Dear Members of the Bates Community,

I write to thank you for your very helpful engagement throughout this spring’s search for Bates’ next Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, and I appreciate those of you who took time to meet with candidates in small group settings or open sessions. Your investment and feedback were enormously helpful to the process. I now want to provide an update on where we have landed for the time being.

Our search committee considered a promising pool of candidates from which we chose three finalists for campus visits—two in person, one via Zoom. Ultimately and disappointingly, however, we did not make a hire out of this round of searching. 

Our plan is to continue to work with our search consultants over the summer to build a new pool of candidates, and to resume the search promptly at the beginning of the academic year. In the coming weeks, we will also be providing an update on the results of our year-long process of outreach and consultation on the work of equity and inclusion at Bates.

I want to thank all the members of the VPEI Search Committee for their dedicated and very thoughtful work over the past several months, with special thanks to Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Marcelle Medford and Director of Alumni and Parent Equity and Inclusion Programs Julisa De Los Santos for their strong leadership as co-chairs of the committee.

All my best,

Clayton