James Irvine Foundation
Campus Diversity Initiative Evaluation Project
OVERVIEW AND PROJECT OBJECTIVES
Campus diversity has been a strong focus of the work of California's James Irvine Foundation for more than twenty years. After undertaking a review of its first ten years of grant making in 1997, the foundation affirmed its emphasis on diversity in its higher education program and in 2000, developed the Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI).
The CDI placed a particular emphasis on evaluation as a strategy for raising the level of institutional success with diversity work, and also in 2000, the foundation contracted with Claremont Graduate University and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to oversee evaluation efforts within the CDI. Called the CDI Evaluation Project, these efforts sought to:
- help the campuses build capacity to conduct meaningful evaluation of their diversity initiatives; and
- assess the overall impact of the CDI.
These efforts were led by an evaluation resource team (ERT) composed of Claremont Graduate University and AAC&U staff, other experts in diversity and evaluation, and graduate research assistants. Senior members of the ERT served as liaisons to individual campuses.
Recognizing the deeply contextual nature of each institution's
diversity efforts, the ERT developed
four phases for the Evaluation Project: planning, campus capacity
building, developing and disseminating knowledge about diversity
in higher education, and analysis and reporting concerning
impact.
Planning
The emphasis here was on analyzing the specific instiuttional contexts of the twenty-eight CDI campuses and the impact these contexts would have on implementing comprehensive diveristy work that was grounded in evaluation. Attnetion was also given to cross-institutional analyses, which ultimately fed into the Project's Impact Study.
Campus Capacity Building
The focus here was on helping campuses (a) implement their
evaluation plans and (b) recognize when and how to make program
adjustments based on their preliminary findings (formative
evaluation).
Developing and Disseminating Knowledge about Diversity
in Higher Education
The ERT's knowledge-building and dissemination activities
have focused on lessons learned about implementing comprehensive diversity work as well as effective evaluation strategies.
Analysis and Reporting Concerning Impact
This phase brought together the empirical work
of the other three phases to create a coherent picture of
the overall impact of the foundation's Initiative on higher
education policy and practice in California. The distillation
of the numerous individual campus evaluations and cross-campus
data enabled members of the ERT to analyze the Initiative's impact both qualitatively and
quantitatively.
These results were reported in detail in the Project's impact study and broadened out for the larger higher education community in the monograph, Making a Real Difference with Diversity: A Guide to Institutional Change (2007). See the Project's publications page for more information.
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