The Bildner Family Foundation
NJCDI Meeting and Team Leader Planning Session 2004

Ocean Place Conference Resort, Long Branch, NJ, April 2-3, 2004

The overarching goals of the Bildner Family Foundation’s New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative (NJCDI) grants were threefold: to reduce prejudice, promote intergroup understanding, and foster comprehensive institutional change needed to support such learning. For the third formal meeting of the grantees, we have designed the time together to take stock of how we are doing, draw on the insights and achievements of the nine campuses, and position each institution to leverage a high level of change in the final year of the grant.

Specific goals for the meeting:

• To benchmark and celebrate progress towards NJCDI goals
• To strengthen capacities for implementing campus goals
• To strategize ways to create more comprehensive, integrated institutional change
• To increase the ability to assess the impact of campus work
• To collaborate across institutions and learn from one another
• To focus on longer range sustainability of campus diversity work

Friday, April 2

9:00 – 9:15 am
Welcome and Overview of Meeting
Joanne Duhl, The Philanthropic Initiative
Caryn McTighe Musil, AAC&U

9:15 – 10:45 am
From Innovations to Institutional Change
Edgar Beckham and Caryn McTighe Musil, both of AAC&U

A core aspect of institutionalizing campus diversity work is learning from past successes and challenges. This opening session is designed to facilitate such institutional learning.

The session will be divided into two parts. Based on your institutional progress reports and Edgar’s site visits, Edgar and Caryn will offer a collective compilation of what the Bildner-funded NJCDI has achieved thus far.

During the second more interactive part, we will probe your insights about how you achieved what you did, examine how to communicate your achievements more effectively to a wider audience, explore what is likely to be sustained or expanded upon after the formal end of the grant, and identify what might be replicable beyond the Bildner network.

11:00 – 12:30 pm
Workshops

Session A
Micro and Macro Assessment: Capturing the Whole Picture
Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi, AAC&U

The session will use Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “sphere of Influence” concept which she uses to explain the impact that individuals can have on breaking the cycle of racism by influencing people within their “sphere of influence.” Based on her concept, campus teams will clarify their Bildner diversity initiative’s spheres of influence and explore how best to assess progress by applying a wide variety of approaches.

The presenter will provide a variety of assessment tools to assist institutions in determining the impact of their NJCDI on their particular sphere of influence. Tools include those designed to assess student learning, progress in curricular transformation, and institutional changes. An overall assessment framework will be offered to help institutions link their particular sphere of influence (micro) to the overarching Bildner goals of reducing prejudice, fostering intergroup dialogue, and comprehensive institutional change (macro).

Micro and Macro Assessment (433 KB, PDF)

Session B
Student Engagement Across Difficult Differences
Caryn McTighe Musil, facilitator, AAC&U

Using a fishbowl participatory technique, this session will turn to the intercultural skills of the Bildner team members to illuminate the challenges of everyday interactions that can be fraught with misunderstandings and unintended consequences. Organized through a series of critical incidents from classroom, campus, and community situations that participants have encountered in their diversity work, this session will highlight the strategies, practices, and methods that can turn potential intergroup conflict into intergroup understanding.

1:30-2:30 pm
Keynote Address
Diversity and Higher Education: Where to Next?
Troy Duster
Professor of Sociology, New York University and Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Duster will locate the current attention to diversity work in higher education in a socio-historical context and then will elaborate upon how that context is shaping the campus debates and strategies for change. He will also identify several issues that he thinks should become part of this next generation of diversity work if we aspire to create inclusive, student-centered, socially responsible academic institutions.

Diversity and Higher Education (176 KB, PDF)

2:45-3:45 pm
Putting the Pieces Together: A Holistic View of Institutional Change
Mark S. Giles, AAC&U

Building on Troy Duster’s challenges about how to conceive of the next level of diversity work, this interactive session will focus on how to move from islands of innovations to an integrated notion of institutional change. To move towards wholeness, it will examine three areas: student development, student and academic affairs, and engagement with the community. How might we enhance a student’s ability to integrate mind, body and soul as part of integrated learning? How might we use a holistic approach to bridge the student and academic affairs gap? And finally, how might we promote stronger ties with the community?

4:00-5:30 pm
Institutionalizing and Disseminating the Project’s Work
Edgar Beckham and Jack Noonan

The meeting will culminate with a focus on the collection, dissemination, and institutionalization of innovations emerging from the Bildner NJCDI. Edgar and Jack will facilitate a discussion to identify innovations (courses, course modules, co-curricular activities, pedagogical interventions, and assessment tools) that can serve as powerful examples of using diversity as an educational resource. During the session, strategies for disseminating these innovations will be explored, so that others, within and outside your institution, can emulate and adapt these Bildner NJCDI products. We hope institutions in New Jersey and across the nation can take advantage of these diversity innovations through the dissemination strategies identified in this session.

Saturday, April 3

Note: This part of the meeting is for Institutional Team Leaders Only

9:00-12:00 noon
Leading Change Oceanport

This final morning session will focus on three areas for discussion. The first will reflect on yesterday’s meeting and what kinds of new insights team leaders have about their own campus work and about the potential of the Bildner collective to influence change in New Jersey as a whole. What adjustments or enhancements can be made to improve what each institution is doing separately and as a group?

The second will look at how to use the third and final year of the Bildner grant to leverage greater likelihood that the work can be sustained and expanded after the grant officially ends. What are some important things to do, who needs to be involved that hasn’t been part of the grant yet, and how can more long term strategic thinking be woven into next year’s work?

The third and final area of focus will be on how to use the June reports to the Bildner Family Foundation as the seeds for a more extensive dissemination plan? How can the questions for the report be more useful to the nine campuses while also providing clear evidence to the Bildner Family Foundation that their funds were well invested?