The faculty and staff at New England College shuffles often with retirements, promotions, and new positions taking some out and adding others in. Keeping faculty diverse is just as important as keeping students diverse.
Rowan Queathem, the newest Assistant Director of Diversity, is one of the freshest faces on NEC’s campus. He knows the rural setting well, having attended an undergraduate program at Grinnell College in Iowa, which was “in the middle of nowhere.” In those years, and through his graduate degree, he fell in love with small schools, “You’re not just a number, everyone knows everyone. It makes it easier to make those interpersonal connections.”
Those connections inspired Queathem to do diversity work in other schools, explaining that his LGBTQ+ Center at Grinnell made all the difference when he was coming out as transgender. Without that community, he wouldn’t have felt connected to a larger group of people like him outside of Iowa, “It was so important having the LGBTQ+ center at my school for support as I was figuring all that out.”
That “planted the seeds” for his future at NEC.
But his interest wasn’t only in LGBTQ+ issues, social justice as a whole is his focus, “a lot of my academic work focused…on racial justice, and disability justice, mental health and by the time I graduated, I was a little bit uncertain of where my path was going to go from there.”
Although he wasn’t sure how to, Queathem had a strong urge to “pay it forward,” and help other people who might not be as lucky with LGBTQ+ support on their campus.
Leaving his graduate program in the Bay Area with a Masters degree in Theology and a certificate in Sexuality and Religion, Queathem had seen both sides of the spectrum: being LGBTQ+ in Iowa and San Francisco.
And this, more than anything, inspired him to return to a small school. While he thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community in cities like Oakland and Berkeley, he knew it wasn’t a place financially available for all LGBTQ+ people and wanted to bring the resources large cities offered to queer people in places like Iowa.
“I needed to go back to a more rural community, somewhere where I could help other people feel more connected to this larger community,” Queathem explained.
So, he applied to many colleges across the country and NEC was a fit. Looking towards the future, he wants to work with faculty and student leaders, hoping that together they can establish the type of support he found in Iowa, making the world friendlier one school at a time.
“It felt important to find some way of giving back.”
