"We want Drew's population to mirror more fully the streets and cities of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic America; and we wish for Drew to bring more students from other continents and cultures. But it is no real achievement to have x percentage of students from here or there if students from differing backgrounds fail to interact. That is, we also live on a campus, and we aspire to make a living model of how people should live together. Strengthening the intercultural aspects of our studies will be one major aspect of this, but how we live from day to day will be our sternest test.”
-- President Robert Weisbuch
Inaugural Address
April 28, 2006
The Drew University Diversity Statement
Drew University is committed to seeking academic excellence while striving continuously to be a welcoming, diverse, and socially just campus. We aspire to provide an education that in content, scope and pedagogy embraces difference and promotes respect that extends beyond the classroom to all University spaces and to local and global communities. Diversity encompasses multiple dimensions, including, but not limited to, race, culture, nationality, ethnicity, geographic origin, class, sexual orientation, gender, disability, age, and religion. Our intent is to achieve a learning environment in which students, faculty, and staff understand the challenges, accomplishments, and perspectives of various groups of people, thus gaining a fuller understanding of themselves as well as how to engage in conversation spanning differences and commonalities. Achieving this vision is a fundamental commitment critical to Drew University's mission as an institution of higher learning.
Message from Erec Smith, Special Assistant to the Provost for Diversity
In the spring of 2007, Drew’s diversity committee finalized its charges, its blueprint for diversity, in five steps:
- Share information about best practices to simultaneously educate and sensitize the community to issues of diversity and create an excellence of inclusion across campus.
- Collaborate with all three schools and administrative departments to construct goals and expectations to promote diversity throughout the university.
- Assist in recruitment strategies for students, faculty and staff.
- Create, solicit and assist the university with projects that pertain to issues of diversity.
- Promote inclusion of diversity across the curriculum.
Of course, these things are not written in stone and should be revised as time and social context see fit, but we feel that these goals best fit our desire to create, enhance and maintain and appreciation of diversity.
Some of these charges are already being accomplished; they‘ve come naturally from a general desire to foster diversity on campus. Creating, soliciting and assisting the university with projects that pertain to issues of diversity are already done by some student- and faculty-run organizations. Drew’s Diversity committee plans on showing its support by sponsoring and assisting these organizations whenever necessary. This year, we’ve sponsored and/or assisted Kuumba (the student Pan-African organization), the Middle Eastern Studies Association, the Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Irish-American Cultural Institute. The Diversity committee also put on workshops of its own. In collaboration with the writing center, it presented a documentary, Writing Across Borders, that presented and discussed the obstacles facing international and ESL students in the acquisition of language skills. In the Spring semester, the committee invited Diane Goodman, author of Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups, to facilitate a discussion about the way diversity benefits all people. It seems we are off to a good start.
A good start, however, does not insure an excellent race. There is more to be done to ensure that. The diversity committee plans on being there to assist and provide information to faculty, many who are already instilling issues of diversity into their classrooms. We also plan on collaborating with all three schools to create and reach large-scale goals for diversity, like large forums, colloquia or talks by prominent scholars or activists of diversity. Moves have already been made to get the diversity committee involved in recruitment strategies, and ways to provide support systems and retention strategies for underrepresented and alternative students are being discussed. Also, the committee plans to bring some less acknowledged ideas of diversity into consideration, like able-ism, heterosexism, and class-ism. These are the goals for the upcoming year. When they are accomplished, our goal will be to maintain this accomplishment throughout Drew University.
I hope that this information has helped you better understand our goals and objectives for Diversity and that we have your support in creating an intellectually and socially inclusive climate at Drew University. As Drew’s mission statement says, “Drew University's highest priority is excellence in liberal education in a changing world environment.” If we are to maintain our integrity in accomplishing this priority, diversity, itself, must also be a priority.
