Goals
To realize its vision of being a globally minded conservatory of the future, Boston Conservatory has identified both long-term and short-term goals to support a more diverse and inclusive campus.
If you have ideas for helping achieve these goals, share your feedback here.
If you are able to contribute any amount to help fund this work, please consider giving a gift to the Executive Director’s Momentum Fund (EDMF). All EDMF gifts received during the 2020–2021 academic year will be dedicated to diversity initiatives at the Conservatory.
Long-Term Goals
Diversity—in all its forms—is at the center of the Conservatory’s Strategic Direction for 2020–2025. We are accelerating our work to achieve:
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Diversity of population: racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in our student, faculty, and staff populations.
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Diversity of aesthetic: reframing of Western classicism within a global context and a new immersion in a wide range of contemporary aesthetics and forms.
- Diversity of culture: a progressively inclusive curriculum and pedagogy and culturally agile student, faculty, and staff community
Boston Conservatory is undertaking a multipronged approach to realizing these goals, including:
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Academics: Boston Conservatory will reinvent its dance, theater, and music curricula to ensure structural incorporation of diverse aesthetics, voices, and perspectives by contextualizing western classicism as one living language in dialogue with many others, and framing this understanding within a global historical context. This diversity of aesthetics will be reflected in performance programming, expanding the repertoire of artistic work which our students create and perform.
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Community: Boston Conservatory will realign recruitment, admissions, and financial awarding strategies to prioritize diversity within our student body. Similarly, Boston Conservatory will broaden faculty and staff job posting visibility and refine hiring practices to secure diverse candidate pools for open positions.
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Culture: Cultural agility is a key aspect of preparing our students to reach their fullest potential as artists and as socially responsible citizens. Therefore, Boston Conservatory will pursue global partnerships and establish academic opportunities with a diverse array of organizations to provide our students with a range of cultural experiences that support their artistic development. In addition, we will utilize Berklee’s international centers to expand opportunities for students to engage with people and cultures around the world.
2021–2022 Goals
Boston Conservatory’s work towards creating a diverse and inclusive campus is ongoing and will focus on different priorities from year to year. These are the Conservatory's top goals for 2021–2022:
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Boston Conservatory at Berklee will develop new opportunities designed to make its top-tier training more widely accessible.
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Boston Conservatory at Berklee will actively promote and elevate student clubs that support the school’s diversity and inclusion values and provide important cultural communities to our student population.
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Boston Conservatory at Berklee senior leaders will establish regular meetings with student leaders and club representatives.
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To help create a diverse Conservatory community, Boston Conservatory will continue working in partnership with Berklee Human Resources to enact inclusive hiring practices for filling open faculty and staff positions, and will continue its work with Enrollment on developing comprehensive recruitment strategies to reach underrepresented communities.
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Boston Conservatory will continue its academic innovation work in all three divisions, prioritizing the development and implementation of curricula that express our institutional values of diversity and inclusion.
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At least one third of Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s 2021–2022 performance season will be composed of works by underrepresented artists.
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Boston Conservatory will provide Conservatory community members with semesterly updates on its progress around its diversity and inclusion work. For improved access and transparency, these communications will also be made available on the Boston Conservatory Diversity and Inclusion website, under a new “Community Reports” section.
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In partnership with Boston Conservatory’s executive director, the Office of Institutional Advancement will continue to seek significant philanthropic support for resources towards the diversity pillar of Boston Conservatory's Strategic Direction for 2020 to 2025.
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Boston Conservatory will commit both operational and philanthropic funds to efforts that support this year’s diversity and inclusion priorities, including but not limited to community training, guest speaker engagements, workshops, and more.