Full Participation: Building the Architecture for Diversity and Community Engagement in Higher Education, by Susan Sturm, Tim Eatman, John Saltmarsh, and Adam Bush, offers a framework for connecting a set of conversations about change in higher education that often proceed separately but need to be brought together to gain traction within both the institutional and national policy arenas. Their aim is to integrate projects and people working under the umbrella of equity, diversity and/or inclusion with those working under the umbrella of community, public and/or civic engagement.
Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, by Julie Ellison and Tim Eatman, reports that, in particular, students and faculty of color perceive risk in pursuing publicly-engaged academic work. Ellison and Eatman raise caution about dividing academic units from engagement units, which tends to create a counter-culture that reinforces inhibitions among those interested in this career path and allows other to view it as eccentric.
The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy, by George Sanchez, describe two pathways to democracy in U.S. higher education: engagement by the university through connections of faculty, staff, and students with specific communities and publics; and access to the university for members of all communities and publics through inclusive admissions and hiring processes. Sanchez notes the rapid erosion of support for programs of access for minority students that was occurring while, simultaneously, service-learning and community engagement initiatives were proliferating at colleges and universities across the nation. He also points to contradictory trends emerging from the 2003 Supreme Court’s ruling on the University of Michigan’s affirmative action cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, which negatively impact minority faculty members.
The Architecture of Inclusion: Advancing Workplace Equality in Higher Education, by Susan Sturm, the Center for Institutional and Social Change, articulates a multi-level systems approach for developing and sustaining efforts to address structural inequality and advance full participation within institutions. Sturm remarks that, more than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, many individuals and communities are not yet full participants in the institutions that define social and economic citizenship. Since the dynamics preventing full participation are multi-dimensional and embedded in systems, their remediation requires operating both deeply within particular contexts and broadly across contexts. Sturm’s multi-level systems approach encourages targeted programs aimed at advancing full participation of specific populations that must be sustained over time and built into core institutional decisions and practices.
Institutional Citizenship, by Susan Sturm, the Center for Institutional and Social Change, is a key element of the Center’s Architecture of Inclusion framework, which aims to enable change leaders to advance concrete goals and affirmative visions of inclusive institutions while identifying and reducing the structural barriers to full participation.
