Black women do not feel safe on Yale’s campus—“at off-campus parties, in classrooms, and otherwise.” This statement is among the most jarring lines in a list of demands for the administration published on Tues., Nov. 3 in DOWN Magazine from the Black Student Alliance at Yale.

Issues of race on campus have been pushed to the forefront. On Mon., Nov. 9, over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff gathered for a March of Resilience in solidarity with the students of color at Yale. On the night of Wed., Nov 11, Battell Chapel was packed to capacity, with people lining the streets to listen by the windows, for a “Race at Yale” Teach-In organized by the four cultural centers on campus. On social media, the hashtag #InSolidarityWithYale has been a rising trend.

These events are centered around the climate that students live in every day at the university. Much of the conversation has focused on social situations and life in the residential colleges. But the racial environment of the classroom is important too.

In the setting of a university, manifestations of discrimination in classrooms are often the hardest to combat. To call out a peer is one thing. To call out a professor, one who you may depend on for a senior thesis, for advising, or for a recommendation letter, is something entirely different. While classrooms aim to push us outside of our comfort zones and challenge our assumptions, students of color deserve the same respect as their peers. Feeling safe in the classroom simply means being in an environment where you do not need to worry about discrimination.

On Wed., Oct. 7, Yale celebrated Founders Day, meant to commemorate Yale on the anniversary of its founding in 1701. In the morning, a poster was plastered on Cross Campus that stood in stark contrast to the glorifying events of the day. The poster highlighted bleak statistics: only 42 percent of undergraduates and 17 percent of faculty in the colleges of Arts and Sciences are of minority descent. The percent average increase in the number of black professors in each century since Yale’s founding has been one percent.

Three days after Halloween, on Tues., Nov. 3, Yale announced that it would launch a five-year, $50 million initiative to increase faculty diversity. The initiative is funded out of the University’s operating budget and is meant to support the appointment of faculty who could enrich the diversity of Yale.

A week later, Anthropology and East Asian Studies professor Karen Nakamura announced that she was leaving Yale at the end of the semester to teach at University of California, Berkeley. She called Yale’s $50 million initiative “smoke and mirrors” in the Yale Daily News article that announced her departure, and said that the initiative would do little to address greater issues around faculty retention and more.

All this raises the question—what can be done to make students of color feel safe in the classroom? What will make faculty of color stay? And, even if Yale hires a more diverse faculty, will that be enough to make the climate in the classroom as welcoming for students, and especially women, of color as it is for the rest of the students on campus?

Jack Dovidio is the dean of academic affairs of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as well as the former chair of the Faculty Diversity Hiring Committee. He thinks that the $50 million dollars can make a real difference to the climate on campus and noted that the new initiative provides resources to do things differently. “Money helps,” Dovidio said. “But spending money doesn’t automatically solve a problem. The University and the students have to continue to work at it.” He continued, “If we keep doing things we’ve done in the past, we’ll get the same results we got in the past. We need new ways to understand diversity and promote diversity.”

The Yale Physics department specifically is venturing into this uncharted territory. Last semester, Physics department Chair Paul Tipton created the first ever Committee for Climate and Diversity within the department. The committee is meant to address any issues that might make the department unwelcoming or might make anyone feel uncomfortable.

If successful, the committee could be a vital complement to the efforts to improve faculty diversity. It is an internal push to improve climate, to grow safe spaces from the bottom up. But as the events of this past week have shown, students have demanded real change on this campus, and whether a committee can make this marked change remains to be seen.

***

When Ellen Pollack, SM ’78, was an undergraduate at Yale, she was the only female Physics major in her year. She entered her freshman year just five years after Yale started admitting women, and it would take 27 more years before the Physics department finally granted tenure to it first female professor.

Pollack spoke at a recent Master’s Tea in Silliman about how she loved taking classes on quantum mechanics and special relativity. But in all of her classes, she felt she was the only one who had to ask questions, the only one who wasn’t getting it right away, the only one who had to lose sleep over problem sets. Years later, she recounts how, when she finally talked to her male classmates, she was surprised to learn that they thought she was the only one who understood what was going on. They didn’t even know enough, they admitted, to conjure up a question.

In her book the Only Woman in the Room, Pollack writes, “At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs.”

She loved the subject, and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major. But she felt that she was ill-equipped for the future: when she graduated, none of her professors encouraged her to go on to graduate school, a sign she took to mean that she wasn’t good enough to succeed in the field. As a result, the prospect of pursing a career in physics faded after she finished her senior thesis in the major.

Pollack told the crowd, “There are no villains.” She said that she had wonderful advisors and professors, all of whom had wished her well. But the obstacles she experienced were subtle ones, often based on implicit biases rather than conscious decisions. They were the sorts of incidents that accumulated over time and that made her feel unwanted.

In the process of writing her book, which is a study on the lack of gender diversity in the sciences, Pollack said she found that many other women in STEM felt the same way, and it was a feeling that people of color in STEM shared as well. Pollack explained that, for diversity to increase, the climate in University departments must change. “Change will come if people become more aware of cultural and psychological biases, and they will be able to create a more inclusive environment,” she said.

***

Thirty-seven years after Pollack’s graduation, Yale’s Physics department is trying to make this change through the Committee for Climate and Diversity, originally suggested by Reina Maruyama, one of five female physics professors at Yale and an Asian American.

The committee, composed of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and staff, meets every couple of months to discuss, in an intimate and confidential environment, issues in the department. They work to create real, proactive initiatives which can foster a more inclusive climate.

“It’s meant to be the eyes and ears for us all, a way we can make this environment more hospitable for everyone,” Physics Chair Tipton explained.

One of the committee’s main purposes is to discuss issues and bring them to Tipton’s attention. The graduate and undergraduate students are all women or people of color, minorities heavily underrepresented in the Physics department.

Charles Brown, GRD ’17, is a graduate student in the Physics department and one of the representatives on the committee. He said that he volunteered for the committee because he wanted the climate of the Physics department to be more welcoming to everyone. As a black student, he said he hoped to bring a voice to the conversation that is often left out. “I wanted to speak to the issues that ethnic minorities face,” he explained.

Danielle Norcini, GRD ’17, also a graduate student in the Physics department and a representative on the committee, said that frank and honest discussions are a large part of what the committee does. “We do bring personal experiences to the table when relevant,” Norcini said. “We try to highlight what we have learned from these situations in the hopes that it will enlighten the conversation.” She says that given the intimate environment of 12 people, it is a space where real and honest experiences are given a spotlight.

Norcini continued: “This is a kind of microcosm that we wish could expand into the macrocosm of the whole Physics department—a place where we all feel comfortable with one another and can talk about how we feel.”

The committee members are supposed to serve as the voices for each component of the larger community—the undergraduates, the graduates, the faculty and the staff, as well as women and minorities. The committee is also meant to be a place where any student can submit his or her voice anonymously.

There are resources available outside the committee for people to report these manifestations of discrimination—Title IX, SHARE, a residential college Dean or Master, or the department chair—and everyone who I talked with stressed that the committee is not meant to be a replacement for any of those resources. In severe cases of racism, sexism, or sexual abuse or assault, which the committee has discussed, students should still go to those existing resources. However, there are often subtler incidents, like those Pollack experienced, which push students away from the field. And there are a lot of reasons why a student might be scared to report these incidents.

Students might feel that the incident is too small to bring up, for example. To file a formal complaint with Title IX and with SHARE is a time-consuming process. Though Tipton told me that he would like to hear about any and all incidents, he said that meeting with him requires making an appointment, a step that might turn some people away.

Tipton offered that the committee might be more necessary now than in years previous. The former chair was Meg Urry, the first female chair and first female tenured professor in the Physics department. Tipton, meanwhile, acknowledges that he is from the same demographic as much of the department. “Maybe because I’m a white male, I need this committee more than Meg did,” Tipton said. “People might be willing to tell things to the committee that they wouldn’t tell me.” To share a complaint there is always the risk that the person might not hear or respect you. Tipton hopes the committee will reduce this fear.

On top of that, there are already so few women and minorities in the department, let alone in a single class. Even if you file a complaint anonymously, it might be painfully clear that it was you. Students often fear that if they draw attention to themselves, their professors might view them less favorably. No one wants to be seen as the one who cried racism or sexism.

But with the committee, students can report knowing that their names will not be revealed to their professors, and without having to go through a formal procedure. There is no process: you just need to approach a representative and share your experience. Any details discussed about the compliant will be kept strictly within the committee. Your name will not be brought up, and the committee will not confront the professor. The department chair will be made aware, however, that the transgression occurred.

***

Beyond discussion, the committee aims to come up with solutions. The most recent initiative that Tipton passed is a study hall for all the graduate students that meets twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The study halls, stocked with refreshments and two fourth year graduate students who have volunteered their time, are about more than just studying.

The study halls aim to ease the transition into the Physics department for graduate students. “It is very common for individuals to feel isolated in the first year class for a number of reasons,” Norcini explained. To an outside observer, this problem may seem innocuous. However, Noricni said, it’s a slippery slope—you’re feeling isolated, you begin to fall behind in your classwork, your self-confidence drops and you don’t reach out for help. This spirals into bigger issues like not passing qualifying exams, or starting research late, and more. “The study hall was created to give the first years a place to ask senior students questions about problem sets, and also to encourage those who are on the shy side to form study groups, which are essential for completing coursework.“

The committee also focuses on proactive measures they can take to make the department more welcoming for everyone. Elena Gramellini, GRD ’17, another physics graduate student representative on the committee, said that their role is to do far more than report. “We want to try to prevent these types of things from happening and to create a more connected community,” Gramellini said.

Another initiative the committee is hoping to pass soon is a department-wide happy hour, although, as Gramellini said, “it might seem a very small step.” But, she continued, “We want to open it up to faculty and staff. We believe if you open up your recreational time to the community, you get more exposure and get to see the diverse community in the Physics department. It’s a good thing for people to interact outside their usual working environment.”

Norcini said that the happy hour has the potential to connect graduate students with possible advisors or thesis committee members, but also to simply allow students to talk casually with all members of the department. She said, simply, it’s just good to know more people in Physics department. “Making these connections goes a long way,” Norcini said.

The initiatives that the committee has passed have the potential to be important in creating a more welcoming environment, but in reality, the power of the committee is limited. It can only advise the chair on issues and make recommendations; it does not have the power to pass initiatives. It does not have the power to fire professors or to hire professors.

And the facts of the numbers remain. The Physics department has only three tenured women faculty and, though the statistics are not available by department, the entirety of the College of Arts and Sciences at Yale is only 17 percent of minority descent. On such a bleak backdrop, can this committee really make a difference?

For Dovidio, the establishment of the committee is important. “Paul [Tipton] felt that people should be thinking about this issue all the time and coming up with new ways to do things,” Dovidio said.

He doesn’t think other departments have anything quite so formalized or visible as the Physics department’s committee on climate and diversity. Still, he cautions, each department has its own way of addressing these issues. Just because a department does not have a visible committee does not mean it is not attempting to address issues of diversity in its own ways.

***

The English department at Yale has better representation than the Physics department, but they approach the issues of diversity through a different means.

“Academic life is something that unfolds relatively slowly,” Langdon Hammer, the chair of the English department at Yale told me. “It is at once a center for vanguard and innovative thinking, and a conservative institution that preserves all aspects of custom and intellectual life that are in fact quite ancient.”

In order to assess questions of diversity, Hammer explained, one needs to keep in mind that double nature of the academy and the drag it puts on change.

The English department at Yale was formally created in 1884, and of its 28 tenured faculty members, 12 are female (the statistics for race and ethnicity are not available by department). The numbers in the Physics departments—three tenured women and 22 tenured men—pale in comparison.

The English department’s undergraduates also come from a diverse pool. In the 2014-2015 academic year, the most recent year from which these numbers are available, in the senior class there were 43 female and only 19 male English majors. In comparison, only seven of the Physics department’s 27 undergraduates are female.

These numbers are of course not only due to Yale’s departmental climates. Rather, they reflect a larger societal tendency that discourages women from pursuing the hard sciences. According to the National Science Foundation’s “Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering” report, 41 percent of college freshman men planned to pursue a major in science or engineering, while only 30 percent of women planned to do the same. Nonetheless, Yale’s numbers do suggest a rather obvious point: people are more likely to go into fields where they feel welcome, and a part of feeling welcome is representation.

When I meet with Hammer, the first thing he does is pull out a photo of the English department from 1924. Everyone in the photo is white and male. He pulls out a second photo, from 1967, which looks very similar to the first. In this one, though, one woman sits in the center of the photo: Marie Borroff, the first tenured woman in the English department. There are also some Jewish faculty members in the 1967 photo, unlike the 1924 one, Hammer notes. By the time he pulls out the last photo, we’ve moved to 2001. There are now eight tenured women in the English department. It is worth noting that 2001 was also the same year that the Physics department first granted tenure to a woman.

When asked how the English department changed its makeup, Hammer admits, “Regrettably, those changes probably happened without a lot of concerted deliberation. I don’t think the faculty got together and said, ‘We are going to diversify the faculty.’ Previous to perhaps 2000, I don’t think faculty diversity was a priority hiring objective or program.”

There are different levels in which problems of diversity arise, Hammer noted, and it can be an issue of who are the people teaching our classes, or a question of what they teach. “Diversity can be understood as an intellectual method and approach, a perspective. It’s also concern about the quality and nature of community.” More than anything, Hammer notes, diversity in the English department will be built by creating a culture that values it.

The English department does not have a committee like the Physics department. But it has its own forum where community issues are addressed: an annual town hall, where graduate students and faculty can go to speak about issues concerning the department.

At the 2014 town hall, a group of graduate students expressed concerns about a range of diversity issues. Female students, LGBTQ students, and students of color said that they felt vulnerable, misrepresented, and violated in subtle but significant ways.

Hammer told me that that he felt saddened and some faculty felt shocked at the statement—prior to the town hall, the faculty in the department had not thought of themselves as producing an environment that was exclusionary in any way. But at the same time, he felt grateful that there was a sufficient sense of community that students felt they could come forward and bring these issues to the public’s attention.

As Hammer’s anecdote made clear, a diverse faculty is only a first step. There also needs to be a sense of community within the department that allows the students to air their concerns, an environment that reminded me of the macrocosm Norcini said she was hoping the Physics department could one day become: “a place where we all feel comfortable with one another and can talk about how we feel.”

“I felt it was a positive that, while there was a problem, they felt they could come together and voice it and felt they would be heard and respected,” Hammer said. Still, Professor Hammer noted, the English department needs to invest more time and resources to diversify the department, and it is something they are still working on.

***

When I asked professor Maruyama how she felt the committee could help in diversifying the Physics department, she explained to me that it’s important for the members of the department including faculty, staff and students to feel that they are in a place where they are valued and heard. In reflecting on the events of the past week, she adds, “I hope that the existence of the committee shows that there are many who care and are working to help make the department more diverse and inclusive.”

The committee is still relatively new, and it remains to be seen if it can generate the kind of environment in which everyone can feel free from discrimination, the kind of classrooms BSAY called for where black women can feel they belong and are respected. However, it also strikes me that there’s something to be appreciated just in the establishment of this committee. “Sometimes, so many things happen during the day that a lot of issues of diversity just fall to the wayside,” Dovidio said. “That’s why for all the things we care about, we institutionalize groups that can watch for them and care for them.” He continued: “Diversity should be one of those things integrated into the daily life of departments.” I ask Dovidio how he felt about everything that was happening on campus: the march, the testimonials from students of color about feeling unwelcome at Yale.

“When you open these things up, it’s not always comfortable,” he explained. “But people who are comfortable tend not to change. If we can manage the tensions appropriately, it can be a part of our growing pains. It can lead to something better.”