University of Vermont welcomed its new Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Amer Ahmed to campus this summer. With an EdD in Adult and Higher Education from the University of South Dakota, he brings nearly 20 years of experience developing strategies and support for diverse constituencies at institutions including Dickinson College; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and University of Michigan.

We sat down with Ahmed one morning, on the porch of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s new location at Allen House, on Main Street, to learn more about his vision, interests and background. The following has been edited for clarity and length. 

What excites you about the work to be done at UVM? What tangible changes are you looking forward to seeing on campus?

For as many challenges as I see, I also see progress. I am from a generation of apathy where most people around me didn't care about social issues, didn't care about what was going on in other parts of the world, didn't care about people's experiences that were very different from their own. With this generation, generally they do care, and that creates a completely different opportunity for the change we can make in the world. I think higher education is a unique vehicle for us to be able to do that and, at the University of Vermont, there are opportunities for us to cultivate students and alumni to enact it. We have a lot of good intentions, we have a lot of things we'd like to do, and I don't think we’ve fully harnessed what we have.

One of the things that we're going to do is create a cultural resource guide for prospective faculty, staff and students to know what's here in this community and what's available to them. Most people don’t expect an entire community to be oriented around them, but they do look for the things they need to make it work for themselves and for their families. If we don't do that, if we don't give people those tools, then we give them every reason in the world to choose not to be here. It's not about just talking, it's about doing; and I think that opportunity is here, which is why I'm excited to be here.

Change takes time, of course, but what is a practice we could each adopt today that might help move the needle on social justice, equity and inclusion in Vermont and beyond?

I think for me, one of the key components of this work is empathy in relation to self-awareness. How do we learn about ourselves and understand our experiences? What are our biases, our communication styles, our identities? How do we understand ourselves in the world and are we able to reflect, learn and empathize with an experience very different from our own and validate it as true for someone else?

Empathy does not require agreement—it acknowledges that something is true to someone else. When we invalidate someone's experience that they say is true to them, it makes it very difficult to build trust; and, therefore, that person may close off or disengage, and be less open to what you have to offer. A lot of times, we just have to get a little bit deeper into what opens human beings up to the unfamiliar, to what's different, to what's challenging.

The Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion recently launched a new advisory committee of representatives across all our academic and administrative units. What is the University Diversity Council and how does that work?

I'm looking forward to the process of working with the University Diversity Council to embed the work of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into every aspect of the University of Vermont’s culture. There's a shared responsibility amongst every member of our community to recognize that we have work to do in our respective areas of the institution—that it is no singular person's responsibility. It's my job to help everyone act on that work, not to do it for them. This is a step toward a deeply embedded commitment to share that responsibility, work together and harness and leverage the resources, tools and abilities of our entire community. We're not going to be able to get there without that commitment and so I'm excited about working with a group of people from nearly every unit and department to enact that together.

This work isn’t for the faint of heart—how did you get into this field? What keeps you going?

I grew up in Ohio with Muslim parents who were immigrants from India. I went to a public high school where most people didn't go to college, in an environment that was either white or black, and I was neither. I studied abroad in South Africa on a campus in Durban, which has the largest Indian population outside of India, during the Truth and Reconciliation process when Mandela was president. I suddenly had a racial place between this dynamic of white and black where people had grown up in complete racial segregation. They didn't know how to socialize with one another, didn't know how to talk to one another, didn’t know how to interact. It was incredibly foreign to them, and I was there with three other Americans—two were black and one was white—and we would walk around together looking like a diversity advertisement for the new South Africa.

That shaped me, inspired me, and motivated me as I continued with cultural anthropology and Black studies and became an administrator. Advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in institutions was kind of my method, my outlet, to connect more broadly with students while working to show them ways we can learn and understand one another, how that can shape us, influence us, and impact and define what we do with our lives—because I was one of those students.

I feel like it's an honor and a privilege to do this work. It's challenging, but the fact that this is what I get to do with my life and live into my purpose—I'm not saying it's all perfect—that’s what keeps me motivated, inspired and energized for the work.

Word on campus is that you’re also pretty talented with spoken word poetry and hip-hop. Is that true?

I first started writing when I was in South Africa where I was just experiencing so much, processing so much, and I had no other outlet. There wasn't a climate of people who were expressing themselves in those ways. I was shaped and influenced by the time, when suddenly this slam poetry scene was emerging. Part of what I started to think about was how do I support voices but also, practically, how do we translate these messages into action? As I engaged the Hip-Hop activist community, I heard a lot of people with great messages but they weren't always walking the walk in what they were saying, or it wasn't translating into anything concrete or opportunities for people who were doing that work to make concrete change. It was through the Hip-Hop activist movement that I started speaking to my generation about creating change. Once I started working on these campuses, what could be more effective than using Hip-Hop in getting students engaged or active? 

Want more? Check out his recommended reading for extra credit:

If you could require campus to engage with one piece of content in this subject, what would it be and why? 

The book that I'm reading right now. It’s called “Nice Racism” by Robin diAngelo (2021 Penguin Random House) about how progressive white people perpetuate racial harm. Part of the reason why I think this book is so important is because I think that we have gotten into a state of believing that equity and inclusion are more connected to partisan politics than we realize. It recognizes the ways in which white supremacy has functioned and operated in the United States, historically, as a relative-scale debate amongst white America about the relative enfranchisement of everybody else. It's push and pull, back and forth, between that and the intersection of race and class. I grew up in an environment with a lot of poor white folks, but that doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist just because there are many poor white folks in this country. Race is a strategy of division that has always pitted poor white folks against people of color. We can't really transcend and move through to a new pluralistic racial reality that’s healed as a country until we reconcile.