At Haas, ‘Dialogues On Race’ More Important Than Ever

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

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