats.
In November 2022, Schutt hired Re-Center on what was to be a two-year contract worth $120,000. The first year, the center would hold listening sessions with the faculty and perform classroom observations. The second year called for a town hall and training for faculty and staff.
“Over all, the feeling was very strong: ‘We are actually moving on this. We are actually making progress.’ It was very promising,” Kearns told The Chronicle. “I believed in the president’s plan. ‘Let’s be prepared to support the person who is going to come in and do DEI work on the campus.’”
Re-Center consultants started regularly making the 64-mile trip north to the campus in April 2023. It was in that same month that consultants observed an art exhibit and theatrical performance hosted by the college on the controversial use of the most common racial slur for Black people. In the exhibit, the word was crossed out but remained legible. In the performance the word was used repeatedly.
A conversation on the performance followed, and members of the mostly white audience repeatedly used the racist word, which students, faculty, and staff all saw. Some reported to Schutt and to the consultant that they were being harmed by its use. When Schutt was told about the conversation, she didn’t offer a full-throated apology but said the college would “explore” its own policies on the use of the word in literature and art, and work to establish “ground rules” for discussion of the topic to avoid harming members of the campus community.
Later in the semester Re-Center consultants met with a white member of Schutt’s cabinet, who was not named in the report or by the college. In that conversation, the white cabinet member, commenting on the art exhibit, repeatedly used the word, noting that “it was in the art show, but it was crossed out, and it was in the play,” according to Re-Center’s account of the incident. The cabinet member “chuckled” and “dismissively” agreed when the consultants suggested that the line through the word suggested it should not be spoken aloud, according to the Re-Center report.
Schutt was told of the incident. But she did not punish the administrator for using the slur. She later apologized for “not appreciating at the time the potential impact” of the exhibit. She said that the cabinet member received training and that his comments were not “used as a slur or directed at any individual.”
In September 2023, Re-Center’s staff members gathered with the president’s cabinet and a handful of faculty members at a retreat. It was a pivotal point in the relationship between the college and the consulting firm. According to those at the retreat, Re-Center shared what it had found in the first few months on campus. Sources who spoke with The Chronicle did so on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of retribution.
As the consultant ticked through the problems with the college, the retreat turned confrontational. One white member of the cabinet kept interrupting and talking over the consultants, according to the Re-Center report and others in attendance. The same cabinet member repeatedly asked about the session’s purpose and goals, and, according to Re-Center, was “intentionally talking past them when talking about the work they were doing and used her arm to wave them away when she got angry.”
At one point, according to sources at the retreat, the cabinet member reportedly said to a white Re-Center consultant: “I think you’re just another white woman telling a white woman that she is being racist.”
Schutt remained mostly quiet. “I did not intervene at the time out of concern for causing more damage by commenting in an area where a sensitive, well-trained approach is required,” she told The Chronicle in an emailed response.
Referring to the heated exchange, Re-Center’s report would later state that Greenfield Community College and its leaders, Schutt and Jordan, were not confronting the cabinet member who used the racial slur and the one who got into a confrontation with the consultants during the retreat.
Within two months, Re-Center’s contract was terminated — before its consultants were able to interview students, hold a town hall, or conduct the training specified in the contract. The firm walked away with $60,000, half the contracted sum.
“While the DEI consultant’s credentials, proposed framework, and intent of their intake work aligned with our objectives, we ultimately determined their consulting model and approach was not the right fit for GCC at this time,” Schutt said in her statement to the campus in June.
Schutt insisted that while the relationship with Re-Center ended abruptly and without the college reaching the goals originally laid out in the contract, she and her cabinet took away valuable lessons from the experience.
“Though the DEI consulting engagement did not play out as anticipated, at every step of the way, GCC has tried to use this experience as a foundation for continued learning and growth in our effort to create an inclusive and equitable environment,” she told The Chronicle in an emailed response.
Schutt shifted her focus to hiring a vice president for DEI. The college is in the middle of a national search, with plans to hire for the role by January. It will be a cabinet-level position. But it will be a single person heading the college’s DEI efforts and reporting directly to the president.
