Dr. Elizabeth Thornton, Babson College’s newly appointed chief diversity officer, wasn’t hired to mitigate a highly charged climate of racial violence or vandalism or to appease student and faculty complaints on multiculturalism.
Unlike other chief diversity officers hired to quiet brewing discontent, Thornton, who also serves as an adjunct professor in the department of entrepreneurship, was appointed to address the needs of an increasingly diverse campus and to solidify a structure that continues to recruit and retain underrepresented students, faculty and staff.
“I was already engaged in working with minority students and helping to recruit more minority faculty. When the administration decided to formalize the role and elevate it so the appointee would sit on the president’s cabinet, I thought that I would be the perfect fit,” says Thornton, the Massachusetts college’s first chief diversity officer.
The position of chief diversity officer is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of academia. Over the last five years, more than 30 elite institutions have created chief diversity officer positions, according to a recent survey. Although their titles vary, these officers play a strategic role in monitoring affirmative action policies, stabilizing enrollment and graduation rates among minority students and employing faculty and staff from underrepresented groups.
Thornton, a Babson faculty member since 2006, began her efforts of inclusion by spearheading Babson’s historically Black colleges and universities initiative, an endeavor that emerged from the lack of diversity in entrepreneurial case studies.
“We would read case study after case study featuring all White protagonists as if every entrepreneur is White. We constructed an HBCU consortium to help HBCUs develop case studies featuring protagonists of color. We’ve got about 10 in the pipeline set for publication. They include video clips and teaching notes,” Thornton says, adding there are recruitment endeavors in development with Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University for Babson’s graduate programs.
