Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in April 2021 undergraduate student Gabrielle Villadolid (C’21) interviewed Tamara Setiady, assistant director for the office of community service and Magis support faculty at Magis Center for Equity and Inclusion in Saint Ignatius College Preparatory (SI), San Francisco, California, United Staets. In this interview, Setiady discusses how Magis plays a role in the school’s equity, inclusion, and racial justice efforts.
Would you mind re-introducing yourself, telling me a little bit about what you’re currently doing and what your connection to Magis is?
My name is Miss Tamara Setiady and at SI I work as the assistant director for the Office of Community Service and Social Justice. I also provide social and cultural support to the Magis program. I also support the alumni volunteer corps program as a program coordinator and my connection to the Magis office started when I began working at our school five years ago in 2016, and my role is primarily to support our students in the Magis program as well as students outside of the Magis program in our larger community, particularly around issues of identity formation, as well as building community in the Magis Center among the Magis high school students. So a few ways that I have supported the center to do that was by hosting a first year retreat for incoming ninth grade students who are Magis-identified to get them to know each other and get them connected to the resources we have.
Another thing I’m currently working on is the Magis end-of-the-year celebration for our seniors who are about to graduate and go on to college. And we honor at that celebration the affinity groups, their moderators, and the seniors who are going to college, and many of them are first gen so it’s a very exciting thing. So those are some of the things that I’ve done. In the past I’ve helped with Magis movie days, so showing different films that have a social justice focus or focus on a particular race, identity or sort of social issue that’s upcoming with accompanying discussion. And some films that we’ve watched in the past are like Beyonce’s Lemonade, The Hate U Give, to name a few. Yeah, those are most of my connections to Magis.
Thank you, and pre-pandemic, how often did you visit the Magis Center’s physical location during your time at SI?
Oh, I would say that I would be in the Magis Center a minimum of maybe twice a week, but I would also more often meet individually with Ms. Hernandez, the director, or Mr. Brian Davis, the associate director. More individually, they come to my office, so for the Magis Center I would go there maybe twice a week but more often those individuals would come into my office.
And thinking back to when you would go into the Magis Center, what did you notice about the space, and how did your observations about this make you feel?
That’s an interesting question because the Magis office space changed quite a bit from when I first started working at SI to the current Magis space. So it used to be a smaller space and then the Magis Center acquired the space next to it and the school demolished the wall in between the original Magis space and the new space. And so, the Magis Center, when I first walked into it, felt very cozy and intimate and it had a lot of bean bag chairs and typically a lot of students working in there, doing homework or just chatting within friendly adults, eating food sometimes, and often just hanging out with their friends, so a variety of students in different levels of like, work. But also on the walls often are decorations like college pennant flags or sometimes inspirational quotes, things like that that really help students feel like their goals are attainable to attend college and to help themselves feel inspired and seen. And also there’s some pictures and posters of historical figures that have worked for social justice, and I think those are something that—the hope is to help students help themselves feel like their own history is being represented.
Could you describe what your participation in Magis activities was like? You already hinted at them at the beginning of our conversation, but if you could elaborate a little more about what that participation was and how your participation with Magis activities makes you feel?
Yeah like I said in the beginning, my role is to help build community as well as support students in their identity formation, so helping out with the freshman retreat, first year student retreat, whatever we’re calling it, and the end-of-the-year celebration to honor our seniors and other things I participated on are the Magis Southern Californa college tour, so accompany last year a group of students to tour colleges. I would say how participating in these programs made me feel is really challenged, to be honest. Obviously very joyful and excited to support our students but also very challenged to consider the discrepancy in equity issues that some Magis students face due to economic circumstances and also just due to discrimination and barriers to access to things like SAT tutors that some other students who aren’t Magis identified have, or just the resources that come from having parents—two parents, or people in your family who have attended college.
I think that’s something that has lead me to feel challenged, not in a negative way, but certainly like, I feel for our students a sense of empathy, because that’s not my personal experience necessarily going through high school. But I also feel really hopeful. The Magis Center and the Magis activities have always made me feel like there’s a strong sense of community and a strong sense of investing in each other as resources to uplift and support each other in these goals, which are not often the same goals as has been attained by people and in people’s families, so, yeah.
Thank you, and what impressions do you have about how other students, faculty, and other members of the SI Community interact with the Magis space or the activities?
I think a couple things come to mind. One, I think that students who are not, who don’t identify as BIPOC, some of them feel like the Magis space is not their space, and so I think there’s this like, awkwardness or this sort of like, unspoken or maybe spoken feeling or maybe taboo feeling of entering the Magis space because if I’m not part of Magis, I’m not an affinity group member, maybe that isn’t the space for me. So I noticed that some students feel that way. But when it comes to larger Magis programming such as affinity group meetings, there might be students who don’t necessarily go into Magis on a daily or weekly basis but I’ve noticed that when we have those events, lots of students—and sometimes those that are in the Magis Center, sometimes those that are not—lots of students feel comfortable, like, being together being in that space, but specifically for programming reasons, specifically because they’re there for an affinity group meeting. There’s been a lot of conversation about how to make sure people know that the space is for everybody, the Magis Center is for everybody, but Magis programming is also—and some of it is very specific to Magis students, so I think there’s some confusion there and so some students who don’t identify as BIPOC or as Magis profile might not want to enter the Magis space.
And do you have any impressions about other faculty or other, perhaps maybe adults in the SI community—what impressions they have about Magis?
Yeah. I think it’s very varied. Just like in the world, there are a lot of people with a lot of different views and prior to my arrival at SI, so prior to 2016, there was a really robust Magis Middle School program that a lot of SI faculty and the high school taught in during the summer. So I think prior to 2016, there was a lot of, sort of a spirit of community, a spirit of excitement, and spirit of-of wanting to, from faculty, to want to extend themselves to get to know this new generation of potential SI students or potential, just like, brilliant young middle school minds, and I think that when the Magis Middle School program was terminated in 2016, that created a lot of just negative feelings from a number of faculty members and even ones who weren’t involved with Magis, so I think that that made people feel really sad, disillusioned, and concerned about our school’s trajectory with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And also sad because our school committed to some families whose kids were in sixth or seventh grade and they wouldn’t be able to continue with the program moving forward, so I think there was some feelings of disappointing or letting down families who were really invested in us.
More recently, I would say, like after 2017, 2016, newer faculty I think probably feel very mixed or unsure of what Magis is. Some of them I think, come in with that lens and other faculty, I think, have been perhaps like, unsure or unclear to the purpose or the population that the Magis Center serves, so I think that there are some faculty who are perhaps just more curious and have asked, and there are some other faculty, I think, who are, who think that the Center only serves a very small demographic of our student body.
Thank you. And in light of your experience with Magis, what did the Magis Center’s descriptors equity and inclusion mean to you?
That’s a tough question. Yeah. When I think about equity, I think a lot about the issue of, I think about the graphic that we show a lot in a lot of our religion classes or our social science classes of someone standing on a small box, a shorter person sitting on a small box to look at a baseball game or someone who’s just quite tall and can see over the fence and to watch the baseball game, so I think about, just, I think a lot about privilege and power and access. I think about what differences between someone who, by virtue of their positionality, has greater access to certain resources and then folks who may be on a spectrum have less or different access to it. And so when I think of equity, I think of providing the resources that everybody needs according to their needs. And some people might need more right? And some people might have access to that by virtue of some other privilege and stuff that they have.
And in inclusion, I think of the work of building a community where not just people are tolerated or accepted or there’s some sort of multicultural appreciation, but there’s a true sense of our community being open and welcoming and seeing people for all of their identities. So I think one example that I think about is making language accessible, so introducing ourselves with our pronouns, not just assuming that people’s pronouns are, you know, he and she, and that there might be some other folk who identify as gender nonbinary or trans or other. And some other things I think about with regards to inclusivity is recognizing the intersection of our many identities, so I think of opportunities for students to go be a part of multiple affinity groups or for students to recognize the ways in which our different communities have historically worked for justice as opposed to against or in competition with one another.
Also I think about curriculum, particularly with equity and inclusion, since we are an academic institution, I think of our students having themselves see themselves represented in our curriculum. So when I think of inclusion, I think of teaching history from the perspective of historically marginalized communities as well as equipping teachers with curriculum and tools and perspectives to help all our students feel seen and be seen and represented in what they’re learning in their classes.
Thank you for your reflections on that. And related to your Magis experience, what does the actual term “magis” mean to you?
Yeah, “magis” comes from Ignatian Spirituality, it’s a term that in Latin means “the more,” and I think that there are a lot of different interpretations of what that means, even in our school community among folks who share some of that language. To me personally, I think magis means to dig deeper into who we are as people already, not to like, do more, like get better grades or read more books, because that’s sort of the nature of a college prep school already, but more just means going deeper into who we are, so that we can be more to who we are. And I think about this slogan that Ms. Vaccaro has that’s on a lot of Magis T-shirts that says, “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” and it’s like a Magis sort of slogan and what that means to me is the sense of perseverance and that we’re sharing sort of the challenge and the joy of what it means to be first gen, to be coming from an underrepresented background, to be on financial aid at our school, to kind of leverage each other as resources so that we can go higher and not be deterred by either social pressures or single stories of what it means to be a private school, San Francisco Bay Area dwelling student, and to leverage the cultural and social wealth from our own communities of color as opposed to trying to shed that in order to fit another stereotype, so, long winded answer to what Magis means to me.
And what connection, if any, do you perceive between equity and inclusion and Magis?
I—there’s such a clear connection to me, it’s super obvious to me that “magis” or this idea of “more” and the more in the sense of giving to God as well as digging deeper to equity and inclusion because I think that equity and inclusion really talks about seeing ourselves as a larger community expanding kinship, expanding who we are so that everyone can see themselves represented. And equity is about access, about giving people the ability to get to the table and magis is about that. Magis is about digging deeper, connecting with ourselves so that we can know who we are, but also ask for what we want and also that there’s a sense of community and kind of transcendence that happens when people from these identities connect and I think build a bit more of God’s vision for the world, rooted in sort of justice as well as owning who we are most deeply as people, right, and sharing those stories.
Thank you. And if any, what connection do you perceive between equity and inclusion and specifically the aspect of racial justice?
I think that’s what racial justice is all about right now, it’s about raising awareness about the different issues with regards to equity that different folks have based on the way that they’re grouped or their identity has been minoritized in our country. I think a lot of the inequity and issues of feeling excluded have come from white supremacy and the way that has functioned to create a social strata in our society, and so racial justice is about standing against this hierarchy. And this sort of imbalance of power and... and ways that people have been perceived of as other and perceived as less than human, so I think racial justice is about imagining a more equitable society that builds on historical knowledge of why different groups have faced different issues so, for me, I think about the issue currently facing the Asian community, and one of the things that the Magis Center has done to try to raise awareness about what’s going on in the Asian American community by hosting an event for our Asian identifying students, and I think that’s helped students recognize the inequities faced by Asian communities for a long time as well as trying to imagine a more inclusive world, like what can we do to build allyship for folks who don’t identify as Asian to help them support us in our journey. So yeah.
In the context, as you touched upon, of the contemporary social justice movements that are going on today, such as those related to COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Stop Asian Hate, what meaning does the Magis Center carry for you? Has its meaning changed for you in the context of these times?
Yeah I think that the Magis Center to me means more—more than—means significant, more than ever to me in my work at SI, especially last year for me as an Asian, someone who identifies as Asian-American during the Black Lives Matter movement, I was recognizing the ways in which different groups in our school community, we’re not necessarily tied into what was going on in the larger world with Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Armaud Arbery, and within that there were different communities of BIPOC individuals feeling different emotions. So a lot of Asian folks were recognizing pain, like the anti-Black racism is really similar to some of the stuff that’s been happening in our community, and this is before the Stop Asian Hate movement started to ignite. And I think there was also ample opportunity and ripe conversation for SI students to imagine themselves—BIPOC students to imagine themselves as allies to our Black community here. So Magis really helped facilitate those spaces, even with the pandemic last summer over zoom, and I know that that created like, it was really difficult to do, to create like a safe space online, and to me more than ever Magis is not just this important thing we have to give kids some resources, like, hey here’s a printer and here’s like, some SAT flashcards but really to be at the forefront of our school’s conversation as a whole community about racial justice.
We’re coming to the end of our questioning or my questions. So my last question is, is there anything else that you believe is relevant to this conversation that you would like to talk about or that I have not asked yet?
Yeah, I think one thing that I would say is that I think our school right now, in this moment, in April 2021 is at a real crossroads with regards to its mission in identity and our commitment to being the school that lives out the gospel of who Jesus is and balancing that historically with who the school has served, which is a historically white and male population, and recognizing the opportunity to recruit and retain students and faculty who identify as BIPOC and be responsive out of our commitment to the gospel, to racial injustice and to really take down folks from their crosses or walk with people who are being crucified. And I think that the combination of our historic who we are as an institution and that’s deeply connected with our donor base, right, so our donor base maybe is not, does not look the same as our current student body, and as well as the opportunity to try to be responsive out of a place of Christianity in our Christian identity.
I think that all of those things have put our school at a really unique crossroads not unique to many other private institutions and private Jesuit institutions, but I think it’s an opportunity that’s kind of risky and an opportunity that could go many ways, and my hope is that our school and the formation we do with adults in faculty as well as parents and donors builds more recognition and acknowledgement of the way that the Magis Center is who we are as a Catholic Jesuit school and that supporting the Magis Center is only going to build a more inclusive and dynamic education for everybody at SI, not just students of color, faculty of color, or families of color. Because Magis serves our whole community and there are Magis students who identify as white too, so it’s not just in terms of racial justice for folks who identify as BIPOC. So that’s all I wanted to say as my final closing.
Thank you so much Ms. Setiady.
