'New Approach' shifts campus diversity and community efforts to local levels

by Daniel J. Fitzgibbons, Chronicle staff

new long-term effort to address community and diversity issues on campus at the unit level is about to begin a visible phase as team members start assessing the climate within each of the five executive areas.

     These executive area teams - representing the Chancellor's Area, Administration and Finance, University Advancement, Student Affairs and Academic Affairs - were formed last year as part of a campus-wide change program called the New Approach to Community, Diversity and Social Justice (CDSJ), according Grant Ingle, director of the Office of Human Relations and a member of the 12-member University Community, Diversity and Social Justice team. The task of these teams is to conduct assessments within their executive areas, identify problem areas, work with management to develop and implement corrective change strategies, and then monitor and evaluate the results.

     While the teams are all at different stages of the assessment process, most of the teams will conduct their assessments this winter and will be able to share the results in the spring. All five teams attended a retreat in July 2001 at which they exchanged drafts of their assessment plans, compared notes on their activities and refined their objectives for the year.

     While some of the assessment activities will overlap, the initiative is flexible enough to allow each executive area to tailor its studies to gather information through different methods, says Leslie Smith, a member of the University Advancement team. Assessment tools ranging from surveys to interviews and focus groups will help the teams get a handle on how community members perceive various issues, including representation of women, people of color and other groups, rates of retention, recruitment and promotion, and class divisions among various employee groups. Assessments will also examine campus policies and procedures and explore the degree to which CDSJ concerns are integrated into local mission statements and the availability of resources for CDSJ-enhancing innovations.

     Three of the teams - Chancellor's Area, Student Affairs and University Advancement - are collaborating on the first campus climate survey of staff and faculty, according to Smith, who said the survey will likely include information spanning all three areas as well as data specific to each unit.

     Based on the results of the assessments, each executive area team will pinpoint problem areas and work with their administrators and managers to develop change strategies for implementation during the 2002-03 academic year, says Ingle. "After two or three years, the assessments will be repeated in order to see if the change efforts have been successful and to identify other areas and issues needing attention," he adds.

     The genesis of the New Approach can be traced back to 1996 when Chancellor David Scott asked the newly formed Chancellor's Counsel on Community, Diversity and Social Justice (CDSJ) to generate a Diversity Action Plan to move the campus to the next level of addressing related issues.

     Over the next two years, the panel sought and incorporated comments and suggestions from many campus groups and individuals, Ingle says. "After sifting through this information, the counsel concluded that what we were doing regarding issues of community, diversity and social justice was generally fine, but how we were doing it was often counterproductive and needed to change."

     In its report, "A New Approach to Promoting Community, Diversity and Social Justice" published in the The Campus Chronicle
(www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sturm/cdsj1.htm), the counsel identified several self-defeating patterns regarding CDSJ issues which had surfaced repeatedly over the past 30 years.

     One recurrent pattern was the tendency for the CDSJ agenda of the campus to be driven reactively by crises, incidents and student protests, and the lack of proactive approaches. Another was the tendency of the campus to give all responsibility for CDSJ change to the chancellor at times of crisis, ignoring the role of the administrators, managers and supervisors actually responsible for problem areas. The key recommendations of the report were to actualize UMass system and campus vision statements regarding CDSJ issues by moving responsibility for those issues to the unit and department level; and appointing a campus team to guide institutional change.