Career Fair Apology and Action

To our Western community,

Among Western’s core values is a commitment to ensuring that our students have a healthy and safe environment in which to live and learn. As the Career Services Center (CSC), we recently failed to meet up to those values and wish to extend an apology to our campus community, especially those who were adversely affected by an event that we held last month.

On February 9^th, CSC sponsored an “All Industries” Career Fair in the VU Multipurpose Room, which included employer participation from Border Patrol as well as some local police departments. There have been social media inferences that we “invited” these agencies to our fair. We’d like to clarify that this is not the case. CSC utilizes the Handshake platform – a national platform - to market our fairs and other events to more than 750,000 employers around the world and to agencies who have particularly tagged Western for updates, including many businesses in our local, state, and regional area.

We recognize that as a department we did not provide adequate notice that Border Patrol would be at the career fair, and that this particularly impacts our students who identify as undocumented or mixed-status. As a result, we created an environment that kept some students from feeling that they could safely attend the fair or even being in proximity to the event.

We further acknowledge that this error on our part has created an atmosphere of mistrust. We have met with Executive Board members of the WWU Blue Group and student staff from the Blue Resource Center to extend our deepest apologies. We appreciate the time and energy they took to meet with us. We are committed to continuing our work with student leadership and our colleagues in the Office of Multicultural Student Services (MSS) to help restore trust in CSC, improve the career fair experience, outline and act on additional ways we can support undocumented and mixed-status students with their career goals and aspirations, and to generally improve on our practices and policies.

Prior to the February 9 career fair, CSC had already requested to participate in the Undocumented Student Support Workgroup created by MSS. CSC and MSS are actively working together to include a CSC staff member in that group. We are also committed to moving “all-industry” fairs to another location, to being intentional about the placement of employers’ tables at those events, and to engaging actively with employers from agencies of concern about Western’s values and their potential participation. We expect additional action steps to be identified as we continue our discussions with MSS staff and student leadership.

It is the intention of the CSC to offer career fairs and services that are inclusive and welcoming to all members of our campus community and we will take measures to meet that intention. We recognize that we still have much to learn and to incorporate in our work. Thank you for supporting us as we further engage in this work.

Effie Eisses, Director 
Career Services Center

Sara Wilson, Executive Director 
Student Success Initiatives Unit