Category: Blog

Identifying Opportunities in Your Department’s DEI Strategy: One Alumni Department’s Perspective

by Ryan Barnhart, DHSc

Are you wanting to create more opportunities for diversity, equity, and inclusion for your constituents, but not sure where to begin? Here’s how one Alumni Relations and Development Office started. We started from the bottom At California University of Pennsylvania, our Office of Alumni Relations has been working collaboratively with departments across campus to paint a true picture of what diversity, equity, and inclusion means for our students, our alumni, and our institution’s history and future. Examining DEI concepts through a variety of lenses is essential to success. For many of us in higher education, our campuses are at times the first, and unfortunately the only, opportunity to have an open, meaningful dialogue around diversity, equity, and inclusion for our students. Our institution has a history of acknowledging and embracing our diverse populations across campus. For example, we’ve always celebrated the legacy of Jennie Adams Carter, our first Black alumna, and her impact on education and her family’s legacy, (Cal U was founded originally as a normal school for teacher education). Other examples include yearly dedicated outreach and programming honoring international students and their heritage. Much of this programming is student-centric. However, as the director of alumni relations, I felt […]

Navigating a virtual provost search during the pandemic

by David Forgues, Carolyn Thomas

The below piece tells the story of Cal State Fullerton’s experience conducting a provost search virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. The story is written from two perspectives: the first from the institution’s Vice President of Human Resources, Diversity, and Inclusion and Search Committee Chair; and the second from the now sitting provost. By sharing their experience, the article authors hope other institutions that find themselves embarking on a search in this continued virtual environment can gain ideas that positively impact the process. Perspective #1: David Forgues, Search Committee Chair and Vice President of Human Resources, Diversity, and Inclusion Pre-pandemic: Starting a provost search When our interim president was made permanent by the board in May of 2019, high on his list of priorities was to search for and appoint a new provost. Three interim provosts had served in the position since the last permanent provost departed. As we moved into fall and kicked off the search, we had no idea what was in store. We planned for this search along the normal cycle with groundwork to be completed in fall and advertising and recruitment over winter break and into the start of the spring semester. That would set us up […]

Back to the Future of Alumni Relations

By Kathy Edersheim President, Impactrics Social distancing and isolation brought on by the pandemic have proven the importance of community and connection, the very priorities for alumni relations. As the vaccine rolls-out and we look forward to a new normal, it is the perfect moment for alumni associations to assess the challenges and, yes, opportunities that have emerged from an almost entirely virtual system and consider what that means for the future. Observing and working with over 25 institutions during the past year has provided perspective on the potential for new directions and greater success. During the outset of the pandemic Since March, alumni relations pivoted to the virtual world like everything else. The first challenge was how to get alumni to support students facing an abbreviated semester and, often, financial challenges. It was a major communication effort to keep alumni informed about cancelled events (including refunds for tickets), campus news, and to solicit donations for student emergency funds while working remotely. At some institutions, the alumni-student support network for career guidance was mobilized to assist graduating students. Overall, the remote management of this process was surprisingly well-accepted and effective in maintaining and building connections. For many institutions, the most […]

Using Thinking Aloud Strategies to Create Equity in Distance Learning

By Prof. Dr. Eugene AllevatoWoodbury University In education, equity means to ensure that every student has an equal chance for success based on their specific needs. Due to the recent pandemic, the transition to distance learning has caused the achievement gap to widen requiring new tools and strategies to reduce barriers, especially to underrepresented groups. Think aloud is a strategy that enhances student’s comprehension and intellectual growth by removing these barriers. By expressing one’s thoughts while reading, students develop their reading skills because they can acquire information from what they read, add to their knowledge, enlarge their way of thinking and reasoning to advance toward academic excellence. In addition, this strategy provides a better way to assess students’ learning. Before the pandemic, considering that social interaction is fundamental in the learning process, I was not in favor of online instruction because I thought that physical proximity was necessary for engagement and learning. Once I was forced to transition to virtual instruction and adapt to new technology and different tools, I realized the significance of online instruction. In fact, distance learning implementation, has the potential to cause disengagement and disconnect between teachers and students, due to the perceived lack of communication, […]

Starting a Women’s Leadership Mentoring Program

Co-Authored by Faculty and Staff at the University of IdahoVanessa Sielert, Professor and Director, Lionel Hampton School of MusicKatherine Himes, Director, McClure Center for Public Policy ResearchErin Chapman, Clinical Associate Professor, School of Family and Consumer SciencesKathryn Schiffelbein, Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Outreach, College of Engineering Starting a program of any type can be daunting. Doing so with little to no experience and resources may seem impossible. Yet the importance of this work and a shared vision brought us together to create a community for women to connect and thrive. We built the Athena Women’s Mentorship Program in autumn 2018 with the support of Athena, the professional women’s organization at the University of Idaho. The intent of the Athena Mentorship Program is to promote and facilitate mentorship for women and/or female-identifying staff and faculty at all University of Idaho campuses. The program graduated its second cohort in December 2020 and launched its third cohort in January 2021, fully online. The program follows a calendar year schedule, provides monthly formal gatherings and bi-weekly informal coffee chats for mentees with mentees and mentors with mentors, and requires that mentorship partners meet monthly based on their personal schedules. The year begins with […]

What I Have Learned as a Campus Leader During the Pandemic

by Mary Hinton

In June 2020, I was part of a group of higher education leaders interviewed by New York Times columnist Emily Bazelon regarding our expectations for what college would be like in the fall in the midst of a global pandemic. In this roundtable conversation, we explored questions regarding navigating COVID in classrooms and residence halls; the risks to students, faculty, staff, and how to limit exposure; how technology can assist us in early diagnosis and contact tracing; and more. Perhaps the numerous interconnected items we discussed should have signaled that leading during COVID, perhaps more than at any other moment, would demand collaborative, connected leadership, but that was not top of mind at that moment. In fact, because I was transitioning between presidencies last summer, I had seen up close how two institutions were responding to the pandemic and felt equipped to make predictions about how COVID would unfold on college campuses. However, as most leaders recognize, for our own benefit and that of our institutions, it is important that we take time to reflect upon our vision, our actions, and our progress. As Steve Jobs famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them […]

Five Guideposts for Successfully Navigating the Tenure Process

By Emma White JD, MAAssistant Professor and Department Chair, English, University of Hawai`i, Maui College Navigation and cartography may be overused clichés, but they helped me through tenure’s stormy seas. And the process of obtaining tenure is an especially stormy sea for women in particular. Data from the American Association of University Women shows that only 27% of tenured faculty among four-year institutions are women. Women faculty—especially women faculty of color—also face additional barriers in the form of systemic sexism, racism, and isolation based on the marginalized identities they hold. I cannot solve most of the challenges women face around promotion & tenure in one article, but I can share some of my own experiences in hopes of helping other women faculty along in the process. I applied for and was awarded tenure while pregnant with my first child. Over the five-year process to gain tenure, I followed a highly effective strategy that helped me improve my teaching, align with my goals, and manage my stress. I’ve since had the honor of mentoring other women through the tenure process, and as I look back on how I navigated my own, several guideposts emerge. Accept that you need a map and […]

Creating a More Just and Equitable Hiring Process for Higher Ed Staff

Eric Silva MSE Assistant Director TRIO Student Support Services at Metropolitan State University of Denver Ally Garcia EdD Assistant Dean for the Center of Equity and Student Achievement and the Director of TRIO Student Support Services at Metropolitan State University of Denver Higher education, since its inception, has been exclusive in who can pursue higher levels of learning and engagement. This oppressive truth not only has subjected students to pain and trauma, but also the faculty and staff who work within those ivory towers. In order to interrupt, and hopefully change these marginalizing spaces, it is paramount that institutions of higher learning acknowledge, assess, and devote resources and time to deconstructing practices, policies, and procedures which have been normed on the exclusionary nature of higher education. This position often toys with the theoretical question of the overall mission of higher education and its connection to serving the public good. The following work was our form of resistance to normative hiring structures within Student Affairs. Although not exhaustive, the work below may help guide you and your institution on its own journey of assessing and changing current hiring and promotion structures to truly serve the public good. The process In the […]

Advancing a More Equitable Transfer Agenda: Lessons from the City University of New York

Chet Jordan, Ph.D., Dean of Social Sciences and Professional Studies, GreenfieldCommunity College We often neglect silence. In our quest to preserve and uplift success, we shy away from what isn’t there, from who and what was left behind, and from the stories that got lost along the way. It is beautiful to celebrate the grit, determination, and ability of those who cross the finish line but there is kaleidoscopic complexity in each individual who never comes into the camera’s view. One of the largest subgroups in the American higher education system is comprised of transfer students. Although students transfer in various directions throughout the system, a vast majority attempt to transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. Recent data show that 31% of students who first enroll at a community college transfer to a four-year college within six years (Shapiro et al., 2019). Astonishingly, close to 80% of community college students hope to earn a bachelor’s degree, yet 60% who enroll in a community college with the hope of transferring to a four-year institution fail to do so. With these numbers in the foreground, it becomes imperative to interrogate the silence. The reasons why community college students struggle to achieve […]

Scholarly Productivity and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cultivating Community in a Remote Writing Group

Dr. Carol Anne Constabile-Heming, Professor of German, University of North Texas. Because of the isolation that resulted from the emergency shut down of colleges and universities as a response to the spread of COVID-19 in the spring semester, the sense of community that ordinarily germinates organically on college and university campuses all but vanished. This, coupled with disruption to the operations of scholarly organizations that normally host annual conferences and professional development opportunities, has acted as a barrier to scholarly productivity for many faculty members. This is especially true in the case of women and minoritized faculty who are shouldering the majority of caregiver duties, including caring for sick family members, supervising home schooling, shopping, cleaning, and cooking. In the midst of the often-impossible demands this places on one’s time, energy and focus, scholarly activity—most especially writing—can easily fall to the bottom of the incredibly long task list. Faced with my own uncertainties and concerns about moving my research projects forward, I longed for a way to recreate the serenity of summer. Summer break, for me, typically involves travel to archives in Germany, where I spend a minimum of four weeks concentrated on writing. I knew I was going to […]