LAS Strategic Plan 2021-2025

Lead campus efforts to recruit and retain historically underrepresented minority faculty, staff, and students at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Actions:

1. Strengthen support structures for historically underrepresented student success through ensuring adequate resources for the Access & Achievement Program, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships.
2. Work with the relevant campus offices to improve hiring practices and policies in order to increase and diversify departmental staff involved in recruitment, administration, advising, and other elements of departmental culture.
3. Seek out and support college and departmental initiatives to develop and improve long-term reciprocal partnerships with local K-12 schools, community organizations, and minority-serving institutions.
4. Reassess the role of public engagement as a form of scholarly work, recognizing the importance of such work for the research, teaching, and service of historically underrepresented faculty members.
5. Work with the campus to expand the Target of Opportunity Program (TOP) to include salary funding until the faculty member resigns or retires, expand the Dual Career for Academic Couples Program (DCAC) to include financial support for faculty with partners eligible for academic professional or some civil service positions, and expand the minority start-up funds program to include transgender faculty and faculty with disabilities.
6. Develop data dashboards and collect metrics to assess and hold the college and its departments accountable for their climate and for the diversity of their students, faculty, and staff.

Elevate our status as the campus center for scholarship and teaching by historically underrepresented minority faculty and as the campus center for scholarship, teaching, and programs focused on improving both intercultural competence and the climate for international students, faculty, and community members.

Actions:

1. Build on the academic excellence and support the essential activities of the American Indian Studies Program and the Departments of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies through the construction of a modern instructional and research facility. Provide increased funding for faculty, students, and curricula through budgeting, grants, awards, and gifts.
2. Lead the campus-wide implementation of the U.S. Minority Cultures General Education requirement through the development of courses and pedagogical resources for graduate students and faculty involved in this instruction.
3. Leverage the work of the college’s Student Academic Affairs Office and the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics to continue building and supporting programs and curricula aimed at improving the recruitment and retention of international students and the intercultural competence of students, staff, faculty, and community members in the college and across campus.
4. Work with college units to develop intellectual communities that help all members of the college thrive.

Provide transformative leadership that produces an inclusive climate and culture for faculty, staff, and students.

Actions:

1. Continue to implement a comprehensive program for departmental training on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in areas such as hiring, evaluation, promotion, and retention.
2. Implement a five-year cycle of climate surveys for all college units, leading to action plans that promote a diverse, equitable , and inclusive climate free from harassment based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, or nationality.
3. Provide in-person workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and sexual and gender-based harassment that are grounded in best practices for transforming work cultures.
4. Recognize actions by departments, faculty, and staff that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion through emphases in annual reports and evaluations and the allocation of resources.
5. Work to diversify administrative leadership at the campus, college, and departmental levels through developing leadership training opportunities, and reward and recognize leadership roles occupied by women and historically underrepresented minority faculty and staff.