Campus-Wide DEI Leadership, Planning, and Support
Initiate campus-wide as well as division-level diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership, planning, and support.
Action Item Details
For over twenty years, the University of Denver has created various levels of leadership to enact its vision around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite significant advances and achievements over this time, these systems created parallel and sometimes unconnected DEI priorities, policies, practices, and procedures across the university. The goal of this action item is to create a coordinated, consistent, and connected leadership and accountability structure for diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels of the university.
- Conduct a national search and successfully hire a Vice-Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to serve as the Chief Diversity Officer of the institution to be completed during the Fall of 2020.
- The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI) will work with every division on campus during the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 to create a framework for diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership, strategic planning, and accountability. This framework will train these leaders to operationalize DU’s unifying philosophy in building policies, practices, and expectations in relation to the internal and external work, mission, and vision of a unit.
- Beginning in Fall 2020, incubate and build division-level DEI leadership by expanding the ODEI Fellow Program to:
- Support minoritized faculty or staff
- Infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion development into the core work of colleagues
- Work with leaders in the division to create and monitor unit-level DEI strategic planning and implementation
- Identify and implement best practices for search processes and subsequent retention
- Communicate DEI advocacy efforts within their unit and beyond
- The leadership will serve on a larger campus DEI steering committee.
Updates
- College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences - Inclusive Excellence Committee
- Professor Lexi Freeman Named Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion | September 2, 2020
- Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Announces Fellows Program | September 23, 2020
- ODEI Announces Cohort of Fellows for 2020-2021 | November 18, 2020
- Announcing the VC for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- ODEI has worked to establish and support DEI committees