At the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, it’s not hard to get people thinking about diversity and inclusion: They already are. The challenge for the chief diversity officers, other administrators, professors, and students who met here last week lies back home — keeping those ideals on colleagues’ and classmates’ minds every day, not just when prompted by a complaint or a scandal.
While many colleges now have top-level administrators and offices devoted to diversity, a hot topic of conversation here was how to make it a campuswide priority. For all students and employees to feel included, everyone has to be involved.
That means those committed to inclusion have to be strategic in working with fellow staff, faculty, and students to build a diverse, welcoming community. And they have to cultivate the involvement of top administrators, linking diversity efforts to the institution’s broader goals. For example, in an era when enrollment is a challenge for many colleges, and students’ success is under ever more scrutiny, attracting and retaining more students from underrepresented minority groups can help increase tuition revenue as well as serve a greater mission.
National attention to racist incidents like a fraternity’s chant at the University of Oklahoma in March, conference participants said, has helped drive a new wave of discussions across campuses on making diversity efforts more effective.
Such incidents highlight how much work there is to be done, said Victoria Sanchez, assistant vice provost for educational equity at Pennsylvania State University. “Now people beyond diversity offices are at a point of saying, How do we do this work?”
Reaching Across Campus
While more and more colleges have established diversity offices, they are often small. Some conference participants represented solo operations. One diversity officer said during a session that, after a recent reorganization, she led a staff of three for a state system that enrolls about 60,000 students.
And diversity work encompasses a vast array of questions and challenges for a broad population of students, including racial and ethnic minority groups, the LGBTQ community, and the disabled. Diversity offices often oversee a portfolio of scholarship, student-support, and cultural programs, in addition to helping other departments think through diversity goals. Because administrators see so much work to be done, they are often tempted to take on more responsibilities, several participants here noted.
Marco J. Barker, senior director for education, operations, and initiatives in the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, counseled people in small offices to “edit what you do.” A handful of well-run programs with a demonstrable effect on diversity or campus climate are worth more to everyone than trying to do too much, he said, and doing little of it well.
He also urged participants to reach out across campus strategically, not just among deans or department heads. When assembling a committee to tackle a certain issue, for instance, he advised passing over some of the “usual suspects” — such as faculty members who are already vocal about diversity — in favor of others who haven’t been involved before. That may bring in new perspectives, he said, and develop new allies.
Successes and new programs should be widely promoted, Mr. Barker said. Tracking down the person responsible for featuring stories on the institution’s home page and building that relationship, he said, can help raise the profile of diversity throughout the college and beyond. Many people don’t know about or pay much attention to a given diversity program, he said. “If you don’t put it out there, it doesn’t exist.”
Buy-In From the Top
Even a small diversity office or a single dedicated administrator can have an important effect. But when an institution concentrates that responsibility, it poses a risk, said Ms. Sanchez of Penn State: “The rest of the university doesn’t have to think much about it.”
That’s not the case at her institution, she said, where a number of offices, committees, and programs have focused on diversity and inclusion for decades, both at the institutional level and among colleges and schools. For the past 15 years Penn State’s Office of Educational Equity has worked under a regularly updated strategic framework for diversity that helps set priorities and goals.
Nothing is more important along the way than “active, visible leadership from the top,” said Ms. Sanchez. Diversity is one of six institutionwide imperatives set by Eric J. Barron, Penn State’s new president. He has also required the strategic framework for diversity to be incorporated into the university’s master plan.
That can help engage individual administrative and academic units, some of which are “more attuned to diversity” than others, Ms. Sanchez said. A vague expectation that all departments think about diversity may not be enough to “raise the floor” for the entire institution, she said. “If the person at the top says, ‘This is my expectation,’ it happens in ways that it doesn’t happen” otherwise.
Everyone’s Challenge
To make diversity and inclusion everyone’s responsibilities, some institutions are taking a new approach. Last summer, for example, Virginia Tech got rid of its Office for Diversity and Inclusion and the vice president’s position that went with it.
In their place, the university set up the President’s Inclusion and Diversity Executive Council. Led by Timothy D. Sands, Virginia Tech’s president, the group, which meets monthly, includes 13 vice provosts and deans, plus six “inclusion coordinators” who are charged with raising issues and proposing effective strategies.
The idea is to spread out the responsibility. The former office was sometimes “scapegoated,” said Dannette Gomez Beane, director of the Office of Graduate Recruiting and Diversity Initiatives and an inclusion coordinator on the council. “People would turn to that office for help and support, but also would turn to it for blame,” she said, when a problem wasn’t easily solved. (The university plans to hire a new vice provost for inclusion and diversity, but the president’s council will remain in place.)
The new structure is supposed to force decision makers at Virginia Tech to assess all units’ needs in terms of diversity and inclusion, as well as their progress. Ideally, Ms. Beane said last week, it will encourage people from the highest levels on down to stop asking why someone isn’t doing something. They should start asking, she said, “What should I be doing?”
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
