Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar AB ’93 magna cum laude

 

Justice, Supreme Court of California  San Francisco

 

March 17, 2017

 

Coalition for a Diverse Harvard

c/o Michael Williams

By email: overseerelection@gmail.com    

 

Dear Michael --

 

Thank you for your interest in my views and my nomination.  Although my current position requires me to refrain from discussing matters that are before me or may come before me, I am pleased to share information about my background and experience, as well as some reflections on the issues of inclusion and diversity referenced in the thoughtful questions circulated by the coalition.  

 

I was born in the northern Mexican city of Matamoros, and spent much of my early life living in close proximity to the border dividing Mexico and the United States.  I attended high school in Calexico, California, in the Imperial Valley, where approximately 70 percent of my classmates were limited-English speakers.  I became a United States citizen in 1994, during my first year in law school.

 

Throughout my career in public service and education, I have been deeply interested in civil rights and inclusion, because I believe our commitment to these ideals can help build a more just, equitable, creative, and productive society.  Currently, I serve on the highest court in California, which has the largest judicial system in the United States. Because access to justice is a major priority for me, I also serve as chair of the California Judiciary's Implementation Task Force on Language Access. The task force works to ensure that California's courts are responsive to the needs of the roughly 7 million Californians who are limited-English proficient and together speak more than 210 different languages.  Among other efforts, the task force is currently focused on working with trial courts to ensure the availability of interpreters to all those who need them in civil proceedings (criminal proceedings are already covered), promoting the availability of multi-lingual assistance and forms for limited English speakers requiring services outside the courtroom, and developing a statewide complaint system for issues involving language access in our courts.  Before I joined the court, as a professor and university administrator, I sought to recruit, retain, and support a diverse and inclusive staff, to ensure (through mentorship, teaching, and support for student organizations) that Stanford was supportive of students from all backgrounds, and to strengthen Stanford's commitment to understanding and alleviating global poverty.

 

Earlier, while serving as Special Assistant to the President at the White House in 2009 and 2010, I worked on enacting the Fair Sentencing Act, which drastically reduced the disparity in federal sentences for offenses involving powder cocaine versus crack cocaine. I also worked to repeal the military's Don't Ask/Don't Tell policy, to increase the budget of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to set up the Obama administration's National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force, and to expand refugee resettlement.  After I left the White House, I co-chaired the 27-member congressionally-chartered National Equity and Excellence Commission for the U.S. Department of Education. The Commission delivered a unanimous report to the Secretary recommending universal means-tested preschool, additional support for English-language learners, and changes in school finance to close the achievement gap.  Many of the ideas in the report were incorporated into the Every Student Succeeds Act, enacted in 2015.

 

I believe institutions like Harvard have a responsibility to treat matters of equity and inclusion with the utmost concern.  I arrived at Harvard from a small town in rural Southern California on the border with Mexico and found opportunities beyond anything I could have imagined. Much the same is true for my wife Lucy Koh, who came to Harvard for college and law school after growing up in Oklahoma and Mississippi and attending a nearly entirely African American rural public elementary school.  I am grateful for the opportunities we both found at Harvard but also keen to help the university move even closer to realizing its ideals.  If I have the chance to serve on the Board of Overseers, I would especially look forward to working with others to ensure that people from all walks of life can be part of, thrive in, and benefit from Harvard. 

 

Harvard’s contributions to society –– including to the ideal of forging a more equitable, inclusive, and just society –– depend ultimately on the university’s capacity to contribute in unique ways to teaching, learning, and research.  That capacity, in turn, is enormously affected by Harvard’s ability to achieve inclusion and full engagement with a diverse public, student body, faculty, and alumni population.  Harvard should remain strongly committed to diversity as well as excellence in its admissions and recruitment of students, and its recruitment of faculty and staff.  It should continue exploring ways to ensure that no prospective student admitted to Harvard is barred from attending Harvard because of a lack of financial resources, whether they live in Mississippi or Malaysia.  It should strongly support diverse groups of students, faculty, and alumni so they can contribute to the university’s distinctive artistic and intellectual ecosystem, and they can remain engaged with the many challenges the world faces beyond Harvard Yard’s ivy-covered walls.  By routinely communicating with and encouraging engagement from Harvard's remarkable and diverse alumni population throughout the United States and the world, university leaders can glean valuable insights and help Harvard adapt to a changing world while it remains true to its mission of advancing knowledge for the world's benefit.  

 

Thank you again for your engagement with Harvard and for your interest in my nomination. 

 

Warmly,

/s/

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Darienne B. Driver EdM ’06, EdD ’14

Superintendent of Schools, Milwaukee Public School

 

1. How important should diversity be at Harvard? What strategies should the University pursue regarding this? (Please discuss specific programs and policies if you can.)  

 

If Harvard is to develop true citizens and citizen leaders, diversity and inclusivity must be the top priority and we must allocate substantial time and resources to ensuring that diverse students are recruited, retained and graduate successfully. Our country and world are ever-changing and we operate at our best when all communities have representation and voice in building and improving our world. Harvard is recognized as a leader in post-secondary education and the decisions we make around prioritizing diversity not only impact the experience and trajectory of our students and alumni, they set the standard across nationally and internationally. There have been substantial improvements in financially supporting students from all backgrounds. The Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion supports marginalized students with programming and resources while on campus. Still, there is much work to be done at Harvard. As a Black student who was on the yard between 2005 and 2007, I truly believe there is a strong need for us to graduate successfully and to have an experience that’s reflective of who we are as a people. Harvard should prioritize improving diversity and inclusiveness in recruitment, retention, and hiring.

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2. How can Harvard encourage more diversity among its alumni leaders and activities? (If not discussed above.)

 

It is my experience that alumni from different demographic groups want to see more diversity in the faculty, staff and student population at Harvard. Seeing the increase in diversity and in the inclusion of those groups gives us a reason to be engaged. Involving alumni of color and those from diverse backgrounds can’t be about hosting a one-time event or activity, it has to be daily practice and a true shift in business as usual. Inclusion means changing culture. Unfortunately, Boston is a city known for its racial challenges. Harvard should be a place to help students mitigate those challenges, not a place that confirms them. For many alumni of color, their negative experiences contribute to disengagement in alumni hood. In order to facilitate more engagement from diverse alumni, Harvard should work to understand and integrate lessons learned from the experiences of all alumni. It’s essential to learn from and integrate the voice of historically underrepresented alumni when seeking to diversify activities and improve the engagement of alumni of color.  

 

3. Please state your views on affirmative action and race-conscious admissions.

 

Despite affirmative action policies being in place for decades in the United States, there are still glaring disparities in post-secondary educational recruitment and outcomes. Unfortunately, affirmative action and race-conscious admissions are necessary to ensure that all of our communities are adequately understood by and represented in higher education. Prioritizing diversity and inclusion on campus benefits all students and staff and cultivates a more innovative and dynamic experience for the entire campus. It’s also critical in race-conscious admissions to consider the complexity of identities. For example, Harvard admits 13.7% African American students, but it’s important to consider nationalities, class, generation and other nuances when ensuring that Black students are admitted from all lived experiences. This same nuance ought to be considered when examining admissions decisions for all communities. Affirmative action and a general race-consciousness can’t stop with admissions. Race-conscious considerations need to be made with respect to course offerings, advising students, offering robust and diverse activities, and the creating a positive and inclusive experience for all students. All students should feel like the Harvard experience is for them from recruitment through alumni hood.

4. What do you think Harvard's role should be in creating a more equitable, inclusive and just society?

 

As a public school superintendent, I’ve always believed that if societal progress is to be made in the areas of equity, inclusivity and access, it must begin in a strong educational system.

As a world leader in education, Harvard should play a prominent and intentional role in creating and modeling an equitable and inclusive society. Harvard’s recruitment process should model for colleges and institutions across the world the power that prioritizing diversity and inclusiveness has in cultivating solutions to the world’s most complex adaptive challenges. While on campus, Harvard students should be encouraged to examine all facets of their education through a lens of asking questions and incorporating multiple perspectives. Regardless of area of study, they should be required to engage in courses and experiences that bring them to understand the complex history of race, class and inequity in our country and world. Our faculty should be encouraged to conduct research that solves problems that promote life improvements for all people in ways that validate many ways of thinking and knowing. They should also be trained in culturally responsive teaching practices that facilitate dynamic, highly rigorous learning environments supportive and inclusive of all students. Harvard should be a space where diverse thinkers converge to create innovative and equitable solutions to the challenges we face in the United States and around the world.
 

5. What steps have you taken to bring diversity and inclusion to your workplace or to an organization that you have been involved with?

 

In order to bring diversity and inclusion, you must prioritize policies, strategies and structures that promote positive and urgent change. As proud superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, this work is my top priority. Last year, I brought our team to Harvard to participate in the Public Education Leadership Program (PELP). While there, we identified and began working on an equity-centered problem of practice: Milwaukee Public Schools has neither consistently nor effectively engaged all of our students of color in an environment conducive to learning; thus, there are opportunity gaps that perpetuate low student achievement.   ​

 

Since that time, we’ve taken a number of steps to further progress equity and inclusion work in Milwaukee Public Schools. We’ve established an equity commission to analyze district-wide decision making, educational and operational practices, and resource allocation through the lens of equity. We launched MPS CARES, a comprehensive community support program that creates late night and weekend programming and supports because we recognize that safe and productive out-of-school spaces are an essential component of educating the whole child. In Milwaukee, access to a driver’s license has proved to be a major barrier for many young people in mobility as well as access to employment and housing. To remedy the drastic racial and socioeconomic gaps in access, we piloted MPS Drives, a universal driver education program for all our high school students. By analyzing access to arts, music, athletics and extracurricular activities, we found gaping inequities in our offerings and have worked to increase programming access for all students.

 

We’re using telepresence technology to expand Advanced Placement opportunities to students across the district in an environment where budget and teacher shortages have historically created unequal access to programming. We are now in a place where every high school has at least five AP courses for students to choose from, resulting in a 40% increase in student AP participation in just three years. And because we know that 100% of our students deserve access to college-level coursework, we rewrote our graduation requirements so that all students are required to take an AP course before graduation.

We’ve added gender inclusion language to our policies and procedures and are strengthening supports of students who have recently immigrated to the United States. We are days away from passing a resolution that confirms Milwaukee Public Schools as a safe-haven district, strengthening protections and supports for students and their families who have recently immigrated and/or are undocumented. We know that students benefit from being taught by educators they share identities with, so we’ve prioritized the recruitment and retention of educators that share the racial and ethnic backgrounds of our young people. True inclusion is about understanding and integrating voice. I’ve instituted teacher, student, principal and family advisory groups to learn about what works and what we need to change. In Milwaukee Public Schools, equity is truly about constant analysis and direct, resource-backed intervention where and when we discover inequities in our policies and practices

Carla Harris AB ’84 magna cum laude, MBA ’87

Vice Chair of Wealth Management and Managing Director, Morgan Stanley    NY

 

1. How important should diversity be at Harvard? What strategies should the University pursue regarding this? (Please discuss specific programs and policies if you can.)  

 

I believe that diversity is imperative at Harvard. The institution is known as one of the premier institutions in the world and the only way to maintain that standing over time is to have the best ideas and the best minds in the world as a part of the University leadership, as a part of the faculty and a part of the student body. Harvard, like most institutions, is competing on innovation. I cannot think of one institution that is not in some way competing around innovation. If innovation is the dominant competitive parameter then you need lots of ideas present because innovation is born from ideas. If you need a lot of ideas, then you have to have a lot of perspectives because ideas are born from perspectives. If you need a lot of perspectives, then you need a lot of experiences because experiences are born from perspectives and if you need a lot of experiences, you must have a lot of different people present.  Thus, you must start with a LOT of diverse people in order to innovate and LEAD.

 

Harvard should continue to develop and implement policies that will ensure that each incoming class is racially, ethnically and gender diverse and should continuously monitor the curriculum and teaching methods to insure that inclusive learning and conversations are occurring in the teaching and learning process. Lastly, the University should somehow ensure that there are fair and equitable opportunities for diverse student leadership on campus and campus governance.

2. How can Harvard encourage more diversity among its alumni leaders and activities? (If not discussed above.) 

I believe that Harvard can encourage more diversity among its alumni leaders by making specific outreach to diverse leaders to lead alumni activities in specific geographies and providing the support needed to execute effectively. The University should also ask them to make a targeted effort to engage their personal diverse Harvard networks to be as inclusive as possible in the activity.

3. Please state your views on affirmative action and race-conscious admissions. 

I am very in favor of race conscious admissions in order to insure a racially, ethnically and gender diverse class which is one of the major contributors to an exceptional learning experience at Harvard. I feel strongly that a diverse class adds to the pedagogy that is distributed by professors and classroom learning. I do not feel that there are any institutions, corporate, academic, or philanthropic that are mature enough for diversity to happen on its own and therefore must be deliberately administered, curated, and monitored to ensure efficacy.

4. What do you think Harvard's role should be in creating a more equitable, inclusive and just society? 

As Harvard is a leader in many things, I believe that Harvard should be a leader in exhibiting, equitable and inclusive leadership in its corporate, academic, and governance capacities and in assembling a diverse student body. The University must take extraordinary measures to ensure that it is soliciting the diverse voices of its constituencies and assembling decision making teams that demonstrate inclusiveness.

5. What steps have you taken to bring diversity and inclusion to your workplace or to an organization that you have been involved with? 

As a person who is diverse in race and gender, I have sought to bring diversity to my workplace by volunteering or positioning myself for decision making roles (i.e., recruiting, operational and hiring roles) that would impact professionals entering the firm or in specific departments. I have taken an active role as a mentor or sponsor in many diverse candidates’ careers not only within my firm, but at other firms on Wall Street for decades. I have also been involved, at one time, in 8 non-profit boards and have ensured that board candidates or slates of c-suite candidates were diverse and that a fair process was deployed in choosing leaders or board members in each of these organizations.