Goal 5a: SoE leadership will be committed to making DEI an institutional priority.
Goal 5b: SoE leadership will be professionally and personally responsible for strategically coordinating, and leveraging resources to support and facilitate DEI in the SoE.
Strategic Actions/Initiatives
- Create an Office of DEI and position for Associate Dean of DEI5.
- Require all SoE leaders to participate in DEI related professional development and training (e.g., NADOHE, NCORE, etc.).
Best Practices6
- School leadership champions DEI within the SoE, as well as in broader educational communities.
- School leadership annually document their record of promoting DEI, particularly as related to hiring faculty of color and those from historically underrepresented groups.
- School leaders ensure units within the SoE allocate and utilize resources to achieve DEI goals.
- School leadership broadly understands the potential barriers that faculty face in the promotion and/or tenure process in the context of diversity-related professional activities (e.g., teaching, research, service) (NADOHE Standard).
- School leadership has current and historical knowledge related to issues of nondiscrimination, access, and equity in higher education institutions (NADOHE Standard).
- School leadership has awareness and understanding of the various laws, regulations, and policies related to equity and diversity in higher education (NADOHE Standard).
- School leadership envisions and conceptualizes the diversity mission of the SoE through a broad and inclusive definition of diversity (NADOHE Standard).
- School leadership understands how institutional programming can be used to enhance the SoE’s diversity mission to support faculty, especially faculty of color and those from historically underrepresented groups (NADOHE Standard).
- School leadership has basic knowledge of how data can be used to benchmark and promote accountability for the diversity mission (NADOHE Standard).
Accountability Measures
5 This particular recommendation emerges from the ongoing efforts to establish a schoolwide Diversity Plan and comes with strong support from the members of the Committee on Diversity and members of the Faculty Diversity Plan Subcommittee. In addition, many of the faculty and staff members who participated in the recent SoE retreat focused on DEI (on March 24, 2017) expressed the need for developing such an office, as well as an Associate Dean of DEI position to expand, sustain, and institutionalize DEI-related efforts within the SoE.
Specifically, the purpose of an Office of DEI is to develop, coordinate, advocate for, and support programming and initiatives related to DEI within the SoE. We recommend that such an office be led by an Associate Dean of DEI, who reports directly to the Dean, with this individual having both fiscal and policy authority to carry out DEI initiatives for the SoE. Once fully developed, we envision that the Office of DEI will have a budget and staff independent of the Dean’s office. This independence is necessary to enable the Office of DEI to monitor and invest in school-wide DEI goals that will be established in collaboration with administration, faculty, and staff. Further, the Office of DEI may incorporate existing SoE units that currently focus on issues related to DEI within this office and thereby increase coordination of efforts across the SoE. The aim of this inclusion is to minimize duplication in programming efforts, establish cost efficiencies for program oversight, and centralize efforts under the Associate Dean of DEI.
The following are the suggested minimum qualifications for the position of the Associate Dean of DEI include:
- An earned doctorate from an accredited institution in one of the disciplines housed within the SoE;
- Previous administrative experience at the program, department, or school-level is preferred;
- A record of research, service and teaching that merits a tenured faculty position at the rank of associate or full professor;
- A record of engaging in scholarly, service, and teaching activities related to DEI;
- A record of successful experience developing, promoting, and leading DEI related initiatives at a research-intensive university;
The members of the SoE’s Committee on Diversity identified other schools/colleges of education within the Big 10 Universities that have similar offices, noting (where possible) whether these offices were led by tenured faculty or staff and the scope of such office. Our search for peer institutions with Offices of DEI and/or Associate or Assistant Dean’s of DEI was primarily based on analyses of individual school/college websites and thus it is possible that additional peer institutions have Offices of DEI with no online presence. We found that five colleges at other Big 10 Universities have existing Offices of DEI (named different things by the various institutions). These institutions include: Michigan State University (ranked #21 among Education Schools in 2017), University of Minnesota (ranked #21 among Education Schools in 2017), Ohio State University (ranked #18 among Education Schools in 2017), Pennsylvania State University (ranked #38 among Education Schools in 2017), Purdue University (ranked #46 among Education Schools in 2017), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (ranked #3 among Education Schools in 2017). Notably, many (four out of six) of the schools/colleges of education were ranked higher than the Indiana University’s SoE (ranked #32) in the most recent rankings published by the U.S. News & World Report. While we recognize the limitations of ranking systems, we also point to the possibility that many of these schools are likely engaged in significant efforts related to programming, recruiting, and retaining faculty, students, and staff from historically underrepresented groups. It is important to note that some of the schools/colleges of education with existing Offices of DEI are led by tenured faculty. The Ohio State University, for instance, has an Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (https://ehe.osu.edu/diversity), which is led by a tenured faculty member and includes staff members and graduate students.
Beyond Big 10 Universities, other peer institutions also have Offices of DEI. While we did not include all schools/colleges of education in the US and/or who may be classified as our peers in our search, several members of the Committee on Diversity offered additional examples of peer institutions with Offices of DEI led by Associate Deans (tenured faculty). Notably, the University of Georgia’s College of Education recently established an Associate Dean for DEI position (https://coe.uga.edu/directory/profiles/asingh) and the University of South Carolina’s College of Education is currently searching for an associate or full professor to serve as an Associate Dean of DEI and be part of the College’s leadership team.
6 Some of the ‘Best Practices’ listed within the domain of Leadership were informed by the following: http://www.nadohe.org/standards-of-professional-practice-for-chief-diversity-officers and https://inclusion.uoregon.edu/content/leadership.