F&M’s Faculty and Professional Staff Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Initiatives
Several initiatives to improve diversity, inclusion, and equity at F&M are underway in order to continue to offer an excellent liberal arts education. Faculty and professional staff are spearheading activities to recruit and retain faculty from diverse backgrounds and promote inclusive pedagogies across the disciplines. Our overarching goal is to effect broader cultural change to create an environment of inclusion and respect that permeates our campus community.
Some of our accomplishments include:
1. Organized or co-sponsored twelve on-campus workshops that explored strategies for encouraging and realizing the benefits of enhanced faculty diversification as well as inclusive pedagogies. Topics have included themes such as: best practices for mentoring, implicit bias, strategies for hiring a diverse professoriate, student belonging, decolonizing intellectual life at F&M, promoting success for lower income students, inclusive pedagogies for STEM disciplines, and #metooSTEM.
2. Created a series of hiring workshops for departments who are interested in exploring best practices in diversifying the professoriate.
3. In May 2019 the campus held several all-day diversity and inclusion forums to promote a better understanding of and capacity for leading and supporting change that makes excellence inclusive at F&M. We partnered with the Emeritus Consulting Group (ECG) to create three days of professional development for more than eighty faculty, professional staff, and senior officers.
4. Two departments and one program (History, BOS, and Public Health) have undertaken curricular reviews to think about ways that their curriculum can help students explore cultures, life experiences, and worldviews different from their own. If your department or program is interested in undertaking a similar analysis, fill out this form.
5. Since Fall 2017, the College has sent seven teams, made up of thirty-eight faculty, professional staff, and administrators, to national conferences that have information and panels on best practices and DE&I in higher education. These conferences have been sponsored by the Pennsylvania Consortium for Liberal Arts, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the American Talent Initiative.
6. To date, we have also funded faculty participation in twenty-five conferences related to DE&I in a variety of disciplines, including: American Studies, Biology, BOS, Economics, English, German, Government, Psychology, Physics & Astronomy, Sociology, and Spanish.
7. Sponsored several rounds of the “Idea Initiative,” led by the Provost's Advisory Committee on Faculty Diversity & Inclusion. This initiative funds or co-sponsors events, including an all campus LGBTQ+ Forum and a LGBTQ+ “Night Out,” a “Modern Families” reception, community building events for the POC Alliance, two lunches for international students to meet professors from around the world, an educational workshop about violence against LGBTQ+ students, a lunch about “Visible and Invisible Faculty Service,” and the College's first Symposium on Disability Studies.
8. Co-organized F&M’s first comprehensive campus climate survey.
9. In this era of coronavirus, we are also working to reduce inequities that are emerging as the result of the pandemic. We have developed the following documents and one workshop to address these issues.
F&M On-Campus Resources for faculty and staff interested in diversity, inclusion, and equity include:
Provost's Office Resources for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity