2009 Fall Convocation Speech - Diversity
Speech Segments
‘Diversity’ Video Transcript
With regard to diversity. I think many of you know that my support for, and record on diversity issues is, I think, I will self-admit this, a strong one. I think that was of interest to this campus when I was interviewed. I was asked about diversity many, many times. Almost every meeting I had, someone wanted to know about diversity. What have I done about diversity?
Well, I’m committed to diversity and this is a different institution, as all are. But I think that there are some questions we need to ask ourselves as we move into dealing more effectively with diversifying this campus. You and I have not talked about this, but I have some specific ideas, and I’m interested in hearing others.
There are questions. Let me just read some of them. Why should we make diversity a priority at UWGB? I’ve heard a lot of people ask me questions, what we’re going to do? But I haven’t heard, why should we make it a priority? Let me tell you my one reason. We need to ensure student success. We have students that are not all alike who come here. And they come here and they don’t necessarily find the environment that supports them. So, if there’s no other reason than to deal with diversity, it’s to ensure student success.
What are our expectations and desires with regard to diversity? Well, there are many answers to that and we will explore these questions, but that we make opportunity equally available and that minority retention is addressed.
It’s not about becoming 60 percent minority or 70 percent minority or 25 percent minority. We will deal with those kinds of numbers and we will make sure that this is an inviting place to minority students. But once they are here, we have a greater responsibility, quite frankly, to make sure their experience is a good one and that they can then succeed here at this University and graduate and perpetuate that new cycle where the minority individuals in this broader community want to come here and get a great education that we can provide.
What do we need to do? What do we need to do to achieve regarding diversity? One thing is to close the achievement gap. And, I have not been able to review the statistics with regard to our minority achievement vs. our achievement in general, but that’s something we need to look at. There are statistics, I just haven’t been able to sit down and look at those yet, but that’s very, very important.
What outcomes do we expect? Well, what are our goals? If we know that, then we’ll know when we’ve succeeded.
I can assure you that as we become better with regard to diversity, both employee, faculty and staff diversity and student diversity, there will be some unintended or unexpected consequences. We need to prepare for that now. I’m coming from an institution that changed drastically in its demographics, and we adjusted well for those kinds of consequences. But we didn’t fully anticipate all of them. So we need to try and anticipate them.
Anyway, I think these are good questions and they are important questions, I believe. I think we have quite a bit to do with regard to diversity and we will.
There are some other things with diversity that we’re going to do right now. I don’t think it takes study.
One of them is we’re going to participate in a UW System-wide initiative called Inclusive Excellence. We skipped the previous initiative and we did our own work. I’m hearing it was done very well, but I have not studied that. But we’re going to participate in this new initiative because I think there’s great benefit. I’ve talked to the cabinet about it and I think they are supportive of this as well. It’s called Inclusive Excellence, and it’s a planning process that does a number of things. Let me just highlight one today because it’s complex, it’s big, there’s a lot to it.
Inclusive Excellence calls for a close attentiveness to the student experience itself, including the impact of race, ethnicity, and the influence of physical ability, sexual orientation, gender expression, socioeconomic background and first-generation status on their learning experience. If we can make progress on that, that’s a pretty big task to have done.
Other things we’re going to do with regard to diversity, we’re going to change, to some degree, our hiring practices. We are going to ensure that search processes for positions at UWGB result in minorities being included in the application pool.
There’s a specific way we’re going to go about that, which I won’t try to get into today.
And, if we are successful in getting minorities in the interview pool, and those minorities are qualified, then we should be able to increase the number of people being interviewed who are minorities. We’re not going to give favored status, but we’re going to make a concerted effort to be able to interview more minorities for the positions that we have open up at this University.