Another Fascinating Woman: The other speaker was Brenda Allen, the associate provost and director of institutional diversity at Brown. Not only was her talk absolutely intoxicating (I felt like I was back at Macalester) but our break out group discussion was wonderful, talking about how we can create diversity in alumni relations, while also fostering "specialized" options for ethnic, gender, etc groups. Such a rich conversation. Then, as dinner was kind of wrapping up, I got into a conversation with 3 other people about race, our upbringings, etc. We finally looked around the room at around 9:30 and realized we were the only people left in the room! Wonderful!