Keeping Diversity First | November 2022
By Robert Bonfiglio, assistant director for Assessment and Academic Success, MCAS
It’s a new ball game. Every month, for the past few years, I have tried to write some sentences of reflection on my professional successes and failures. As a recent college graduate stalking into the education arena, I learned quickly how informative the personal and professional are of each other.
I am a competitive individual and enamored, actually, with learning. My nature has driven me to ask questions: to be that guy in math class who stops the teacher every two minutes, to question authority often at unproductive times, to stretch intentions into other spheres of influence.
Hence, my need to sit down and take time to reflect before I got myself into too much trouble.
Once I began my formal career in education, my curiosity, beloved as a student’s attribute, turned into impertinence, bemoaned by leadership. I was not suited to shutting my classroom door and just teaching, as advised by colleagues. I was suited to recognizing gaps in students’ education – lack of access to child care, health care and education, sex education, food, language support, transportation – and advocate for policy and pedagogical change for student success. I became beholden to my own personal set of values as a mathematician and ethicist.
I am proud of where I have traveled and how I have ended up working with MCAS at RIT. I am a liberal arts (if you can call it that anymore) loyalist, through and through, and am excited by my transition into the intensity and relevance that RIT students and staff bring to their fields. Higher education, higher as in greater than second, not superior: the issues of inclusion and access are the same here as they are in secondary education. Our systems work together. I think it unlikely that I will forget my teachers and their work and their livelihoods, in the greater scheme of training our youth to react and be mindful as ideologies, morals, and faiths continue to collide within our increasingly diverse and globalized American society.
And throughout all that, I will still post in my office my signage, like in a drive-thru window, “Ethics-Social Concerns,” hoping to enculture a desire to strive for communities that can stomach a professional who looks, or communicates, or moves, differently within the workplace. “Can’t we all just get along?” as my mom would say, to student Robert. Now, professional Robert, I might answer, “Sure.” I trust, amidst all the difference, that we can.