“How do we have grace with one another in the midst of working toward creating—in the words of Dr. King—that beloved community where people respect one another?” That was the question posed by Rev. Harold Spooner, who, alongside Debbie Blue, has been conducting focus groups with international students and students of color throughout the past year.
Spooner, a Chicago native who graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary after attending Houghton, has served as Director of Diversity at the Stony Brook School on Long Island and as Vice President of Community Impact at Covenant Retirement Communities. He has helped a variety of churches and organizations develop policies and programs that are more ethnically diverse.
“As the college is attracting more students of color,” Spooner said, “the desire is to create an environment where all of the students will feel comfortable and safe, and will be able to benefit as much as possible from the Houghton experience. That being said,” he continued, “the reality is that institutions, across the board in the United States, aren’t always sensitive to the needs of people that don’t necessarily fit into the context of the majority culture.”
These talk-back sessions, according to Spooner, are born out of “the desire to both hear from the students of color, in terms of what their needs are as they relate to the Houghton: where they’ve had great experiences and where they’ve had frustrating experiences.
“What Debbie and I were asked to do was to come in, listen to these students of color (both international and domestic), and make recommendations to the institution in regards to how they can do a better job of creating an open and welcoming environment for all students. In moving both individually and collectively, the goal…is to create an environment where all of the students at Houghton College can get as much as possible out of the Houghton experience.”
“Majority culture, in general, looks at the world through their lens and says the world is supposed to work the way they see it,” he continued. “There’s no sensitivity to the possibility that there may be other views out there that don’t coincide with yours, and that certainly there are systems that do indeed work against people. They might work for you, but they don’t work for everybody else.”
While Spooner acknowledged that “there are issues of insensitivity, from both the institution and fellow students, which play into some frustrations from students of color,” he also seemed confident in the guiding ethos of a Christian liberal arts education. “When you come to a liberal arts campus, the idea is to be open to broader ideas,” he said. “You don’t have to agree with everything. That’s not the point. The point is actively listening, discussing, talking, hearing, empathy. Not discounting someone else’s experience because it’s not yours. Part of education is to hear and see what the world has to offer, engage with it, and then make your decisions based on engagement—not based on opinion without ever engaging. Our hope is that folks will be open to being educated.”
After consulting with students, Spooner and Blue submitted an action report to the Houghton administration. For the last few years, many students of color have asked administration to consider hiring a full-time Diversity Coordinator. Spooner and Blue came to the same conclusion during their conversations with students. “One of the things that we recommended was that the school look to hire a person whose specific function would be to zero in on the needs of international students and students of color,” Spooner said. “They would do that in conjunction with the Dean of Spiritual Life, because as we look at it, this is a fundamental issue of discipleship.
“To be more Biblical than that, to go to Genesis, we need to understand that all human beings are created in God’s image. You’ve got to think of all people as equal, created in God’s image, loved by God, and treated in the same way you would want to be treated,” Spooner continued. “So it is discipleship.”
Although both administration and students hope to make progress on these initiatives, Spooner expected roadblocks and obstacles in years to come. “This is a process,” he emphasized. “There will not be any point where we say ‘Oh, we’ve nailed it.’ We’ll do some things positively and make some mistakes. Students don’t have to agree on everything, but they respect each other and affirm the dignity we all have as children of God.”
He also explained how students can adopt a more nuanced perspective on complex issues: “You should critically look at the values that you’ve been taught. Don’t accept them as truth just because someone told them to you, or because you were raised like that.”