April 6, 2021
Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,
This past week, our Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer and valued colleague, Norm Jones, let me know that he will leave his position in May to help lead a foundation that his family has recently established. Among other priorities, the foundation supports Black men pursuing leadership positions in secondary education. It was established to honor the legacy of his maternal great-grandparents. Norm’s grandfather was one of the first Black principals in Gadsden, Alabama. I know you will join me in appreciating this extraordinary opportunity for Norm, congratulating him, and wishing him well as he leads the foundation’s crucial mission in honor of his family’s ongoing legacy.
I am excited for Norm and eager to see the impact of the foundation. I am also sad to see him leave his position at the College. In this message, I want to highlight his many accomplishments over the course of his nearly five years at Amherst. We will create an opportunity for the community to celebrate and thank him in the weeks ahead.
Norm has been the College’s inaugural Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer. He has established, defined, and developed the office responsible for leading diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across multiple constituencies at the College. From the beginning, Norm advocated for a distributed model of DEI work, suggesting rightly that only its integration into all facets of the College’s operations and culture would lead to the change we want. While creating and shaping the office, he has also collaborated with alumni and colleagues across the campus to ensure the progress we have made toward our DEI goals thus far.
Norm increased the faculty diversity and inclusion officer role from one to two part-time positions and established the Office of Faculty Equity and Inclusion. Within his office, he established a position for Workforce Equity and Inclusive Leadership with responsibility for working with Human Resources to help ensure inclusive search processes, robust retention efforts, and clear measures of progress toward diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Norm has also created opportunities in his office for students interested in institutional DEI work to hone and apply their leadership skills. Under his direction, the newly launched Center for Restorative Practices was established in ODEI.
The College continues to benefit from a longstanding relationship with the Mellon Foundation; we thank Norm for taking the lead role in making Amherst one of the Foundation’s newest sites for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), which prepares undergraduate students for careers in advanced scholarship and teaching.
For his entire tenure at the College, Norm has chaired the President’s Task Force on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and recently established it as a standing committee, now called the Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. With administrative and staff colleagues, he assumed responsibility and leadership for efforts to make our community more physically accessible to students, faculty, staff, and visitors.
Norm has represented the College in a range of settings—as an invited speaker at national convenings of CFOs, grants officers, and college and university attorneys. In 2019, he was nominated and selected to be part of a cohort of higher education senior leaders in Harvard’s Institute for Education Management (IEM) and, in that same year, represented the College at the STEM Equality Congress in Amsterdam.
We are very fortunate to have had Norm’s leadership through this crucial period when work on diversity, equity, and inclusion needed the benefits of his imagination, collaboration, determination, and energy. I will launch a search for Norm‘s replacement in the next few weeks.
Please join me in thanking Norm warmly for his many contributions to the College and wishing him well in the absolutely essential work he has decided to undertake.
Sincerely,
Biddy