Summit explores diversity
May 6, 2008
Paulette Granberry Russell, the senior adviser to the president for diversity at Michigan State University, gives a presentation at the MizzouDiversity Summit on Monday at the Tiger hotel.
Students, faculty and administrators gathered at the MizzouDiversity Summit Sunday and Monday to facilitate dialogue on increasing diversity on campus.
The Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative sponsored the summit, which was held at The Tiger hotel. The focus of the summit was to encourage dialogue between groups on campus that normally wouldn’t collaborate.
Newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer Roger Worthington said there were six key areas to look at regarding how to improve diversity: faculty recruitment and retention, student recruitment and retention, curriculum issues in diversity, staff issues in diversity, leadership issues in diversity and campus climate change.
“A lot of what you see at this conference is dialogue,” Worthington said. “And so we really worked hard to try and stimulate dialogue across campus, across statuses.”
Worthington said he was trying to promote “cross fertilization” of ideas, making the campus a better-connected place.
Sunday, students and staff broke into “work groups” to talk about important issues on campus, and then presented them to administrations at a town hall meeting, Worthington said.
“The administration could hear from people they don’t interact with on a daily basis about what the issues are,” Worthington said.
Monday, teams from administrative groups on campus met to discuss what they learned the day before. Not only did each school and college send one or more representatives to the summit, but also offices such as the Division of Enrollment Management also sent teams.
“They are part of the conversation, too, and importantly so, because those folks have responsibility to diversity, too,” Worthington said.
Teams met in sessions to brainstorm how they could improve their respective areas of campus.
“We’re focusing on administrators being exposed to all the different issues so that they can actually think about what kinds of things they need to do for their individual schools and colleges,” said Noor Azizan-Gardner, Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative diversity programming and professional development director.
Keynote speakers said change on an organizational scale at an institution of higher education is often slow. Speaker Damon Williams, assistant vice provost for multicultural and international affairs at the University of Connecticut, showed a slide during his speech which depicted the expectation of change as being a steep slope leveling off later, and saying it was unrealistic to believe change would be rapid. Instead, change would be slow at first, gaining momentum as time went on.
“We are working gradually toward systematic, systemic, organizational change,” Worthington said.
The Chancellor’s Diversity Initiative is three years old, and this is the first year for the summit. Keynote speakers included Williams; William Harvey, vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia and Paulette Granberry Russell, senior advisor to the president for diversity at Michigan State University.
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