My most recent work in the area of diversity and inclusion is the creation of a faculty development social belonging intervention. This project is a collaboration with my colleague Andrew Feldstein and the goal of this intervention is to improve underrepresented course failure rates in the top ten enrolled freshman courses over a two year period. This project was launched in Fall 2018.
My experiences with diversity and inclusion have been shaped greatly by my work as assistant provost for internationalization and as a graduate dean. In the internationalization area, I have produced intercultural training for faculty and staff for an institution undergoing rapid transformation due to international student enrollment increases. As graduate dean, I have studied and advised units on diversity admissions data in their efforts to diversify their student body. As a department chair, my commitment has always been to be intentional about diversity hiring practices.
In my current position, diversity plays a key role in student success and conversations with departments about strategies for addressing the achievement gap of underrepresented students are frequent. This is a central topic of the Student Success and Engagement Committee I presently lead.
I look at valuing diversity through three lenses – planning, process, and people. Plans talk about where units I lead want to be with regard to diversity and inclusion. Process refers to the various processes within the unit/institution that faculty value (tenure, promotion, etc.) People refers to the daily interactions people have with each other. Since faculty values differ from unit to unit and institution to institution, one of the first activities I like to do is survey faculty to determine their values with regard to diversity and inclusion. From these data, we can move forward to determining which values can be addressed within the unit by aligning incentives and rewards to these values. A scorecard might be one way in which the unit communicates its commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Timothy R Crowley 