Dialogues on Race facilitator Liz Koenig leads students in a reflection during a session in 2017. Photo by Caron Creighton
When Liz Koenig approached Om Chitale in 2016 about helping to facilitate a student-run course on race issues at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the India-born, Houston-raised Chitale thought it was an amazing idea.
But he declined.
Chitale, who had worked with an education nonprofit in Memphis, Tennessee, before starting his MBA, was practicing the art of saying “no” to good opportunities — a good mental health practice when embarking on an intense, elite two-year MBA journey. Bottom line: He didn’t want to burn himself out.
“Liz and I are friends, we share a lot of passion, we share a lot of good memories,” Chitale tells Poets&Quants. “She said, ‘I know that you’ve started having these kinds of conversations in Memphis, I know you’ve done some deep reflection on your own background and being raised in a city and in privilege, and how all these things kind of manifest in the way you approach the world and the way you approach other people. And so I’m thinking about this class, I’m thinking about something to do with race and understanding what role that plays in leadership, and framing it such that it’s a core competency. So would you like to help?’
“I was like, ‘You know what, it sounds amazing, but no.’ Because by then I was really leaning into the whole idea of saying no to good opportunities. But then I slept on it and then the next day I texted her and I said, ‘Hey, actually this is the opportunity that I’ve been saying no to everything else for. I think this is really important.'”
‘A TON OF SUPPORT FROM THE ADMINISTRATION’
Om Chitale. LinkedIn
Dialogues on Race emerged out of the 2016 Race Inclusion Initiative, an effort by students to address race and ethnicity issues and improve the Haas experience for underrepresented minorities. As part of the RII, students conducted a survey that found that even though 90% of students believe that understanding racial dynamics is a key component of effective leadership, fewer than half are comfortable talking about race. Spurred by this stark reality and inspired by a class called Diversity in the Workplace, Koenig, a co-chair of the RII, drafted a plan to promote classroom discussions on race, all within a “safe space” without judgment; it became, with the blessing of the school, the 10-week seminar Dialogues on Race, the first two-hour session of which happened in spring 2017.
After four seminars involving dozens of Haas MBA students, Koenig, Chitale, and others involved in the creation of Dialogues on Race graduated. But even as they scattered into the job market, they didn’t want to see the conversation end — and the school agreed.
“The two-year turnover cycles of business schools is really punishing, but we’ve figured out a way to keep it going,” says Koenig, currently a consultant with The Bridgespan Group, a social impact investment consultancy in Boston. “We’ve been really lucky. We’ve had a ton of support from the administration. Jay Stowsky, our dean of instruction, has been super supportive in helping us figure out a way to make this a more permanent thing at Haas. We ended up finding a way to keep it as a student-led class, but still making sure it’ll live on beyond us — making sure that we can give it the support that it needs.” In future, that may involve paying some of the student leaders involved, she says.
NOSEDIVE IN BLACK ENROLLMENT HURTS IN SEVERAL WAYS
The most important thing, Koenig says, is that the conversation continues — particularly now, as Haas grapples with controversy over plummeting enrollment by black students. Only six black students are enrolled in the 2018 fall intake of MBA students at the Haas School, down from 19 two years ago — the year Koenig, Chitale, Amy Traver, and others involved in the RII and Dialogues on Race started their MBA journey. This, despite the growth of the program to its biggest population ever of 291 students — which means that Dialogues on Race has an even more important role than ever, Koenig says.
“I think it both accentuates the need for these kind of conversations and the need to know where we are coming from and going to,” she tells Poets&Quants. “It speaks to an interesting tension, that you have all these folks that want to be part of the conversation, that care about racial equity and that care about diversity and inclusion, and yet our actual numbers don’t reflect that in terms if the diversity of our class.
“It’s been an unbelievably tough admission season for us,” she continues. “It has not escaped the notice of anyone. I was at the Haas orientation helping the discussion on diversity and inclusion, and it came up: ‘Hey, we’re having this conversation and yet we’re super conscious of what this room look likes right now. It’s not a super diverse room.’
“The answer to the question is, ‘It’s a problem.’ Everyone is super concerned about it. Folks are really activated by it. The numbers aren’t anywhere near what we want.”
On a practical level, the lack of African-American voices is self-defeating when trying to organize and expand a course like Dialogues on Race, Koenig says. “We will open as many sections as we can have really diverse groups of people,” she says. “Every semester we have had demands that we can’t meet. We have folks that want to take this class. But we don’t think it’s responsible to have a section of Dialogues on Race that has one person of color and ten white people, because we don’t want to put folks in the position of being marginalized, or being the only voice in the room. It’s a limiting factor for us, because there’s all this demand.”
Haas student Gabriela Belo Soares (center) shares her perspective as Ejede Okogbo and other MBA classmates listen during a Dialogues on Race session in 2017. Photo by Caron Creighton
Traver, who is currently in her final semester of a MBA/MPH at UC-Berkeley, served as a facilitator of Dialogues on Race in spring 2018. She recalls the “courageous conversations” that regularly took place in a framework reminiscent of Stanford GSB’s famous “Touchy Feely” course.
“They can be really challenging conversations sometimes, and I think one of the things that is really important from the beginning is everyone has opted into this class,” Traver tells P&Q. “So there is some expectation that people who are there want to be having these conversations. Sometimes some of them are courageous conversations, and in the class we’re all trying to stay in the courage zone where we’re taking some risks and truly sharing what’s true for us. And we also commit to listening to other people’s perspectives, really listening with empathy.
“I think we do set up really strong minds with the class discussions. We equip our facilitators with tools to navigate conversations that can be tricky. I would just echo that I think we are really thoughtful about setting norms for the group, putting the time into building relationships. Haas is a very tight, very community-oriented kind of place. I think that’s been a huge advantage for us, that we have folks coming that already feel a strong affinity for one another — fellow Haasies who often tend to have creative relationships. Even when the conversations get hard, I think there’s a real care that people bring to the conversations of assuming just intentions, of being curious. If someone says something that rubs you the wrong way — being curious, being open about that, suspending judgment a little bit.
“In some ways what we’re doing has been really strengthened and accelerated by the strength of the community at Haas as a whole.”
A FACILITATOR BECOMES A PARTICIPANT
Amy Traver. LinkedIn
Chitale, who earned his MBA in 2018, now serves as CEO of the San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit he founded, Teachers of Oakland, which seeks to amplify teacher voices through social media and community engagement. He served as a facilitator for the entire first year of Dialogues on Race, working with Koenig to “make sure that everything came across meaningfully for the students.” From the first class, he says, their expectations were “blown out of the water.”
But then Chitale, previously a facilitator, took the class in his final semester as a student. And his eyes were really opened.
“That was another one of those things I had to kind of give myself permission to do,” Chitale says. “I had to remind myself that this is a journey, and no matter where you’re starting, you’ve got a lot to learn and you’ve got a long way to go. So as a student, I had to allow myself to really dig into the emotional piece of it, to sit there in the class with my classmates and really respond in an empathetic way. You’re flexing a different set of muscles there than when you’re facilitating; as a facilitator, you can’t necessarily get into the actual conversation quite as much because you’re looking at the bird’s-eye view. So it was great to get away from that.”
PUTTING THE PIECES IN PLACE FOR EXPANSION
Student reviews of Dialogues on Race have been almost universally positive. The course, Koenig says, has created a self-perpetuating cycle of positivity and confidence in dealing with race issues. As she told Poets&Quants for her profile as one of 2018’s “Best MBAs,” that stems from making the right moves at the start. “I’m proud of the thoughtfulness, responsiveness, and persistence it took to recruit an incredible team, attract interest from nearly a third of our class, and bring the idea from its infancy into its first and second iterations. It’s been incredible to see students emerging from the class with conviction and clarity about the role they want to play to address racism in their personal and professional communities. Alumni of the class have organized and led their own dialogues over dinner, worked with Haas to organize workshops about diversity and inclusion, and even stepped up as the next generation of Dialogues on Race facilitators.”
In the spring of 2018, Koenig’s team won first place at the Investing in Inclusion Pitch Competition hosted by the Haas Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership with a proposal for collaborative training for dialogues on race within, and between, MBA communities and top companies where MBAs might work. She created a business plan around the idea of launching Dialogues on Race at other schools, modeled as a sort of corporate MBA partnership. The prize was $7,000.
“And we basically used the money — it wasn’t a ton of money — but we used the money from that pitch competition to do a lot of work this summer to codify a lot of what we’ve done,” Koenig says. “Right now, all of us who are sort of founders of Dialogues on Race have full-time jobs. So no one’s doing it right now. It’s a full-time job. But I think we’re trying to put the pieces in place, in terms of like codifying the curriculum, codifying the system. We’re hoping to get more of this public platform partly through the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership so that we can more easily share what we’re doing with folks who are interested in doing something like this.”
DON’T MISS BLACK STUDENT NUMBERS NOSEDIVE AT HAAS and MEET UC-BERKELEY HAAS GATEKEEPER MORGAN BERNSTEIN
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