News
Photo by Avra Juhnke
UWSP strives for more diverse culture
The Pointer
ajuhn217@uwsp.edu
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is in the planning phase of the University of Wisconsin System implemented Inclusive Excellence.
Inclusive Excellence is defined as the integration of diversity efforts into the core aspects of all UW institutions. This includes priority in academic, leadership, quality improvement initiatives, decision-making, day-to-day operations and organizational cultures.
All of these must be insured to maximize success of Inclusive Excellence at all universities.
The Board of Regents Inclusive Excellence leadership team joined campus on Tuesday, Oct. 13, for the Inclusive Excellence kick-off. It was a day filled with brainstorming, discussions and beginnings of actualizations among faculty, staff, students, administrators and community members.
“This is a very good time for us to be going through this,” said Jeff Morin, the interim provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.
“Inclusive excellence includes more than tracking what we have traditionally defined as diversity students. It includes orientation. It includes gender. It asks us to take a look at maybe gender by program,” said Morin
A common theme of the day was the fact that diversity is not a problem to be solved. Diversity is a culture to be created.
In order to create this culture, UW system has asked each university to develop a plan that is most applicable to their climate and that would be most successful.
“It starts to refine a philosophy on campus, create a philosophy where people feel safe, people feel included, people are basically allowed to thrive,” said Morin.
“We want to recruit and retain diverse faculty and staff. On this campus we have a lot of problems recruiting and retaining, in particular, diverse faculty just because its the middle of the state, there is not a lot around. Hopefully this finally gets to the core of that,” said Greg Hartmann, the multicultural issues director for Student Government Association.
Hartmann said UWSP does a great job at recruiting and retaining diversity in the student body but it can always be better.
A lot of focus was on the community this university is in. If a student has a negative experience off-campus that is likely to alter that student’s experience at UWSP as a whole.
Morin said if someone goes downtown and has a negative experience, that will ruin their time at UWSP and it wouldn’t have been something the university did.
An example that was brought up multiple times was the African American student that has to go to Milwaukee to get his or her hair done to his or her liking because there is no establishment that is accommodating in this city.
The campus and community connection also has a reverse factor: those coming from the community to campus.
One community member compared this to the university having a glass wall around it.
“The community clearly values the university, the diversity it brings, the programming it brings. What it doesn’t have is the feeling that the campus is open to the community and is welcome. I think we try but it’s a pretty closed operation,” said Marge Coker-Nelson, a member of the Stevens Point community. “You can look in and see all these things happening.”
She said things like athletic events and theater performances are more open, but then she expressed parking concerns and the need for better signs to guide visitors.
As professors start to think about their teaching styles and curriculum there is some concern about whether they are qualified enough to sustain these principles in their classroom.
“This isn’t something they teach you in graduate school specifically,” said Samantha Kaplan, a UWSP geography and geology professor. “Now, perhaps you are in a discipline that deals with issues of ethnic diversity or some sort of cultural diversity. But I am a physical scientist and it’s not something we talk about in grad school.”
Kaplan said she is going to look at how she teaches her class, her roster and see where she can incorporate the principles of inclusive excellence. “It will be an interesting journey. It will be an interesting project to figure out how to incorporate these concepts because clearly it needs to be addressed.”
