Women’s Center continues search for new leadership

Hope Freeman will continue her work as the interim director for the Women’s Center after stepping in during November 2018 to fill the opening left by former director K. Martinez.

A committee to search for a new candidate is not currently active as the Office of Student Affairs considers a reorganization of the Group of Six, specifically within the Women’s Center, according to Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon. McMahon said that there will continue to be changes in the coming months, hopefully with the outcome of hiring a new director.

Freeman is also the full-time director of the Tufts LGBT center, where she has worked for the past several years on promoting inclusion of LGBTQ individuals on campus, according to a March 9, 2017 Tufts Daily article.

With the addition of her recent role in the Women’s Center, Freeman explained that she has had to split her time between centers.

“What I’ve been trying to do is when I am thinking about the LGBT Center, I am also thinking about the Women’s Center," Freeman said. "I’m making sure [that] students, staff and interns feel supported, and that there is someone that students directly can reach out to get the support they need around their programming.”

Freeman noted the need for the centers to have bigger budgets and more professional staff. She explained how the students working in the centers play a key role in ensuring that the centers run successfully, but she stressed the need for more organization and permanent structure.

“We need people doing more specific assigned tasks, not one or two people doing a million tasks,” Freeman said.

Freeman explained why she decided to accept the position.

“[I wanted to make sure] the Women’s Center was on everyone’s mind and that the staff and administration were still talking about and thinking of the Women’s Center," Freeman said. "That was what the director’s role was supposed to support. So I wanted to make sure the Women’s Center still had a voice in the room.”

Freeman explained that while LGBTQ rights and inclusion are her passion, she wanted to make sure that the Women’s Center was not left behind.

“[I] wanted to make sure that demographic [women], which makes up about 53 to 55 percent of the Tufts population, was heard, because that’s actually pretty significant," Freeman said. "We want to make sure our largest population of a marginalized group is not being left out and not being talked about.”

Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Nandi Bynoe explained why the Center appointed Freeman as interim director rather than continuing the search for a new director.

“We are hoping in her interim director role that she is there as support for the students at the Women’s Center, keeping voices amplified and maintaining a consistent presence while we look for a permanent director,” Bynoe said of Freeman.

The focus of the Women’s Center has also changed to reflect the current political climate and representations of identity in society, according to McMahon.

"There is a national conversation about what’s happening with women’s centers,” she said. She explained that the search committee is evaluating questions like, “Who do we want to be? What do our students need? What kind of structure do we have right now?”

The center has taken a step back after the pause in the candidate process to ensure that this restructuring will work best to support the students and other partners in the Group of Six, McMahon said. The search process for the new director has led the board to think about other options that Tufts could take for the Women’s Center.

“We are stepping back, looking at the structure and using what we had learned from the search process," McMahon said. "We are taking the opportunity to understand our center model, get student feedback and get input from partners and stakeholders across the university, to get a sense of what’s the best structure moving forward.”

Freeman emphasized the need for the candidate to be someone who embraces this restructuring as well as the spectrum of identities that contribute to the Women’s Center and the other centers in the Group of Six.

“The role of the director is being able to vision, think more largely and broadly about missions and values, being able to compare and contrast, move and shuffle the pieces that best work for the center and the university,” Freeman said.

She emphasized the importance of “focusing on people within this already marginalized group who still don’t necessarily have their voices at the table — trans women, non-binary women, femmes, women of color, and people of different socioeconomic backgrounds.”

While the type of leader and the date for when the position will be announced is still being decided, Bynoe stressed the importance of making sure the Office of Student Affairs finds the right candidate.

“We want to be careful and thoughtful about who we have in that position so that they’re successful here, rather than be hasty and have someone who is not as good of a fit,” Bynoe said.