By Zaria Nabinett
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Although considered a day of tranquility among Towson University students, Friday is the busiest day of the week for Shaunna Payne Gold.
Gold is the assistant provost of Diversity and Inclusion, the first African American to wear the title at Towson. In November, she will be the first to train faculty on such hotbed issues as multiculturalism, racism, race and gender identity.
On this Friday, however, Gold reflected on a Brown Bag session she recently hosted called “Intergroup Dialogue.” The event had been held two days earlier in the Liberal Arts building with the goal of teaching faculty to “read” students who may feel uncomfortable during certain conversations and then assist them in developing an awareness of both their own identity and others.
“There is a way to engage people in meaningful ways that they’d never forget it,” said Gold, explaining the session was designed to showcase the multicultural and diversity-related scholarly activities taking place on campus.
Gold said there are conflicting perspectives between marginalized groups – people perceived to be undesirable because of social class, race, skin color or religious affiliation – and the status quo or privileged groups. Using a power point during the session, she explained marginalized people may focus on impact and patterns, while those considered privileged focus on intent and individual acts. For these reasons, she said dialogue between both groups create a rift in everyday conversation, especially on campus and in the workplace.
The assistant provost pointed to one definition of intergroup dialogue: “a face-to-face facilitated conversation between members of two or more groups that strive to create new levels of understanding, relation, and action…encourages direct and exchange about contentious issues, especially those associated with social identity and social stratification.”
Multiculturalism, gender identity and race are such heavy subjects for a woman more popularly described as “a multifaceted athlete with experience as an Ironman 70.3 triathlete, certified Level 1 and Level 2 U.S. Masters Swimming coach, certified Adult-Learn-to-Swim instructor, and multiple-time marathoner” in the website Outspoken Summit.
Even her office shows another side to Gold, who exudes confidence while offering a warm and friendly smile to those around her. Positioned on her office windowsill are pictures of her husband Adam Payne and two boys, Trai and Kendrick, aged 8 and 5 respectively. Documents litter her desk, including a large black binder with “Intergroup Dialogue” (IGD) plastered on the spine.
As Gold sat comfortably behind her desk, she talked freely about her life growing up in Altavista, Virginia, a small town where her mother took piano lessons at the local church. Her mother eventually began to teach her piano and other instruments. Gold said she was certain she wanted a degree in music.
“Music, food, and church,” Gold said, proudly listing the things she enjoys the most.
Gold was the first in her family to earn an undergraduate degree from James Madison University. She switched her major from music to business, and eventually, to marketing and computer information systems. She pursued Campus Ministry at nearby Eastern Mennonite University, and it was from this Harrisonburg, Virginia site that Gold became focused on diversity and inclusion among the various cultures across campuses. She joined mission trips, where she learned Spanish and Latin, and studied abroad in Madrid, where she graduated with a master’s degree in Divinity.
Eventually she landed at the University of Virginia as a new campus minister.
“During that time, there were 23 different denominations of campus ministers,” Gold said. “Each one of us had the opportunity to have a sermon that you were assigned one Sunday per year. I had my one and, of course, my one Sunday was the Sunday after the Virginia Tech shooting.”
During the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, 27 students and five faculty members were murdered by Seung Hui Cho. Cho, a Virginia Tech student, committed suicide soon after. The shooting has been described as a massacre, one of the deadliest school shooting in the United States.
“That was really impactful for me because, even though I was at the University of Virginia, there was a lot of overlap between UVA and Virginia Tech faculty and students,” she said. “It was a direct connection, which was pretty profound. Trying to help people reconcile what happened in a very brief time period, it was very tough.”
Gold earned a doctorate at George Washington University, in Higher Education Administration – in just three years when the national average is seven. Gold first became a facilitator for “Words of Engagement,” also known as “IGD,” at the University of Maryland, College Park. She transferred her skills in January to Towson University, where “IGD” was embedded in her job description.
Gold said she accepts her status as a successful woman but mainly because she can do what she loves, not necessarily because of monetary benefits.
“From [her parents] perspective, graduating from high school and being an independent adult was success to them,” she said, noting that her mother was a bank teller and father, an electrician. “Then I got my college degree and that was like, you know, not their wildest dreams, but that put a cap on it. Master’s was like, ‘okay this is great, but why are we doing this extra?’ Then, doctorate was like ‘wait what? We don’t even understand what’s going on here.’”
During the Brown Bag session, titled Multiculturalism in Action, Gold noted that racial incidents and harassment occurs on college campuses more often than known. In the wake of the presidential election, it was fitting for the provost to share insight about what misfortunes come with such events on Towson’s campus.
Faculty, she said, must learn to transition from being a lecturer to an actual facilitator, guiding racially sensitive conversations between the marginalized and the privileged through a healthy and effective dialogue.
“Be okay with being the person who knows the least in the room because you’re there to learn anyway,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to ask any question.”
To Gold, her high school experiences helped pave the way to her current position. She remembered her Latin teacher, Debra Mason.
“She helped instill in me, ‘being an expert in your content area, community service and being concerned about people other than yourself, learn about contexts that are completely foreign to you,’” Gold reminisced.
“I love how [Mason] exposed us to culture in many ways,” she added. “She identified as a white woman from the South, raised in Georgia. She definitely taught us Latin, but then she also contextualized it for us. “For example, she invited us to her Catholic masses that used Latin in a religious environment. She believed in community service and connecting with people, so we’d go out and sing carols in the neighborhoods around my high school.”
Gold said she is confident of the success rate of the IGD model and understands it could potentially lead to a sensitive and violative issue. But she stressed that “IGD was actually birthed from racial unrest at University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. So I’m confident the model works to encourage discussion and rethinking prejudgments.”
Another example for Gold was her old music teacher, Edwin Temples.
“I think he was both exemplary about the content he taught, the way he taught it and his understanding of the different population of students in his one classroom…,” she explained. “He had this ability to rally an entire community around his music class and marching bands.”
This is the ideal goal for IGD – being able to rally an entire community around social justice, said Gold.
“I’ve definitely come across other people who’ve come across racism, so I don’t see why this model isn’t implemented in all classrooms,” said Jada Sweetney, a Towson junior. “Students should feel safe and comfortable anywhere they go.”
Senior April Davis is a PRIDE mentor coordinator for the Center for Student Diversity who admits the IGD model is new to her, but she is open minded about its impact.
“I’ve never heard of this model, but I definitely think it could be useful to a vast majority of campus community, and especially in the climate we’re in today. I’d actually love to see more professors use these sorts of techniques.”
Gold acknowledged, “Across the country, nationwide, unless it’s a minority serving institution or community college, there are not a lot of people of color in senior administrative roles at predominantly white institutions. There’s just not.”
“I get to work in the No. 2 office on the entire campus every single day. People are happy to see me and I’m to see them and we laugh and cut jokes. I just think that’s an overall blessing that I get to do that every single day.”
Towson President Kim Schatzel often struts down the hallway greeting the provosts and chatting with them.
“Some of the more memorable things are showing up to meetings within different colleges,” Gold said. “I’ve been fortunate where you don’t have to sell people why having a diverse faculty is important.”