Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: Campus Diversity

Today's Chief Diversity Officers face tremendous challenges. Among those are threats to Affirmative Action admissions and financial aid programs, the dearth of faculty and staff of color in Predominantly White Institutions, the scarcity of funds to carry out institutional diversity mandates, and the need to play mentor to a vast array of individuals--faculty, staff, students and community stakeholders--with minimum staff support.  This book addresses how these and other challenges are tackled by providing valuable insight into the innovative work that Chief Diversity Officers perform. It provides insightful accounts into the diversity program successes and promising practices by diversity officers working on college and university campuses in the United States. Contributors draw upon their experiences as educators working to sustain diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and social justice on college campuses and describe how they have designed successful diversity and inclusive excellence initiatives which had a profound positive impact on all demographic populations.

The authors of this volume discuss diversity issues such as admission policies and the role of ethnic studies departments, then suggest strategies for dealing with questions of racism, diversity and intercultural communication. Suggestions range from ways to improve intercultural interpersonal skills through to the broad structural changes needed if a university is to embrace its diverse population.

Unleashing Suppressed Voices on College Campusesprovides a comprehensive and inclusive lens of diversity for nearly every aspect of higher education: academic affairs administration, faculty tenure and promotion, student affairs administration, student athletes in revenue-producing sports, enrollment management, and business. It addresses relevant concerns for faculty who teach in higher education and student affairs graduate preparation, social foundations of education, counseling, educational psychology, educational policy, and educational leadership and administration programs, and can be used as a training manual for new and continuing faculty and staff in student, business, and academic affairs as well as governance.

Over the past three decades, colleges and universities have committed to encouraging, embracing, and supporting diversity as a core principle of their mission. But how are goals for achieving and maintaining diversity actually met? What is the role of students in this mission? When a university is committed to diversity, what is campus culture like? In Learning to Speak, Learning to Listen, Susan E. Chase portrays how undergraduates at a predominantly white urban institution, which she calls "City University" (a pseudonym), learn to speak and listen to each other across social differences. Chase interviewed a wide range of students and conducted content analyses of the student newspaper, student government minutes, curricula, and website to document diversity debates at this university. Amid various controversies, she identifies a defining moment in the campus culture: a protest organized by students of color to highlight the university's failure to live up to its diversity commitments. Some white students dismissed the protest, some were hostile to it, and some fully engaged their peers of color. In a book that will be useful to students and educators on campuses undergoing diversity initiatives, Chase finds that both students' willingness to share personal stories about their diverse experiences and collaboration among student organizations, student affairs offices, and academic programs encourage speaking and listening across differences and help incorporate diversity as part of the overall mission of the university.

The study gives detailed data on how 249 university deans, provosts, administrative and academic department heads and other leaders perceive the problem of discrimination in hiring and advancement at their institutions. Respondents were drawn from major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The study present specific data on how survey participants view the issue of sexual harassment at their institution, and how they view how this term is defined, as well as data on their views of discrimination based on age, gender, social class, sexual orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, handicap and other variables.

The academy may claim to seek and value diversity in its professoriate, but reports from faculty of color around the country make clear that departments and administrators discriminate in ways that range from unintentional to malignant. Stories abound of scholars--despite impressive records of publication, excellent teaching evaluations, and exemplary service to their universities--struggling on the tenure track. These stories, however, are rarely shared for public consumption. Written/Unwritten reveals that faculty of color often face two sets of rules when applying for reappointment, tenure, and promotion: those made explicit in handbooks and faculty orientations or determined by union contracts and those that operate beneath the surface. It is this second, unwritten set of rules that disproportionally affects faculty who are hired to "diversify" academic departments and then expected to meet ever-shifting requirements set by tenured colleagues and administrators. Patricia A. Matthew and her contributors reveal how these implicit processes undermine the quality of research and teaching in American colleges and universities. They also show what is possible when universities persist in their efforts to create a diverse and more equitable professorate. These narratives hold the academy accountable while providing a pragmatic view about how it might improve itself and how that improvement can extend to academic culture at large. The contributors and interviewees are Ariana E. Alexander, Marlon M. Bailey, Houston A. Baker Jr., Dionne Bensonsmith, Leslie Bow, Angie Chabram, Andreana Clay, Jane Chin Davidson, April L. Few-Demo, Eric Anthony Grollman, Carmen V. Harris, Rashida L. Harrison, Ayanna Jackson-Fowler, Roshanak Kheshti, Patricia A. Matthew, Fred Piercy, Deepa S. Reddy, Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, Wilson Santos, Sarita Echavez See, Andrew J. Stremmel, Cheryl A. Wall, E. Frances White, Jennifer D. Williams, and Doctoral Candidate X.