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Diversity Goes Beyond Numbers at the University of Denver
When Jesús Treviño arrived at the University of Denver in 2002, one of his first undertakings was to change the name of the office he was hired to run. “I took the old Office of Multicultural Affairs and changed it to 'Multicultural Excellence,'” Treviño says. “I wanted to get away from the “deficiency model” that assumes minority students are broken, and if they come to this office, we’ll fix them.” Instead, Treviño, Denver’s associate provost for multicultural excellence, decided to focus on the positive from day one. He started a Community of Excellence Scholars program for high-need students that awards scholarships, and pairs students with mentors who can validate their experiences and support them as they progress through their undergraduate careers. He instituted a series of weekend Diversity and Unity Retreats in the Denver mountains where student leaders learn about topics like social justice and being an ally. And perhaps most importantly, he is working to ensure that diversity is as important outside of his office’s walls as inside.
A focus on diversity isn’t new at Denver, which enrolls roughly 4,000 undergraduates and 6,000 graduate students, of whom about 16 percent are students of color. The university hosted its first diversity summit in 2002, and in Chancellor Robert Coombe’s inauguration speech in April 2006, he called diversity “the edge that will make us champions.” What is new in Denver’s diversity work is the emphasis on “inclusive excellence,” a term developed by AAC&U to capture a multi-faceted approach to diversity that focuses on student achievement, attention to cultural differences, and the creation of a learning environment that uses its diversity to enhance educational excellence for all students
Making Excellence Inclusive
At the University of Denver (DU), Treviño’s desire to extend his office’s reach coincided with a plan by Provost Gregg Kvistad to study how to attract more faculty of color. “I said, ‘Let’s focus not just on hiring, but really try to transform the institution,’” Treviño says. So last October, Kvistad invited Treviño to meet with the chancellor, vice chancellors, and deans to explain inclusive excellence. Since then, departments from across campus have signed on to the inclusive excellence concept. The deans at that fall meeting formed committees to draft inclusive mission statements for their colleges, and the division of student life did the same. DU’s athletics department, University College, and Sturm College of Law have all updated their missions to include an inclusive excellence component as well.
In the past, diversity had been addressed at Denver primarily in terms of numbers—the percentage of underrepresented students and faculty members on campus or in a particular program—and almost exclusively from within the multicultural affairs office. Under the new campaign, which was officially introduced at the 2006 Diversity Summit, the responsibility for an inclusive and diverse campus is shifting to academic departments, units, and programs.
In the university’s human resources department, HR director Dick Gartrell and Treviño discussed how the inclusive excellence concept might be able to increase diverse hiring as well as improve performance management—how the university evaluates and provides feedback to its employees. Gartrell designed a new hiring and evaluation plan, and met with deans and departments to explain how the interviewing and hiring processes could incorporate inclusive excellence. “We’re encouraging behavioral interviewing—things like ‘Tell me about a time when you worked in a diverse group.’ Just identifying that we’re interested in these competencies when we’re interviewing can help us find the right person,” Gartrell says. In a recent search for a new assistant provost for student life, the search committee asked candidates to prepare a presentation on inclusive excellence. “Rather than leaving the presentation topic to the candidate, we can give them the direction that this kind of topic is important to us,” Gartrell explains.
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| Diversity and Unity Retreat |
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Expanding Definitions
An important part of the inclusive excellence concept is learning to look beyond race when thinking and talking about diversity. At the Diversity and Unity retreats run by the Office of Multicultural Excellence, it’s not just students of different races who learn cross-cultural communication skills—there is also attention to socioeconomic, regional, gender, and religious diversity. By teaching different groups to communicate effectively and recognize the similarities of their goals, students form connections that might not happen spontaneously. “The students come back to the classrooms from these retreats and spread [this message] around,” Treviño says. “Now the black student alliance might cosponsor a program with the queer student alliance. That didn’t happen before.”
DU’s office of academic advising currently has one advisor specifically trained in multicultural student advising. But this fall, the entire staff will receive this training. Melissa Martinez, the coordinator of multicultural advising, says the change will make diversity a wider responsibility. The most effective advising happens when everyone understands the issues students from various backgrounds face, she says. Martinez designed a multicultural student advising model that would start with outreach to a diverse group of prospective students and provide specifically tailored services to underrepresented students once they arrive at DU. While the model is still in the planning stages, Martinez has received positive feedback so far from many of the offices that would be involved—including financial aid, the international student house, admissions, and student life.
Measuring Success
One of the limitations of Denver’s approach to diversity is that it can be hard to measure progress. While traditional indicators show success so far—at DU, the persistence rate for first-year students of color last year was 95 percent, and the university hired 17 faculty members from underrepresented groups in 2006—staff members are aware that these measures can’t tell the whole story. “It doesn’t always make sense to measure things like retention, because a student who leaves really might be a better fit somewhere else,” Martinez explains. The Office of Multicultural Excellence is working on outcomes assessments instead, she said, to measure what students have learned about multiculturalism, rather than simply the existence of a diverse student body at DU.
Another potential problem is that Denver’s inclusive excellence campaign has come from administrators, rather than starting with students’ own expressed needs. But Treviño is confident that the students are on board. “These ideas are coming from [administrators], but the students know we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots diversity work, providing safe places to talk about privilege and oppression as they haven’t been able to do before,” he says. “This is engaging education. We don’t have trouble recruiting students.”
Denver’s inclusive excellence campaign is still in its early years—the Multicultural Excellence office sees it as an 8-10 year project. But based on the response so far, Treviño says, the DU community seems eager to embrace inclusive excellence and to develop good measures to assess change.
“There are a lot of people still running what I call ‘revenge curriculum’ when it comes to diversity—‘I’ll make you feel as bad as you’ve made me feel!’” he says. “That doesn’t work. We want to set the standard for collaboration.”
AAC&U has developed many resources related to diversity and inclusive excellence. Our next Network for Academic Renewal conference, “Civic Learning at the Intersections: U.S. Diversity, Global Education, and Democracy’s Unfinished Work”, will feature the University of Denver. See our diversity resource page for our most recent publications, projects, and meetings. Visit Diversityweb.org for links to resources from around the country.
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