Faculty Allies for Diversity in Graduate Education

Although the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan encourages diversity from “the center,” students’ experiences are grounded in their particular program, making it important for each program to address its own diversity issues. The precise nature of the diversity challenges varies by program, as does the nature of the best solutions. For that reason, the Graduate School sought to identify Faculty Allies within the programs. Our hope was that in this way we could support and encourage “local” efforts to recruit and retain diverse students.

We asked our Faculty Allies to perform a new role, including:

• To be visible to the faculty and students in their program as someone who cares and is available as a resource or can help find the right resource;
• To be willing to consider volunteering for new initiatives the Graduate School proposes to enhance diversity;
• To suggest new initiatives to the Graduate School to enhance diversity; and
• To provide the Graduate School with feedback on its efforts as well as areas where improvement is needed.

We asked department chairs, graduate chairs, and program directors associated with every graduate program to identify someone in the program who might fulfill this role. We stressed that there would be few or no standing meetings, but that we would hold periodic, informational and topical meetings, and that we would rely on the group of Allies to help us define the role more fully. We specified that existing administrators should not add this role to their duties, because it was intended not to be formally administrative, but a faculty service role.

We held initial meetings with the individuals identified to talk through the nature of the role and what the Allies felt they wanted to do and needed from us. Their main request was for information/resources to be readily accessible. In response, we revamped our website and created a space that integrated resources about diversity with them in mind, and listed them and their role on it.

In addition, we initiated a quarterly newsletter to the Allies, in which we point to specific resources that are seasonally relevant, and started holding topical workshops geared specifically for the Allies. For example, we held a workshop reviewing some good practices to follow in recruiting diverse students. We included comments from diverse students who had been recruited successfully to Michigan about what factors led to them choosing Michigan, and we distributed material about promising practices and resources the Graduate School has that can assist them in recruiting.

We have also decided to include Faculty Allies in the meetings with each program, when the programs are reviewed every four years, as a way to ensure that a faculty member with a strong interest in and commitment to diversity has a voice in the review process and access to the data about current successes and failures in recruiting, retaining and graduating diverse students. Finally, we created a grant program aimed at supporting new practices that will improve graduate diversity for a particular program and specified that only Faculty Allies can serve as principal investigators on these proposals. All of these activities are aiming to define the Faculty Allies as playing a meaningful role within their programs and as our valued collaborators in promoting diversity in graduate education.

This is just one of the many programs developed at the University of Michigan and supported by AGEP funding. For more information contact Debby Mitchell.