As the university community gears up for the winter semester, units across the Ann Arbor campus are moving into phase two of the universitywide diversity strategic planning process.
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At the same time the planning process builds momentum across more than 40 individual campus units, the university is launching new initiatives and trying new approaches to achieving diversity, equity and inclusion without waiting for the yearlong planning process to be complete.
President Mark Schlissel has made diversity, equity and inclusion a priority of his presidency. At an event last September, he launched the campuswide process to produce a five-year strategic plan that will enhance diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the university.
“We cannot be excellent without being diverse in the broadest sense of the word,” Schlissel said last fall. “We also must ensure that our community allows all individuals an equal opportunity to thrive.”
During a university community assembly in November, which was part of a campuswide Diversity Summit, the president said he heard a lot of “honesty, subterranean anger and discomfort” as well as a lot of “shared interests in trying to make the university a place we can be increasingly proud of.”
“I think the challenges we face as a society, not just on campus but all through our society, are going to require each of us to make a continuous and ongoing commitment to change, not be satisfied with incremental steps but realize that the challenges we face will probably take the rest of our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t push as hard as we can every day and every year as well.”
The strategic planning process is being coordinated by the Diversity Working Group, a team of leaders representing all aspects of the university community. For planning purposes, the campus has been subdivided into four main areas:
• Academic Affairs.
• Student Life.
• Other vice presidential units.
• Health System.
As the work progresses, each unit within these areas is responsible for conducting an engaged planning process and developing a unit-specific strategic plan that covers its main constituencies (students, faculty or staff) and addresses these four areas:
• Recruitment, retention and development.
• Education and scholarship.
• An equitable, inclusive environment.
• Service (as applicable to service units).
“The planning we have undertaken is critically important to the university,” says Rob Sellers, vice provost for equity, inclusion and academic affairs, who is leading the planning effort for academic units. “But it’s just as important that we not stand still while that planning takes place. We are moving ahead decisively even as the planning — which will lead to even more new initiatives — is taking place.”
Sellers acknowledges that the “bottom-up” approach to strategic planning is leading some on campus to scratch their heads and wonder about where they can plug into the process. He encourages those who are unsure to reach out to their unit planning leads.
This approach, intentionally designed to include a broad array of the university community right from the start, ensures that faculty, staff and students can access the people doing the work in their campus neighborhoods.
“We want faculty involved in developing the plans for their departments, their schools and their own professional development. And we want students involved — not just through Student Life, but also through their schools and colleges — so they can plug into this process in meaningful ways right now,” Sellers says.
The planning timeline continues through this spring. In June, unit plans will roll up into a comprehensive university strategic plan, which will be announced in the fall of 2016. Over the course of the plan’s five-year implementation, units will continue to assess and refine their approaches, report on progress and identify additional opportunities for improvement.
Across campus, units of different missions and sizes are moving forward with gathering the necessary data, offering educational programs to employees and launching new efforts. The new initiatives and the diversity planning process are highlighted on the revamped Diversity, Equity and Inclusion website.
Students weighing in
Students will have a special opportunity to weigh in on diversity planning and learn how they can be further involved during a series of town hall meetings in the week ahead.
In an email message Friday, Schlissel acknowledged important contributions from students and invited all students to engage further in the diversity planning process.
“Our process is designed to encourage ideas bubbling up, and I invite you to participate. There are many ways to do so. Our aim is to give students direct access to the people on campus who are developing our plans,” the president says.
Jackie Simpson, director of the Trotter Multicultural Center, is leading diversity strategic planning for Student Life. She, too, is encouraging students to attend one of the town hall meetings to learn how they can contribute to the process.
“The bottom-up approach of this planning process is designed to give students more direct access to the decision-makers in their schools and colleges and the other units that are important to them,” Simpson says.
During the meetings, which are open to all students, Simpson and others will detail the process so students know to whom they can reach out and how to participate. She says students also will be involved in other ways in the year ahead as individual unit plans are reviewed and new initiatives are considered.
The town hall meetings are set for these times and locations:
• Jan. 12, 8-9:30 p.m., Angell Hall, Auditorium B.
• Jan. 13, 7-8:30 p.m., Pierpont Commons, East Room.
• Jan. 16, 2-3:30 p.m., Michigan Union, Kuenzel Room.
Beyond these meetings, Simpson says there also are plans for student-focused activities in February that would explore in more depth some of the topics and suggested actions that emerge during the initial discussions.
Health System planning
Throughout the Medical School and the university’s hospitals and health centers, diversity planners are looking ahead to their own leadership diversity summit coming up this spring. The one-day event is being planned after gathering feedback from a wide range of employees during “world café” discussion sessions this fall.
Dr. David J. Brown is interim associate vice president and associate dean for health equity and inclusion. He serves both the U-M Hospitals and Health Centers and the Medical School. Brown says the facilitated café discussions in the fall are helping to shape the path forward for the 175 individual units within the health system.
He says the diversity summit in the spring will bring together speakers from within the health system, from central campus and from outside the university to further examine how to make diversity, equity and inclusion part of the day-to-day discussions about excellence, quality and innovation.
Brown says the Health System planners already are looking ahead, identifying one major focus for each of the next three years. The climate within the Health System will be the focus for year one; mentorship will be the priority in year two; developing a critical mass of diversity will be the focus of year three.
Dentistry moving forward
The diversity strategic planning process in the School of Dentistry is the next logical step in a commitment to diversity by the professional school that dates back more than 20 years.
Following a cultural climate audit in 1994-95, the school established a multicultural affairs committee. That committee continues to meet regularly and an implementation subcommittee has been added to help carry out plans that are being developed, explains Todd Ester, diversity planning lead and director of diversity and inclusion for the school.
Ester says the school launched its diversity strategic planning work this fall armed with data from three earlier campus climate surveys. Building on that work, faculty, staff and students are working together to develop strategies in four focus areas: the learning environment, the humanistic environment, diversity, and micro-aggressions and bullying.
He says the work in the school community — which includes more than 120 full-time faculty members, 200 adjunct faculty members, more than 640 students and 320 staff members — is now focused on developing recommendations for how to increase efforts.
The school community, Ester says, is working hard to honor the legacy of one of its early students, Ida Gray, the first African-American woman to earn a dental degree. She earned her degree in 1890.
Business and finance efforts
The business and finance units of the university, under the leadership of Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Hegarty, revved up their diversity planning last fall with a range of approaches that fit into the operational approaches for each unit, explains Catherine Lilly, senior adviser to Hegarty.
She says about 400 business and finance employees participated in Diversity Summit events last fall and there were individual department meetings, surveys, focus groups and diversity café discussion sessions that included many of the 3,300 employees in business and finance.
At the Shared Services Center, where large meetings are difficult to balance with the center’s operations, employees added ideas and comments with sticky notes on giant posters at the center.
Results of an employee survey indicate that the main areas of focus for further planning will include offering diversity educational program, fine-tuning human resources practices, providing additional supervisor training and building strong, diverse work teams.
