After 12 years as the Director of the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center (BAIC), Inés Maturana Sendoya is leaving Boston College to become the Associate Dean of Students for Inclusion and Engagement at Wellesley College.
In an email to The Heights, Sendoya said that July 2 marked her last day at BC and that she is moving to Wellesley for career progression.
Vice President for Student Affairs Barb Jones, who is set to retire this summer, told The Heights she anticipates that the position will be filled “sometime in the fall” as the approval process for sending out the request to fill Sendoya’s position is still in progress.
Sendoya started at BC in 2002 as an Associate Director of BAIC, and became its director in 2006. In this role, she has been responsible for overseeing the many social and academic programs that BAIC runs for its students, according to her website.
In 2013, BC conducted a climate survey developed jointly by BAIC and the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs that aimed to focus on campus diversity. As the results were being considered, Sendoya told The Heights in 2013 that the survey could be used as a mechanism to understand how the University could better serve its AHANA+ students.
“For us, this is a way in which we continue understanding the student experience, and also it’s a tool for us to figure out ways to do a better job in terms of creating a climate that is welcoming to all students, and where all students feel that they are part of Boston College,” she said.
Sendoya’s departure comes after a year of student protests and activism calling on the University to, among other requests, reevaluate the programs it has in place for instruction on diversity and inclusion on campus.
In response, the University has announced it will implement a DiversityEDU module for all undergraduate students, and that it will work with the Office of Institutional Research to develop a new climate survey to obtain information on diversity and inclusion.
Featured Image via Heights Archives
