It's interesting as I look back as we've finished Year 5 of our DEI. First five-year strategic plan, I always have to start off with the statement. We have come a long way but we still have a long way to go. The things that when I look back, actually make me smile and give me great hope and great pride is as an institution we've worked very hard to make diversity equity and inclusion be more than what I would refer as a contested set of ideas to have it be something that the university has adopted as a core value. Now, we've not completely and totally have it as our standard operating procedure so we don't do it in everything that we do as an institution but we're working towards that were much much further along. You see DEI as being a part of our change in just the conversation. For instance, across campus whenever there are areas of concern, one of the first things that gets raised is that we're not living up to our commitment to DEI. Which five-years ago there was no such thing. We have a level of expectations within all of our communities that the university will be a more diverse equitable and inclusive institution that it will be more just, that in and of itself is an important milestone. We can have arguments about what we're doing and whether we should be doing something different or we should be doing something better or we should be doing something more, but we don't have arguments about whether or not we should be working towards a more diverse equitable and inclusive space. We're no longer at the beginning of the journey, we've broken through that initial inertia towards really moving to become a place where DEI is in our veins, in our DNA that everything that we do as the university should be based on those principles. We have a number of great programs that are happening across campus. We've done a lot overhaul many of our practices, our policies whether it's around hiring practices promotion policies. We've developed greater capacity around diversity equity and inclusion with creating really important structures including our DEI leads as one example. As ways in which we're institutionalizing diversity equity and inclusion. You can see changes in our curriculum, you could see changes in the nature of the service work that we do, work within the community. I think one would be hard-pressed to look at us now versus where we were before and say that we haven't made progress, just as we're would be hard-pressed to look at us now and say that we've made it, we still have a lot of work to do. But I feel like we're much much better situated to get to that place than we were five years ago. More and more people are engaged in DEI efforts really asking, how I can be a part of this? In orientations you see very clearly people are like," I want to be a part of this, what can I do?" We help them explore what that means for them. But everybody through either teaching, learning, research or work, it's involved and some level in the eye efforts. Although we have our heavy emphasis on diversity which is something that we still need to focus on, we have moved into the realm of culture change, and really exploring what it takes to have an inclusive and equitable community that is focused on behavior change that leads to policy and institutional change. Really focusing on like how are people experiencing these values and we need to do things differently. I will say though we did in the past year, we have had a really strong emphasis on central race on our DEI work. We have develop college values that we're calling the college compact so that we can be very explicit about what we mean when we say this is what we live by, this has the values that bring us together with student facing activities we really aren't doing some other work around curricular reform, creating Pathways Programs at the high-school level of the graduate level. Changing really our faculty work including changing some of the fellowships that are pathways for faculty and center in those and raise increasing the faculty of color receiving tenure, and developing equity innovation grants so that we're putting our money where our values are and for staff really creating new HR processes from the hiring to their attentional level of diversifying or staff. Creating a salary equity framework where we actually ask staff what they should get paid. What the title should be based on the work that they're doing and so we're really doing this at a culture change and we're putting in the metrics to evaluate if their work is having an impact. The ISO community organizer and I was a executive director of a non-profit organization and so a lot of the doing things on the ground are part of our DNA. Now, I would say that the biggest principle that I have brought from community organizing to the university, is that people affected by the issues should be a part of the decision-making process. We cannot make decisions without the people who are going to be affected by this and so that is really the secret ingredient it was like Rob said to our success is that at every step of the way, we're meaningfully making attempts to create a structure where people's voices are not a check-mark as part of a process but they are meaningfully contributing to our process, and that means that we need to meet people where they're at. Some people like Rob said different levels of development than others and all of those voices need to be a part of that decision-making process although sometimes we wish it was faster. But I love this saying that " if you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far go together." That is what the work that we're doing is about, really specially bringing people together students faculty and staff together is one of the things that has been actually revolutionary in our space because in many spaces the mixing of our constituencies is not a thing and we can now create culture change, if our different constituencies are not talking to each other and on the same team. When we talk about changes to curriculum for example, we have students and faculty together having those conversations. When we're talking about changes on student hiring we're talking with HR and students together. When we're talking about fellowships we're talking with faculty and students and staff who are working on those fellowships. We've really having join conversations and that I think it's really key to the success that we have in our work. You make wherever you go a better place. Pretty much has been the main message that I've tried to live through in my life. As a graduate student here at the university I was involved in helping to recruit more black graduate students and students of color to the university. I was involved in some of the student protests that led to actually my position, but it was all with the notion that it was important that we open up systems to groups that are traditionally been minoritized and not provided those opportunities? I would say the students are the drivers of the change, and they're actually telling us specifically what it is that they want. We are partnering as to the how, but not the word or the why necessarily. For example students were a really big driver in curricular reform work, where we evaluated 80 percent of the architecture syllabi for equity. The students were the one leading the meetings with the faculty and going through a check was like, "Are you doing this, are you doing inclusive teaching practices? Are you bringing into the classroom?" Students are heavily involved they have led letter writing campaigns where they talked about the culture of architecture and the aspects that were harmful and say like we want to have a really open conversation about how we can change this starting in school because we wanted to bring this into the profession. Students are really really big drivers and I would say that we are seeing a change as to why people are interested in coming to our school? More and more people are interested because we're having a really open and honest conversation about diversity and inclusion. They want to be a part of a institution that is wrestling with this. We are, at all sorts of levels and students want to be a part of that. Yes they're leading the change. We should always ask, how we can make is socially just university, always and we should always try to at least attempt to have an answer. I will say that my answer begins with resource distribution, and how the resources are distributed in a way that benefit everybody. That means financial resources, time resources but also cultural resources and this is where making the rules of the game explicit, very very key. Because this is how we create the change if everybody knows how to succeed, then we'll be more likely to succeed and then people also be more likely to know what they don't like and try to change those rules. I also think that there needs to be balance between policy change and personal transformation the least to culture change, because that in turn affects and create some were more equitable policies and practices and so we need to do both pieces of the work, and a really really big piece that must happen for this to succeed is to have a spaces for self and communal reflection. If we unstop and those resources for us to stop and reflect, take a deep breath figure out if we're going in the direction that we're bringing people along, if things are working if we need to change anything if we don't do that then things are not going to change necessarily. Part of it depends on how you define what sociable just means. For me it really does tie back to the I piece in the inclusion piece in DEI. Is it a university? If it's a public university, is it a university that the entire public has access to in terms of all of the things that you expect from the university? When I think of a university I think of it in terms of what are the products that a university provides? One product is really focused on developing new knowledge and creating new things, art humanities, sciences, social sciences, creating new knowledge. To do that are we doing so in ways that captures the full breadth of who we are? Do we all have opportunities to contribute to that? Then it's the learning the teaching and learning piece. Are we providing opportunities for the full breadth of teaching and learning that plays out at the institution? As a public institution, we often talk about the service that we provide the state, the question is are we doing so in ways that are equitable? Are we doing so in ways that every member of the State of Michigan or the United States or the world? Are we utilizing those many resources that the university has to benefit everyone? If not, then it's really not an inclusive institution and if it's not inclusive then I don't know how it can be socially just. If you include folks then people begin to figure out what is the socially just thing to do? Because if you don't include people, then you end up with a very skewed sense of what social justice is. What one set of folks may see as being socially just, is not likely to be the same thing that another set of folks. Historically, higher education has not been a space that has provided that broader vision.
