By: Martin Kemper, staff writer

Amid staff turnover, LVC promotes a new Assistant Dean of Student Engagement and Inclusion. Renata Williams, previously the Director of Intercultural Affairs and Inclusive Programming, will assume the role of assistant dean.

Williams will be coordinating and organizing diversity and inclusiveness initiatives and programs across campus.

“We are really trying to engage students and expose students to a wide variety of what diversity means, not just here at LVC, but what it’s going to mean at the spaces that our students grace beyond LVC” said Renata Williams, “we want to engage students with regard to diversity inclusion, whether that’s cultural, ethnicity, ability or orientation.”

LVC is an organization that promotes inclusive excellence as a core issue in its mission statement, attempts to create a more socially aware and equitable campus through educational curriculum, symposiums and workshops. Williams believes that there are always goals to work towards.

“There’s always more that we could be doing,” Williams said, “if you ask a professor when their research is done, they will probably tell you never, there’s always more research to be done. That’s the same view that I take on working towards inclusiveness and working towards diversity.”

When asked about the message she was trying to explain, Williams stated, “One of the really important parts that are great to get across to the entire campus, is that it’s no one person’s, one office’s or one committee’s responsibility to be working towards diversity and inclusion. It is the task of every single person on our campus. It should be weaved into our syllabi and weaved into our conversations with students, it should be weaved into the work that we do every single day, and I think that is critical for folks to understand and really to embrace.”

As a new year at LVC gets underway, students will have many opportunities to engage in thought-provoking and eye-opening activities. Look for Renata Williams, leading the way.