All across the Ann Arbor campus, in schools, colleges and other units — 50 in all — thousands of students, staff and faculty have participated in more than 200 community engagement activities since President Mark Schlissel announced the five-year diversity, equity and inclusion strategic planning initiative last fall.
Members of the University of Michigan community have provided feedback through focus groups, town halls, online forums, fireside chats, surveys and bulletin boards as a way to inform the university’s planning leaders as the process gains momentum throughout the academic year.
During a daylong summit April 11 for U-M Health System employees, world-class experts on workplace diversity engaged with nearly 600 faculty and staff members as the group discussed best practices that pertain to shaping their diversity, equity and inclusion unit plans.
Similarly, during a March 28 roundtable discussion at the Michigan League, Asian and Asian-American students, faculty and staff joined a panel of local and national experts to discuss the lack of leadership roles and a perceived glass ceiling that exists for people of Asian descent within LSA.
“The leadership roles here are mostly nominated, elected or appointed positions, so this includes our chair professorships, college tenure promotion committee, administrative positions such as deans, and the college executive committee,” says Amy Westmoreland Ko, a researcher and graduate student instructor in LSA.
“What we see in LSA is that out of 204 professorships, 4 percent are Asian faculty members, 8 percent of the administrative roles are taken by Asian faculty, and no Asian faculty serve on the college tenure promotion or the college executive committee.”
During a March 24 School of Public Health summit on diversity, equity and inclusion, students, staff and faculty members identified opportunities and potential solutions for making the school more diverse and inclusive. SPH Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jane Banaszak-Holl highlighted the key components of the unit’s strategic plan.
“This is a five-year process and we’re just getting started. We’re setting the framework for what’s to come in the next few years and we want to be sure we develop a plan that aligns with what each department is already doing and coordinate it at the school level,” Banaszak-Holl says.
The three events provide snapshots of the campuswide engagement efforts that have been taking place within every unit of the university since the president’s fall announcement of the strategic planning process.
“In order for us to ultimately be successful in what we’re trying to do, it has to be a complicated process,” says Rob Sellers, vice provost for equity, inclusion and academic affairs, who is leading the planning effort for academic units. “With that process in mind, the strategic plans that will be rolled out in the fall are not the end.
“The planning process is the beginning. The plans themselves are the beginning. They’re not stone tablets, but they’re designed to be starting points, living documents, and the beginning of a space for us to live up to our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and goals.”
The university’s “Be Heard” campaign, which launched before the November 2015 Diversity Summit as a way to foster community engagement, sparked a lot of input, as nearly 1,000 ideas were submitted through comment cards at events on campus and through the online portal.
Feedback from the engagement sessions helped provide a framework for the first iteration of the individual plans, which now are being reviewed.
After the plans are reviewed, the president will work with senior leaders across the university to identify key strategies that are common among the individual plans to be included in a universitywide strategic plan. The university plan will align with the individual unit plans as implementation begins in the 2016-17 school year.
School of Public Health Dean Martin Philbert said he feels personally responsible for helping SPH and the rest of the campus change its social climate.
“Where I hope we end up, through being open to innovative ideas and to difficult messages, is that we think together and come up with better, more complete solutions and push the boundaries. This is just the start of the conversation,” he says.
“I am dedicated. I have committed to President Schlissel and the students, staff and faculty at the School of Public Health that I am responsible. If nothing changes five years from now, I am responsible.”
Several plans detail ideas about recruitment and retention of a more diverse staff. In order to accomplish those goals, some units call for advertising open positions in new ways to attract more diverse candidates and implementing programs that make people want to stay at the university.
Other plans call for training to overcome unconscious biases, stating that their units needed to become more aware of the unknown barriers that can create difficult environments for students, staff or faculty members.
Sellers says the plans will be evaluated regularly by all the units in order to ensure they’re shaped with input from students, staff and faculty members, and all units will be reviewed annually as part of the process.
