The Commitment of CED's Office of Undergraduate Advising to Racial Justice and Advocacy

The commitment of CED's Office of Undergraduate Advising to Racial Justice and Advocacy

Dear Students,

The Office of Undergraduate Advising in the College of Environmental Design (CED) acknowledges that we are beginning this academic year in an extensively different world than the one we knew last fall. Since Spring 2020, we have been physically distant from each other due to COVID-19 and have been navigating the various transitions the pandemic has put on us, our families, and our communities. Now in Fall 2020, as many of us are continuing to navigate these issues, we are also experiencing compounding stressors from situations such as wildfires, floods, and a host of other natural and economic challenges.

In this message, however, we want to specifically address the tremendous acts of hatred, injustice, police terrorism, and anti-Black racism that we witnessed towards the Black community during this season, and acknowledge that, unfortunately, these acts of injustice are not new in our country. And as we enter the tail end of the year, we see the months-long calls and demands for justice for the Black community, including countless murders of Black women, men, and trans community members, have been largely umet. We affirm that Black Lives Matter, and that we feel that we can contribute to justice in our daily practice as advisors as well as in our individual beliefs.

The CED Office of Undergraduate Advising wants to build on the messages from CED and the UC Berkeley campus[1] to confront and take action against anti-Black racism, and share our set of intentions, previously mentioned in our Juneteenth Message, on how we intend to protect and support diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work. This document indicates the actions we will take today and in the near future that will contribute to the creation of an environment where all experiences and identities belong. We deeply believe that the future is the inevitable result of what we do today, and what we take into our hands today will help shape and create an environment that is equitable and just.[2] Please read more below and JOIN US in the conversation on how we can promote justice & equity for all of our students in CED.

CED Advising Statement & Intentions

The CED Undergraduate Advising team believes that “solidarity” is a verb, and statements of solidarity absent of specific actions are devoid of meaning. With this in mind, as a new team of advisors, we have taken time and space for reflection to process what this solidarity as a verb means in relation to our responsibility and values as CED Undergraduate Advisors. For the purposes of transparency and accountability to our students, we have set a series of actionable items anchored in our values.

Our intention is to directly confront unjust structures and policies we find within our institution of higher learning, with a particular focus on addressing the structures and policies that contribute to anti-Black racism. We actively engage in the actions that will contribute to the creation of a future where all CED undergraduates have an equitable experience.[3]

These values, however, cannot be accomplished if we do not first acknowledge that we are part of a larger higher education structure that is historically rooted in racism and systemic oppression. These roots have significantly impacted historically minoritized communities, and their various intersections as it relates to race, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., and we can easily call out these lasting effects through the low representation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students in CED. If we are to be in solidarity with building a community that is equitable and just, we must acknowledge these challenges and set our intentions on addressing issues specific to the college.

Actionable Items:

Actively Engage in Growth

As academic advisors, our core values start with viewing our advising through a bias-aware, student-centered lens. We recognize that while we use our professional knowledge to advise, we are also shaped by our own dominant and non-dominant identities, life experiences, and the intersections of how we navigate our world. For example, we may share an identity with a student (ethnicity, family structure) and may lean to our own experiences in those identities to offer support, instead of listening to the student share their unique experience. Being bias-aware means that we will acknowledge how our experiences frame our work and will consistently “check our bias” each time we meet with a student to ensure our lens is in focus.

We will likely make mistakes in our journey, but by learning from our own experiences, educating ourselves on developments in the field, collaborating with our communities, and taking strategic risks, we aim to improve our advising services and the student experience. We are committed to continuous self-reflection, growth, and development.

The advising team will pursue professional development opportunities that support continued learning in diversity, equity, and inclusion for student services teams. Some of these opportunities include attendance at the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE); engagement with the NACADA Social Justice Advising Community; and Berkeley-specific trainings that discuss inclusion, unconscious bias, etc. through the Multicultural Education Program.

Continuous student-centered development of our advising services

In the Spring 2020 term, COVID-19 forced a rapid shift for everyone. The inequities that were present before the impacts of COVID-19, have been further exacerbated for marginalized and minoritized students.

As an advising team we have continuously worked on providing services that meet the needs of all CED students. As we continue to improve our advising services, students interested in shaping advising services will work alongside advisors in the creating, developing, and assessing our current and future services.

The efforts to consistently involve students in constructing our services is done with the intention to better serve students and increase a sense of belonging in our CED community.

By gathering information about the CED student experience through the CED Senior Exit survey and University of California Undergraduate Experience (UCUES) survey, several programs and services were introduced to improve the student experience. A few examples are the CED Admissions Ambassador Program, Transfer Information Sessions, Satellite Career Center Advising, and CED Material Store.
As we navigate through an increasingly virtual delivery of our services we will expand the methods of gathering information to ensure that the voice and experience of all CED students is understood and prioritized. This would include an integration of qualitative data to our current data collection.

Ongoing Review of Academic Policies and Advising Procedures

Improve the accessibility of CED advising policies and procedures as they relate to degree requirements and academic progress for students.

Currently, students have to navigate through many documents and websites in order to understand the multitude of policies that impact their progress toward degree, we will work on creating an accessible and centralized policy manual.
Review CED policies with an equity lens and make adjustments as needed.

Through these actions we will address and advocate for change in policies that do not contribute to an equitable experience amongst all CED undergraduates

We will be growing our actionable items throughout the semesters, and invite you to ask us about our actions and provide feedback.

[1] A Message from CED’s Deans, Standing Together at DCRP, and many other campus messages

[2] brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press. Northouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

[3] Our shared definition of equity

In our work as advisors, we define equity as an acknowledgement that there is a historic and systemic investment in the oppression and exclusion of people based on identities that privilege those with dominant identities to the detriment of people who are not included within the dominant identities. Equity is the process of actively working toward eradication of the inequities created by the histories and systems that privilege some and oppress others.

We also want to highlight some of the AMAZING actions delivered by our CED student organizations and faculty to confront anti-Black racism and fight for justice.

The Berkeley student chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and CED Students of Color Organization (CEDSOC) hosted a series of student listening sessions as the ASLA Diversity + Representation Taskforce. Their mission is “to combat the anti-blackness and continued lack of BIPOC voices within the landscape architecture field and education at large, and advocate and educate for inclusivity and representation through anti-racist work. Find the DRT Statement for CED, with a debrief and resources from the listening sessions here.

In July 2020, members of the CED Graduate Architecture Student Union (GASU), penned a letter addressing racism in architecture to faculty and administrators in the Architecture Department. Review “A CALL TO ACTION: LETTER TO UC BERKELEY CED ARCHITECTURE DEPARTMENT + FACULTY,”

Race and the Environment (Aired on 8/10/2020) — Moderated by Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, professors john a. powell, Claudia Polsky, and CED Urban Studies chair and professor Charisma Acey described a litany of historical and current reasons why environmental harms disproportionately affect people of color. View the recording here.

Architecture Presents, Unbuilding Racism: The Fierce Urgency of Now (Aired on 9/2/2020) Deanna Van Buren, Executive Director and Design Director of the nonprofit design studio Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, shares the initiatives of recent work in her practice as it relates to addressing racial equity and the role of the designer in unbuilding racism in the U.S. View the recording here.