Professor Ouellette: Photograph of Karen Salvemini

Shenyi Yu
Professor Ouellette
EngL003
Section 12
Sept.26
1.0 Introduction
Lehigh University is a multicultural global institution that can be termed as a cultural ‘melting pot’ bringing together students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The university’s culture is rich and diverse, drawing on the multifaceted backgrounds of its student population. It’s an equal opportunity institution providing equal opportunities to all students regardless of gender, culture or linguistic differences. As an equal opportunity institution, the university has instituted policies and structures aimed at ensuring that its equal opportunity policy is fully institutionalized. To this end, the university has put in place various offices such as ‘The Gender Violence Education& Support’. This office provides education on topics relating to having healthy relationships and various forms of gender violence. Besides, it provides support for victims of gender violence and performs oversight on harassment, discrimination and gender violence policies. In addition, the office handles any other issue related to harassment, discrimination and gender violence. However, due to the multicultural nature of Lehigh University, multilingual students are presented with diverse challenges. Thechallenges range from cultural, gender, social to linguistic challenges. These issues are difficult to confront due to legal and cultural disparities that exist between different nations. While cultural differences make understanding of sex education and related policies difficult to understand for international students, Karen was excited to embrace the cultural differences from every international students who has come for help.
The interview that informed this essay paper was conducted inside Karen’s office. Karen is a middle aged, polite and soft spoken woman. When entering her office, she welcomed us witha broad smile that made the interview seem shorter than it actually was. After a brief introduction and interview permission, we went straight to the interview. The interviewee’s photograph is shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Photograph of Karen Salvemini
Karen works as an Equal Opportunity Compliance Coordinator in the office of the General Counsel. She reports to Frank Roth who is the university’s General Counsel. She stated that she was just one of the several other employees in the office of the General Counsel. In her explanation, Karen noted that her work did not entail provision of legal counsel but rather, her role was more ‘specific and ‘specialized’. She explained that her office specifically dealt with the “…issues of harassment, discrimination, and retaliation as well as gender violence”. In performance of her duties, Karen indicated that she works as an educator and trainer in the aforementioned four areas. In addition, her office oversees the university’s response team whenever reports relating to the four areas are received at her office. When asked whether cases of harassment are reported to her office, she observed that indeed her office exclusively deals with all cases of harassment, discrimination, retaliation and gender viol...