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Staff and student leaders of the campus LGBTQ Center have successfully launched an inclusivity campaign centered on the needs of transgender and non-binary students. The campaign titled “My pronouns are …” seeks to normalize pronoun sharing in institutional spaces like classrooms, meetings and other public events to raise consciousness to community members who live outside the gender binary and to intervene the harmful effects of mis-gendering.

Magali is the associate dean of students responsible for student transitions. She supervises the directors of orientation, conduct, first-year programs and transfer programs. Among strategic priorities for her direct reports is relationship-building with international programs and expansion of services to better serve international students.

At a recent Board of Trustees meeting, a group of student leaders organized a demonstration during a presentation to the board by University Housing & Dining Services to request a 3% increase to room rates.

The team at Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) is well aware that the number of students of color who access services is well below proportion in relation to white peers, and the rate of access does not reflect the level of need assessed through institution-wide surveys and corroborated with the college counseling scholarship. It has been three years since the CAPS team became fully conscious of the racialized disparity of student access, and the team has not realized meaningful change.

In preparation for end-of-year reporting to the Division of Student Affairs, the coordinators of Student Health Services bystander intervention programs to confront sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other forms of gender-based discrimination, are asked to run a report on the proportion of faculty and staff at the institution who have completed trainings and report on the ratios of trained faculty and staff for each unit. The coordinators realize that their own unit, Student Health Services, has among the lowest number of faculty and staff who have completed trainings.

A group of career services staff members asks for time on the next staff meeting agenda to discuss the team’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. During the discussion, several team members share that they are not familiar with what diversity, equity and inclusion work looks like in career services and would benefit from more concrete examples of how their peers have translated the concepts into practice. The team generally agrees that more can be done to raise the collective consciousness to good work and sustain team efforts.

Campus financial aid staff conduct an annual review of the impact of their services and run analyses on what students and communities access services. From the analysis, the team identifies a disparity in the number of Latinx students and families who access services and considers options for how they may do a better job of reaching out.

Erica, the chief of the campus public safety department, arranges a bi-annual forum on public safety to receive feedback and recommendations from community members. During the forum, student leaders share their perception of disproportionate public safety presence at events that are attended predominately by students of color. The campus leaders give examples including National Pan-Hellenic Council, Inc./Greek Life step shows, outdoor events with the Black Cultural Center and the annual MLK peace march.

A team of staff and graduate students in the College of Science student services coordinates a STEM tutoring program. At the end of the year, they convene to review the reach and impact of their academic coaching and supplemental instruction programs. During the review, they become aware of a racial disparity in student access to the programs and reporting positive outcomes.

Staff and graduate students from the campus events team convene to discuss the results of their annual satisfaction survey. Their preliminary analysis revealed that in large proportion, students of color, in particular international students of color, felt marginalized by the team's series of cultural celebrations. In the comment portions of the survey, many students shared their concerns about events centered on holidays and other cultural significant traditions and asserted that the design and execution of the events was essentializing, misinformed and offensive.