The 2013 Diversity Forum kicked off Monday with two keynote speeches in addition to 10 concurrent sessions aiming to improve diversity issues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
According to Vice Chancellor Darrell Bazzell, attendance on Monday was 60 percent higher than at last year’s forum.
During a listening session, The Ad Hoc Diversity Planning Committee presented a general framework of the goals for a campus diversity proposal.
The new diversity plan would include how social, economic and political factors impact diversity, whereas the previous plan, which expired in 2008, focused on recruitment and retention problems at the university in regard to ethnicity and gender, according to the committee co-chairs Ruth Litovsky and Ryan Adserias.
Additionally, in a breakout group, four experts discussed bolstering the success of underrepresented students studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Institute for Biology Education representative Jennifer Ball-Sharpe said implementing support programs can help connect students to STEM fields, and stressed the importance of First-Year Interest Groups in making those connections.
During the first keynote speech, University of California-Los Angeles Professor Sylvia Hurtado discussed her model for creating diverse learning environments, highlighting the need for understanding different factors that influence a campus climate.
Her model aims to understand a group’s history of inclusion or exclusion within a campus community. Hurtado added that a campus community must ask “who’s at the table?” to assure all groups are acknowledged equally.
Additionally, she said the university should focus on improving retention rates and making sure that when students graduate they will excel in a future world that will be more equitable, democratic and economically sustainable.
“We want them to get their degrees and be qualified for all the things they’re aspiring to become,” she said. “We want them to be visionaries.”
Columbia Professor Derald Wing Sue gave the second keynote address about micro-aggressions, which he describes as “everyday slights and indignities, insults and allegations and put downs that people of color, woman, any marginalized group experiences in their day-to-day interactions by well-intentioned individuals.”
For example, Sue said he’s been the subject of seemingly innocent comments asking where he’s from or complimenting him on his English, even though he was born in the United States. Sue said it is important to acknowledge these biases so they can be addressed.
“It is impossible for any of us born and raised in this country to not inherit biases,” Sue said. “Some of them are unconscious and outside the level of conscious awareness, and that is where they are most problematic in terms of dealing with them.”
Bazzell ended the first day of the forum by reiterating the importance of a plan to improve diversity efforts on campus.
“If we are truly to be serious about diversity and creating a diverse environment, then we must have a diversity plan,” Bazzell said.
Emily Gerber, Emmett Motl, Adelina Yankova and Maija Inveiss contributed to this report.
