Michael E. Reed of Carlisle, PA, has been named senior vice president for inclusion and diversity at Bowdoin College, effective March 1, 2018.
Michael E. Reed
Working closely with Bowdoin President Clayton Rose, Reed will be responsible for building on efforts already underway at the College to produce an even more inclusive campus community while promoting greater diversity among students, faculty, and staff by race, ethnicity, religion, economic background, first-generation college student status, gender, sexuality, disability, and differing political perspectives, among other measures. He will report to Rose and will serve as a member of the College’s senior staff.
“Michael’s impressive record of accomplishment in shaping institutional change, combined with his leadership and strategic planning expertise in both higher education and the private sector, make him the ideal person to take our inclusion and diversity efforts to a new level at Bowdoin,” said Rose. “He knows the liberal arts, and he knows how to work with and guide others to adapt and to navigate cultural changes at both the interpersonal and organizational level. He was a standout in our search to fill this new position, and the unanimous and enthusiastic choice of our search committee. I look forward to welcoming Michael and his partner, Allison Thorner, to Bowdoin and to collaborating with him to deepen our existing commitment to inclusion and diversity at the College.”
From 2006 to 2014, Reed served as vice president and a member of the senior leadership team at Williams College, his alma mater. He established Williams’s Office for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity and helped implement a plan for expanding institutional inclusion and diversity, working with stakeholder groups including students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the board of trustees to help articulate, develop, and implement strategic approaches to diversity. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Reed also served as interim vice president for alumni relations and development at Williams.
Most recently, Reed served as vice president, institutional initiatives at Dickinson College, where he was also chief diversity officer and deputy Title IX officer (2014-2017). His primary focus was guiding and coordinating institutional efforts to increase inclusion, diversity, and equity within Dickinson and in the broader community. During his tenure, Dickinson saw the largest increase in faculty diversity in its history. Reed was also responsible for supporting the president and senior staff in coordinating and implementing Dickinson’s strategic and operational directives.
Reed cofounded the Liberal Arts Diversity Officer (LADO) consortium, a vehicle for chief diversity officers working in liberal arts settings to collaborate and learn from one another, and to provide leadership in implementing and publicizing effective diversity strategies in higher education. Twenty-eight liberal arts colleges are now LADO members.
Reed also established and led Consulting Works, LLC, where he conducted culture change and diversity workshops for clients both domestic and international, including educational institutions, nonprofits, and local and federal governments.
He has also been a member of the Williams College Board of Trustees (2004-2006) and president of the Nation’s Capital Child and Family Development board of directors (2002-2009).
Reed earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology at Williams, a master’s in educational psychology at Howard University, and a certificate from Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management.
2 thoughts on “Reed Named Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity at Bowdoin College”
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Congrats to Dr Reed.
10 years before my time at Bowdoin, I was one of the little brothers described by John Edgar Wideman in his book Brothers and Keepers. It was at Liberty Elementary school near the Homewood/East Liberty hood in Pittsburrgh. We lived diverstiy and racism in that pressure cooker. We experienced the Pirates victory in 1960 just a couple miles away. We watched the Kennedy assassination on a black and white classroom TV. We were brothers and sisters.
So, I think Dr Reed may appreciate this.
HERE WE GO STEELERS HERE WE GO!
Barry Browning ’73 says “Kudos to Eric ’73!”.
Stumbled across the Morehouse visits to Bowdoin as our son now working on the “Dynasty” set in Atlanta. And my wife Ann’s & my K-12 Educators set include any number of Afro professionals who have here in the South, done twice to three times what others may have done, in order to progress at the same rate, in their careers. And we network with them to get kids moved upwards through the system. Our own “underground railroad”, so to speak. And one of Bowdoin’s biggest weaknesses in this respect is, that the greater Bowdoin community DOES NOT NETWORK EFFECTIVELY. No excuse, now that we have a “Harvard Business Case Study” guy at the top. We should look seriously at the top of the heap in this, and copy Stanford’s model for doing this. Not much of a point, matriculating races & ethnicities previously under-represented, if we all don’t help ALL of us NETWORK and be MENTORED into such places of success as thrive on both. Bowdoin taught me to care, and to support in any way I can, “the Common Good”. Imagine what we might have accomplished, had I known what Bowdoin Brother Eric has just told us all, about himself. And imagine what we can accomplish now, if Eric & I, and many others, can get in touch, and stay in touch.
“Just-sayin””
Barry
Post Scriptum:
Dr Reed and others might be interested to know that my late father, who was FBI trained as a D.C. Patrolman, walked three beats before the war, in the Howard Theater District, “and learned so much from being there”. And Barry grew up in our South County Rhode Island potato fields, working with our brothers,the descendants of Rhode Island’s slave trade, and members of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Native Peoples. There’s a lot of collective knowledge for us to share among ourselves, which we were not able to share in four short years at Bowdoin. High-time to start doing it now???